It is the very essence of yours and my humanity that we have been given the gift of emotion. From gladness to sadness, and back again, that is our gift.

My past experiences have covered a lot of emotional territory. I remember back to when I went to my brother’s oldest daughter’s wedding. I too have daughters. More emotional territory.

When this experience began, it began with a phone call from Oldest Daughter, now married:

“Dad? Hello. So, dad, how’s it going? Are you ready for all this?” Lately, she’s become more interested in my opinion as to how everything is going. I’ve begun to suspect that she compares my view on my life with hers. Someday, when our views don’t align, she will step in and commit me to the home for the feebleminded.

“Oh,” I replied, “pretty good.” I’m naturally wary about answering her. I’m old, but I’m still able to wipe my own drool.

“Dad, grab a pencil and your little book and write this down.” Write this down? Wary just took a trip out the window; I’ve now got flags of caution cracking in gale force winds.

“What am I writing down?” This could be used against me, someday.

“Just write,” she replied. I wrote.

“OK,” she continued, “you have to be there for pictures on Thursday at 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. Check in time at the Archer in downtown Northfield is 3:00 o’clock. The groomsmen dinner begins at 6:00 o’clock, wear pleated tan pants, no blue jeans allowed, tie is optional. For the wedding, bring black pants and a suitable jacket.”

And then she was gone. I had, like it or not, just been organized by someone whose diaper it seemed like I’d just been changing. There’s really only one conclusion: Fogeydom is encroaching. The problem with slipping merrily into  Fogey Kingdom is that one often doesn’t realize he’s there, or even on the way there.

Emotionally, I’m not certain just where on the scale between sadness and gladness I should place the possibility that I’m on my way over the hill. There ain’t no road maps to where we’re all going. Being old is for sure a mixed blessing.

After the wedding, I kissed the bride and hugged the groom and went to give my sister-in-law a hug. Ten seconds into the hug, we were hanging onto each other and trying our best not to break out wailing and sobbing. We hung on some more. We wanted to cry for a lot of reasons. One is we’re human, and we can.

We’re obviously not crying for the bride and groom: they’re ecstatically happy. I guess the only conclusion is that we’re crying for ourselves, even though we’re happy about all this, too.

People cry for themselves. It’s the bottom line of being human. People cry at weddings because of this inescapable perplexity: nothing that we have learned or can do is going to help us escape the past. This wedding is now past, and as such, serves as one more reminder that the past is insatiable; that we give our present to the past, piece by emotional piece, parent by parent, wedding by wedding, illness by illness, friend by friend. The fact that there are people who are not here anymore with us, to realize all this, is the biggest saddest reminder of this inevitability. There are things that won’t happen again, experiences that won’t come again. Us, who won’t be here again, someday.

Maintaining the illusion of our immortality, something that comes naturally to the young, is spiritually exhausting when faced with today’s precious gifts crossing over to our pending yesterdays. So we hung on to each other.

On the drive back home, I was talking to Daughter Two. “So,” I asked her, “how does one tell for sure that he’s not turning into an Old Fogey?” After the phone call organizing me, I’m worried that I’m missing the signs that line the side of the road to Fogeydom.

We kicked this around for several minutes. She was pretty reassuring, inasmuch as she seemed to be nicely saying that the things about me that bugged her now always did. So, if that’s reassurance…

We drove on for several minutes. I caught her looking at me. I thought she was admiring my last year’s family reunion tee shirt, which I had worn especially for this occasion.

Now she was laughing out loud, but it wasn’t normal laughter. It was more like nervous laughter, and she was trying to suppress it, for some reason that wasn’t becoming clear to me. In fact, I think that was a worried look on her face.

“What?” I looked at her.

“Dad,” she said, still giggling, “your tee shirt is on inside out.”

Aw, no.