Every year my kids and I have gone to Smith’s Ballpark during the summer to see baseball games. We didn’t make it this year. This is the last year of Smith’s Ballpark; after this, the team is moving elsewhere. Another bit of lost time. Every year we have thrown birthday parties. This year, kids doing other things. The Japanese maple my daughter bought me for Father’s Day is dying and I don’t know how to bring it back. All little losses that other’s won’t even notice but are central to my structural integrity.
It feels these days as if the entirety of my life is made up of fragments of time that are drifting away and soon to be lost, never to be seen again. I don’t feel wistfulness. I feel something along the same lines, but multiple orders of magnitude stronger, to the point that it’s nearly debilitating. I sit here and I look around at the artifacts and environment of my life, saturated with meaning and memory, but now only meaning and memory. It’s me and the stuff, in silence. Why am I here? What am I for now?
I guess I am alone and having difficulty fighting off sadness. There’s not a lot for divorced men over 35. Rather than wanting to know us, society generally wants to punish us for the perceived sins of our fathers. Ours is to wait—and fade—until the end.
Through it all, the unmitigated brutality of time, devoid of any sentiment, continues to amaze. Or maybe to haunt.