Yellowstone Vibes

Time goes so slowly when you're young. At seven and eight, you look forward to things like birthdays and Christmas--days that stimulate senses. It's these memories that remain fresh in your mind.

Thanksgiving in my memories was one filled with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and parents. It was a day where these comforting scents came from the kitchen: a turkey roasting, filled with dressing, pies baked the day before, Christmas pudding and caramel sauce. I remember uncles that made me laugh, and the memories still do, their jokes and their demeanor, and their fun way of telling stories. You look forward to it, and after spending the day with cousins running and having fun and eating all those good things, the day begins to change. The sun sets. The moon rises.

As quickly as you arrived, your family climbed into a car and started the drive home.

One cousin passed away in the past few months. Most are still living, but a few show signs of age. That's the irony. My grandparents disappeared from everything but my memory. Grandfathers went first, one when I was 3 and the other when I was 9. My grandmothers lived many years, but both disappeared by just kind of fading away. It was sad to see them change so quickly as they turned 90.

I only have one aunt left. She is the lone survivor of those incredible memories, and she still looks young, and she still has the same sense of humor she always had.

One year when I was very young, my impatience began to appear. I wanted Christmas to arrive. My grandmother taught me how to tell it was close to the Great Day when Santa arrived.

She told me to watch for snow in the foothills. It worked in most cases. But it was the beginning of my wishing my life away. Now here I am at almost 58.

I spent my life thinking about life in ten year installments: what will I do in the next phase, where will I live, when will I prosper?

And now my little ones ask similar questions. "When is Christmas? How long is it before my birthday?"

I try to teach them to avoid my mistakes, my impatience, my ignorance. You only learn to savor life when things look bleak. And if you are lucky enough to survive, you understand how important it is to enjoy every minute of life. I try to teach them that important key to living a happy life.

I teach them to enjoy every moment.

Hopefully my point of view will be something they remember about me, yet I hope they remember the days at Disneyland I spent with them. And there's always the little things that made everyone smile, specific stories I'll save for individual blogs.

I finally understand that having grandchildren means having the moment to relive youth through their eyes.

Having fun like this is what you do when you're old. Besides, if I walk around pulling faces in a picture, people either think I'm having onset dementia, or they think I'm making a silly fool out of myself. That's the dilemma of becoming old. That's the problem with wishing your life away.

Enjoying the moment is the way to embrace life. Now I do it through the eyes of my grandchildren.