Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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On Father's Day, my young adult children took me out for a barbecue dinner -- at their expense.

Michael had just returned from a party in Northern Virginia for a friend from Virginia Tech who soon will serve in Iraq.

Katherine had slept late Sunday morning after a long day at her summer job in a different restaurant.

At dinner, they talked about their work, their friends, their plans and their goals.

And I talked about dating.

We had a wonderful time.

Nevertheless, it was difficult not to think of the adage about the old becoming young and the young becoming old.

Or something like that.

All things considered, I'd rather have told them of my hopes, dreams and goals than about my social life. And I'd rather they'd told me about their social lives.

But even now, at 23 and 19, they don't share much about their social activities, and as for my hopes, dreams and goals, well, they're so numerous and I'm so unlikely to reach them that just mentioning them makes me feel ... old.

A total surprise

When you reach the neighborhood of 60, which I am fast approaching, nothing is as it seems.

Your friends see you on the street and chirp, "You look GREAT!"

Nobody ever felt compelled to say that when you were 30, 40 or 50, but suddenly, it's as if you're as well-preserved as a dusty jar of peaches in your grandmother's spring house.

Naturally, you feel compelled to play the game.

"YOU look great," you assure them.

And then, because so many of us have become single for one reason or another, we talk about dating and relationships, the most important things in our lives at 60, just as they were at 16.

We know that things could be worse. We could be incapacitated. Our kids could be screw-ups. We could lack friends.

Or we would be stuck in one of those chilly marriages where the couple have grown apart and now communicate mainly by passing the salt and pepper shakers to each other over dinner.

How to say it

It's hard to put all this in words to your children.

It would be impossible to convey the wistfulness I notice every time an older single friend mentions the heartening sight of longtime spouses who hold hands, laugh together and beam at each other as brightly as they beamed on their wedding day.

We realize that such couples turn up mostly in commercials for urinary incontinence remedies, but they serve as the unattainable model to which we all aspire.

But we realize that many of those people may be a mere four months into their third marriages rather than 40 years into their first.

My kids don't hear any of this.

We do talk about real-life issues, such as finding the things that feed our souls. And they do take an amazing interest in my happiness, because they care.

When I ask my daughter, "How was your day?" she often says, "Fine, how was yours?"

And then she listens.

Sometimes, when my children were younger, I wondered if they realized that I, in my ogre moments, cared about them.

Now that they're growing up and away, I believe they did. They just didn't have the means to express it.

Now, they assure me that they've forgotten, as well as forgiven, all the mistakes I made when they were teenagers and I was a novice at single parenthood.

The same goes for me.

We like one another and don't mind showing it.

"The child is father of the man."

That's the expression -- which originated with William Wordsworth -- that I couldn't remember.

A modern day revision might go, "The children are father and mother not of the man, but of their dad, a boy who never grew up, and who has lived a fairly long time."