Someone
once said…"Some days you win, and some days you just strike out…"
Looking at the way this was phrased, I suppose this refers to a baseball game or
some player or another. But, you know it applies to us as well. For example this
past weekend, I’d been planning to take my four sons on a fishing trip down to
South Texas. I’d booked the plane tickets months in advance, lined up the
fishing charter service and did everything that I thought I could to make this a
great bonding experience for all of us. It seems that as your kids get older,
they tend to spread out and you just don’t get enough time with them like you
used to. They get busy, you get busy. They get married and have other
obligations on the holidays. Where we once were a group traveling in tandem, now
we’re many different groups coming and going from all different
directions.
For some folks that’s fine with them. For
me, it’s not. I like my sons. I value the time I get to spend with them. I
just wish we had more of it than we seem to get. Some parents prefer to have
each of their children alone at times rather than all together. Not me, I love
it when they are in a group and some topic of interest comes up for discussion.
I love to just sit back and listen to the different opinions and slants on
various issues that we are concerned with. Usually I’m very talkative, but not
when it comes to my boys. I love to listen to them and hear their hearts and the
way their minds think. It’s good for my soul. It lets me realize that their
Mother and I did do some things right. It renews my spirit.
This trip we put a $5.00 bounty on anyone
talking about their business. I was the first to lose. This made us spread our
thinking to the point that we actually had to concentrate on what we were
discussing. No one in this group wants to lose and the attempts to trick
everyone into talking business were too numerous to mention. The plan was
simple, arrive at the hotel on Friday, eat dinner, go to bed, get up at 5:30 on
Saturday and fish all day, then get our fish cooked, go to bed and fly home on
Sunday.
We actually followed the plan correctly for
the first part. We all managed to arrive at the airport on time. It wasn’t any
big trick to get to the hotel. Our dinner went off great, even considering we
had the loudest, ugliest shirts anyone had ever seen. In short, a good time was
had by all. We got back to the hotel at a decent hour and everyone drifted off
to sleep with the anticipation of a full day of fishing in the morning. About
this time the plan starts to unravel.
We all got up on time at 5:30 and start
getting dressed. About the time the coffee finishes brewing, one of the boys
sticks his head outside and announces that we can’t go fishing in this kind of
weather. Sure enough, a full-blown storm had moved in on us during the night.
The rain was pouring down with no sign of it slacking off or getting better
anytime soon. I started calling the guide service and after about 45 minutes
finally got them to answer. They said that no one would be going out in this
kind of weather. Sorry.
Everyone mumbles a little, finishes their
coffee and heads back to bed for a couple of more hours of sleep. About 9AM,
everyone is awake and moving again, and the decision is made to hang it up and
change our tickets to get out of here and go home a day early. Everyone gets
dressed. We all meet downstairs and eat breakfast, then on to the airport where
we board our flights and reenter our separate worlds. I’ve thought this over
in my mind and have come to the conclusion that next year; we’re staying
longer, even if it does rain. Our lives are too busy. Our years go by too fast.
Our times together too infrequent.
I miss those Saturdays, when we used to do
what we called ‘rat killing.’ That was our term for errands to the hardware
store and wherever else we needed to go. Many the Saturday that we spent all
morning and most of the afternoon going to 15 different places for some item or
another that we didn’t have time for during the week. There was a lot of time
for conversations during those hours. We talked about any and everything you can
imagine. My boys aren’t boys any longer; they’re grown men. Even though I
know this in my heart of hearts, I still think that they’re boys to me and I
guess they always will be.
Relationships are just like investments. What
you get out of them depends on what you put into them. I suppose I could have
been disappointed at not being able to fish. I could choose to be hacked over
the cost of the trip. In that case, I’d have ‘struck out’. But, you know
winning, to me is in how you look at things. I choose to think that in this
case…I won. I got in some much-needed time with my 4 boys. Who cares about
fish, you just have to clean ‘em anyway. You can always reach me at
