The Days Are Long But The Years Punch You In The Gut

An Essay About Fatherhood

If I didn’t know better I’d swear to you I just watched my son grow an inch right before my eyes. The hair on the back of his head that is already startin’ to naturally duck-tail like mine did and like my Grandaddy’s before mine did just sprouted like an eye on an old tater. Having a child is like experiencing life with the fast forward button hammered down.

I swear I was just a young man yesterday. My head filled with dreams I now know to be suggestions at best and delusions at worst. If I close my eyes long enough I can almost smell the Miller High Life halfway to a state of mildew covering the old and untreated bar-top at some county-line beer joint that had the misfortune of entertaining me between romantic dalliances that were born out of passion and died of exhaustion.

If you’d told me then that I’d one day be giggling like a school girl on Book Fair Day because my son called me “Da Da” while he was placing my worn out ball cap on my head, why I would’ve told you that you had the wrong guy. It ain’t me, babe. Nah nah nah it ain’t me, babe. I’m an artist. A renegade. Only thing holding me down is the sum-bitchin MAN!

It’s real cute when my son does that by the way and I wish you could see it. He’s so used to me having a hat on that when I take it off he grabs it and puts it back on as if I might stop breathing without it. As if he thinks it’s part of my head instead of what it really is: a wig with my favorite football team stitched on it.

That’s my boy, though. Always looking out for his Da Da. His old, bald, bad-knee-having Da Da.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about that quite a bit. My age, that is. Sure, to many reading this I’m but a young whipper snapper, still green and wet behind the ears! “Hell, Corey, with the technology we have and the tax bracket you pretend you’ll one day be in, you’re merely just getting started!”

Hush. You say that because it’s polite conversation, but we all know that anyone with a necessity to novelize their life and an addiction to bacon-grease ain’t making it past 75. They don’t let people like me live that long cause they know if we are already talking this way as young men, it ain’t no telling what we’ll say once we’ve blown out the last fuck on our birthday candles.

I think about my age because of my boy. 37 is young if you are working in finance on Wall Street living in a bachelor pad near Alphabet City. But when you’re staring down 40 with a 15 month old, you can all the sudden hear every creak in your bones like you had a stethoscope glued to your ear.

I know earlier I made it seem like perhaps I had given up the ghost and laid rest to any inkling I might have to change my life in order to prolong it. I apologize but I have a tendency to edge towards the Macabre. Must be the romantic in me thumb-wrestling with the cynic.

I actually have changed for the better on account of that boy. And how has he repaid me? By turning into someone different nearly every single day. Would you believe that earlier this evening he closed the dishwasher? And I don’t mean just slammed it shut… I mean that he pushed each individual rack in before ultimately shutting the lid tight. Cause he knows it won’t close if you don’t do it that way. He’s seen me and his momma do it.

The audacity of this child to walk on his own two feet when he wants to get somewhere instead of relying on me to carry him. Does he not know that deep inside of me I need to be the one who gets him there?

Why does this child with the sponge-like brain the size of a ripe plum not understand the torment he is putting me through by having the nerve to grow up?

Son, if you’re reading this one day, know 2 things: 1.) Your Daddy loves you. 2.) your daddy just made a new rule: when you start crying real hard, you’re probably done writing the story.

Actually one more thing…. You’re the only reason I’ve ever cried when I was happy. If you can bottle that talent, my boy, you’ll go to the moon!

Save me a seat, please!

‘Corey aka Da Da