My son Jake turns 30 today and it's a really odd feeling when your youngest leaves his twenties behind. You want to turn to him and say, "Hey--where are your twenties? Go back into the house and get them RIGHT now or we are not leaving! You also want to look into the mirror and say, "Stop aging! What the hell is wrong with you?"
Thank God the person that is staring back at you is the older, wizened version of you who does not overreact and knows how to calm you down. It just smiles back at you and whispers, "Go buy something on Amazon.com and take a nap."
Our children are living scrapbooks whose photo filled pages turn way too fast for us to keep up. It all moves faster than Hamilton on Hyperactive Thursday. (I'm guessing that the Lin Manuel Miranda act begins with "You have the right to remain silent by switching off your phones....").
The good thing about our most cherished memories is that they are all filed away in the large file cabinets in the home office of our brain.
Birthdays especially tend to be the biggest day of the year for drawer surfing/clerical cleaning, usually under bright birthday candle light and it never fails to astonish because inevitably you will vividly relive episodes of your child rearing years that have been long lost in the Sherlock fog of your Baker Street brain.
Here is the thing about my son Jake. It goes without saying that this dad adores him. He's one tall triple shot latte this kid. 6'4" to be exact and on the day he finally hit that near the ceiling number, I pretty much became his official pull toy. I mean his natural walking stride is five hundred yards longer than mine and while navigating the terrain of Manhattan with him I quickly become Frank Sinatra chasing the train at the end of "Von Ryan's Express."
At birth he looked like a chicken that Colonel Sanders would stamp "NO." In fact, he had to shake and bake in the incubator rotisserie for a few days. His fingers were fairy tale witch crooked and long and his hair was Andy Warhol white. At birth, my wife looked down and said, "Who's the mother?" And yet he grew up pretty.
A clairvoyant, who my wife had seen earlier, who was no doubt named Claire Voyant, told her that my son would be musical and that is exactly what happened. One night, during his middle school years, I played the album "Kind of Blue" (which no, was not about the Trump campaign) and we fell asleep like a pair of couch conjoined twins listening to Miles blow jazz wind magic our way. And my son was smitten for life and man did he learn to wail on that sax. His big fingers were just the perfect size to massage those keys. Basketball? Jake meet the Lakers. Baseball? Jake meet the Dodgers and dad's beloved Yankees. And then Jake started flying in all directions like a whacked out drone, towards the next compulsive passion. Skateboarding. Paint balling. Pitching. Basketball. Everything he took on became an addiction.
When he was little he was obsessed with dogs. He looked up to me on perhaps the last day that he actually still could and said, "Daddy, I don't want a dog. I need one." I remember when he worked on weekends for those street corner pet adoption set ups and when I came to pick him up one weekend day, he was fast asleep on one of the larger mutts, snoring like a downtown drunk.
The more I write, the more the drawers fling open. In his pre-school days he was a holy terror. One early teacher offered us money NOT to send him there. This is a kid who hugged active barbecue grills. He also hugged any stuffed animal within a 100-mile radius and any roaming cartoon character in Disneyland and he carried a giant sheepskin rug, we called "Shuba," like it was his inner passion bursting from his heart like a field of sprawling yellow roses. He wound up having the kind of collection that would make the experts on Antiques Roadshow wet their pants.
He was also stunningly accident prone. Our local hospital had a banner printed that read "Welcome Back Jake." His orthopedic surgeon sent us a thank-you basket filled with gold bullion. Hospital Magazine named him Broken Bone Boy of the Year ten times. Skateboarding. And now snowboarding has kept him in good, well anything but standing.
Jake is currently the director of A&R at Universal Music Publishing. He gigs on demand, is almost astonishingly silly, he is a life committed punster (another inheritance) and is a ridiculously handsome chess player.
By the time he hit 21, we would walk into a restaurant and every, single woman's head would SPIN in his direction like a sea of ventriloquist dummies and they would audibly bleat like a flock of love starved sheep.
Now I have two kids, and let me be on record as saying both are stellar citizens of Downtown Wow. Max, now 32, got his dad blog on his birthday. We just went to a Dodger playoff game together, which instantly transformed him into an enchanted little boy which is not hard to do because he loves to sprint in that general direction of those feeling on giddy demand.
But today, for now, I want to say, Jake: congratulations on your Hebrew school award (a long standing joke for an award that was preposterously and obviously mistakenly given to him years ago, which to this day makes less than no sense since he was basically Satan in a Yarmulke).
But more than anything, thank you for the ride of a lifetime.
You continue to mesmerize like a hypnotist, dazzle me like a prom queen and almost always make me feel like the richest man in world.
Happy Birthday my baby boy.
And again: congratulations on your Hebrew school award.
Dad