45 and Life To Go

"I can beat ya to the front door!"

The challenge was laid down with all the unbounded confidence my lovely Wee Lass could muster. I knew she couldn't truly beat me to the front door, but those blue eyes and the mist of freckles across the bridge of her nose weakened the last vestiges of competitive instinct leaking from my worn out ego.

She would beat me to the door, and she knew it.

I said "Oh, yeah?" and did my best imitation of Apollo Ohno at the starting line. She laughed and took off running. I made a half-hearted leap forward, two, three strides and then fell back into my tired lope. The breeze was up, blowing her hair back. She really did remind me of a colt. I swallowed the lump in my throat as she raced to the door. She beat me with lengths to spare, and found it hilarious.

Watching her run, hearing her laugh, made me ache to live forever. Just so I could be around her lightness, her "winged energy of delight" as Rainer Rilke may have described it. Sometimes I think he wrote that poem with her in mind. The tears in my eyes came from knowing that I won't be around forever with that laugh like silver bells ringing in my ears. It made my heart sore with a bittersweet ache.

My heart. I have been thinking about my heart frequently as of late. I wonder what shape it is in, if it is feeling any stress cracks, if the wounds are starting to heal. I worry about it in a practical sense, as well. Many of the men on my dad's side of the Gumbo family tree had heart troubles, some with fatal results. My brother, as many of you know, passed away last year from what was most likely a massive heart attack. At least two of my uncles had multiple heart attacks, one died in his mid-forties.

I remember hearing my father and one of my uncles joking long ago, that if "we can make it to forty-five, we've got it made!". I was too young then to get it, to understand what they meant. My uncle is no longer of this world, but my dad is still chugging along, beating that mark by a very wide margin. He's had some brushes with coronary troubles, very serious but not debilitating. I have to say this is one of the few times I've truly hoped that I got my father's genes as it relates to the ol' ticker.

All that flashed through my head, watching my daughter run and giggle her way to the front door, because it's 45 and life to go, my daughter's eyes and laugh tell me so.