Observations: When My Dad Was My Age

My father has been gone for 19 years.  All of my life, I always considered him an old man.  This is a combination of the facts that I was a change of life baby for my parents, arriving in HIS 47th year, and because a doctor told him he was sick so he considered himself disabled for most of the time from my birth to his death.

This week I gave pause to reflect on MY age, and ponder where my father was when he was my age.  When my father was my current age, he was relocating the family from New Jersey to Florida.  He had never owned a home, and had no money.  His wife, and 4 kids aged 3, 5, 10 and 11 headed to Florida with little to no money.  He took them to a hotel on US-1 until securing a rented house with what little money they had.  He was waiting on a disability check from the company that he had retired from.  There was so little money, my mother suggested that if any of my older brothers friends invited them to dinner to take them up on it.

I could not imagine being in that position at my age, and taking on that task this late in life.  I know many are in that situation.  I just look at the grand kids around my circle, and I am appreciative that I am not raising 4 of my own kids this late in life, and that I have the security of being a homeowner, and some measure of financial stability.  Just an interesting, personal observation that I thought I would document and share.

The chronology has been on my mind of late as I have been digging into my ancestry and learning more of the stories of my family down the different lines.  As more of my family members die off, more stories are lost.  Last week, my step brother in law passed away.  He and my stepsister have a huge and wonderful family.  It was always interesting as a little child to visit them in S. Florida and have these teenagers introduce me as their uncle,

I had one step sister from my Mom's previous marriage, and 3 step sisters from my Father's previous marriage (only one living still) and my two brothers and a sister.  Large family, and for the most part, we are all strangers to each other.  Thankfully, Facebook connected many of us.