Reaching Out

 This May my son will celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday. I expect that his mother and I will have something to to with that mark in his book. He will be three hundred forty-eight months old, so we may have to add a few pages to his baby book. 

Or not.

Over the past decade we have spent less time together on those actual dates of his entrée into this sphere. He has a life of his own, after all. 

But why twenty-nine, and why months ahead of the actual nativity? 

Glad you asked. I was out running around the city streets where so much of those earlier years prior to his twenties were spent. A mile or two to the east where he went to preschool. Up the hill to elementary school. Down the street to middle school. Over another hill across town to high school.  By the time he was in high school he graduated from taking the bus to driving his own car. On a line, those institutions could be visited in six miles. Returning to my running brain, I noted a vanity license plate on the back of a shiny black SUV. EKKA20. A birthday gift, perhaps. A prize for completing undergrad studies early. 

We helped our son buy his first car. Since then, he has bought, traded and swapped titles for any number of vehicles via his own wiles and automotive knowledge. I can say without fear of reprisal that I had nothing to do with those. Swapping cars with a neighbor for a weekend makes me nervous. My son has learned to negotiate and navigate the Department of Motor Vehicles, an entity I consciously avoid. 

So as our little boy rounds out his first three decades, I wonder what is left for me to give him. On trips to Target his mother and I still send him pictures of Hot Wheels and Nerf guns that we think he might like. He takes this all in with good humor and aplomb, as he charts his own course into the adult world that includes things like health insurance and appliances that just stop working. It is his parents who are now calling him for help. We try to make it sound better for us by reminding him to eat more vegetables or wear a raincoat. 

He's got this, but every so often the phone rings and my son will ask me for the tiniest bit of advice. I try not to spend too much time going on and on about how glad I am he called to ask me about whatever minor inconvenience has him stuck. I am the boy's father, after all. Why shouldn't I be impressed with the job his mother and I did getting him this far? 

Even if we didn't get him that Black SUV. With vanity plates.