Witness

If you’re lucky enough to have parents to watch you grow up, and delight in your progress, you stake some of your identity in knowing they’re impressed.
Later in life you start running out of people to impress.
They all pass on into the dark.
And there’s nothing around but young people and they don’t count. They didn’t see it happen; they weren’t there.
And they need you to bear witness to their own progress.
You only realize what a gift it is when it’s your turn to give it.

My father is old and all the outer layers have peeled off again.
Still, he tells me stories I never heard, about his younger self. Tiny events that set his course for seventy years.
A kind word from a certain girl, a basketball game, a few summers picking fruit.
Seeds that he re-planted season after season into an entire valley,
into which I was born.

It’s a joy every day I know he’s still there, alive, pleased with how I turned out, taking an interest.
But I’ve come to understand the gift he is still giving away.
And so I listen to his stories too, and hold the space he lost when his own father went into the dark, and take pride in his younger self, in an old world I know I’ll never fully understand, doing all those things I never knew, being impressed with who he was before I was alive.
A kind word from a girl who is now buried. A basketball game in a school now closed. A summer picking fruit in an orchard, now a car park.
I remember. You did so well. I am so proud of you.