Celebrate

 Grandchildren are the crown of the aged,
    and the glory of children is their fathers. (Proverbs 17:6)

My dad. Picture taken and edited by my 10-year-old, who adores him.
(He would say the feeling is mutual.) 

We're visiting my parents this weekend to celebrate my dad's 87th birthday, which is tomorrow.

My dad and I are both early risers, so we talked for a long time this morning over coffee, starting at about 6:30 a.m., after I had done my Bible study and prayer time. We had the most wonderful discussion--about life, envy, competition, fulfillment, and God. When I was in my 20's, my dad and I would meet for dinner every Tuesday night and have these kinds of conversations. Sometimes we would go for two hours or more. I loved it. I've found few people in this world with whom I can truly talk on a "deep" level, but he is one of them.

It had been a while since we'd had a talk like that. He's getting older, and his memory isn't what it used to be. He's frustrated because he's in a relatively COVID-free area of North Carolina (where they have a summer home) rather than their real home, in a COVID-infested parish in Louisiana. He doesn't want to get sick, but he wants to be home, so the past few months have been hard for him, even though it's a pretty good life in NC.

At one point in our talk, he commented that his kids have turned out pretty good, even though we all had our struggles along the way. He said he's known many parents who were disappointed in their grown kids. In his profession, he's known families who grew vicious with each other over money and property in the wake of their parents' deaths. He said he's proud that my siblings and I all seem to like each other, and that we don't seem to have that competition that characterizes so many other sibling relationships.

I told him, "Well, we had pretty good parents, you know." And we did. They weren't perfect, but I often say that I won the parent lottery when they adopted me.

So this weekend we celebrated his birthday, and I'm hoping for many more such celebrations to come.

Bonus: Here is a blog post I wrote years ago about how he and I used to go to the LSU basketball games together.