Father and Son Timeline

My dad will turn seventy-eight this year. I'm to visit my parents this fall. I just realized that my dad is almost eighty. One gets up to that age, and whether a visit across the country will prove to be the last becomes a somber possibility. After all, the average man in the United States only lives to be seventy-six.

Now that I'm firmly ensconsed in middle age, I thought it would be interesting to review the age the two of us were at various times in our lives. When I was younger and my dad went through certain things, I thought him an "old man"; now I'm not too far behind him when certain things occurred. So let's see.

I married much later and took on parenting at the same time, so that rather skews the chronology.

Still, what's interesting is that when our first child graduates high school next year, I will be about the same age my father was when I graduated high school. As I noted, it seemed to me then that my dad was so old; now, it seems he was quite young. And when he lost his job of twenty-five years, he was only a decade older than I am now (and started his with longest-term employer roughly the same age as I started with my current employer)--at the time, he seemed much closer to retirement to me. Alas, that was another decade or so (not sure if he retired at sixty-two or sixty-five) away.