A passing shadow

Age is a funny thing.

I've been looking around at work and in my neighborhood recently, at all the elderly people and those at the gates of retirement. They have worked long. They are a little more feeble. A little less sturdy on their feet. To me, they look Old.

And then only very recently it occurred to me that these feeble old people are the age of my parents.

To me, my parents are frozen in time and personality in about their late 40s or mid 50s at the most. Sure, they are winding down the family rearing years, but not without a fight.

My dad has reached retirement age, and he will very soon be retiring. Grandchildren are coming and growing.

How strange that is. How strange it must be.

I have a picture that I love, of the ten of us -- my family -- in a field in springtime. I must have been about 13 years old, and I am holding the baby and smiling, my siblings crowded around me smiling as well. And since then every one of those little siblings has grown up and been a teenager and fought against curfews and chosen a college and moved away. Permanently. And now they post pictures of their own, smiling families.

And all the pictures stack up. All the families. All the smiling children. But the people in the pictures no longer exist. They only existed for an instant in time. Light on film. Scattered and captured in a single moment. The moment long gone. But the pictures are still there, oblivious to the emptiness behind them.

What will I look like soon when I am old? What will the middle aged woman think of me, she in the thick of family and career? Will she wonder, too, how I happened to grow wrinkled and gray? And will I recognize her, watching me?