My world is shrinking...

I read the online newspapers & websites from all the local media outlets in my hometown area surronding Booneville, AR. I find myself clicking the "Obituary" link more than not. And each time I see familiar names from my past. A former teacher, a neighbor who used to live across the street from me, a classmate's father, former clients of my now deceased father.... Each day could bring another name I recognize.

I see now how as I get older my world is getting smaller. Life goes on... And I watch it pass. I live 1250 miles away from my hometown now. I see how my home state of Arkansas is slowly becoming more of a foreign land. The culture is changing, the landscape is changing & each year I visit it seems like a new element is being added or taken away.

Nevertheless, it is comforting to visit these virtual outposts of my past. I still feel connected & have the desire to know what's going on...even though I have no idea who the people are that are the subject of the news articles I read. It gives me a sense of being to know I can have a head knowledge of the events that I no longer experience first hand.

And then I hear news today that my Dad's youngest living brother, my Uncle John, has had a stroke. He is well into his 70s now, and has had numerous heart operations. The world of my family is getting smaller, too. I think of my grandmother, "Grandma Ruby", who will turn 99 in April. She has buried 2 of her own children - my Dad being one of them - and she just spends her time lying in bed in a "rest home" in southern Arkansas watching life pass her by. It is when I visit her every year at Thanksgiving that I feel like I can come home.

My home, that I spent a quarter-century living in, is now occupied by strangers. It still looks familiar, but the trimmings have dramatically changed. Soon, another milestone will pass: By the year 2010, I will have lived in Pennsylvania as long as I have lived in my childhood state of Arkansas. After that, I will be more of a Pennsylvanian than an Arkansan.

I see now, why many return to their home upon retirement. I'm starting to feel that way even now, & I still have years to go before I hang up my working shoes.

But while my world is shrinking behind me, a new world is growing in front of me. I have two precious boys who are, in their own individual way, the spitting image of "dear ol' Dad". Tomorrow, I relive a part of my past because my youngest boy will be going to the eye doctor at the tender age of 4 to be fitted for corrective lenses that he will , no doubt, be dependant up0n for the remainder of his life...just as I depend upon them right now to write this. I, too, was 4 years old when my next door neighbor (who was also to be my eye doctor) noticed I could not see the golf balls he was putting in his front lawn when he asked me to retrieve them for him while he practiced his swing.

This new world is growing each day as I see traits of me in my children...and as I introduce them to the world behind me by taking them to see their family each Thanksgiving back in Arkansas. There, I watch as they get to know & love their cousins & other family members just as I did at their age when I was brought to these family gatherings that started in 1960.

My new world grows as I take walks in the woods with my kids & hear my oldest (who is following in he father's steps by trying to be at least 15 yards ahead of everyone else on the hike) shout out toward me, "Dad... you know what?" "I love you!" and hear those words echo through the Pennsylvania mountains.

What an intricate & complicated - yet completely marvelous life we live in.