Buzzards

My father and I were sitting outside the other day, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. Summer had made an early appearance where spring had barely begun. The sky was as blue as my father's eyes I noticed as he watched a flock of geese fly overhead. Nearby, turkey buzzards circled lazily above the treetops, in twos and threes, relishing in the physics of aerodynamics.

Leaning back in his chair, taking a long pull from his beer, my dad announced skywards, "Go away, buzzards, you're too early. I'm not dead yet"!
My dad tends to have quite the gallows humor, but this was more a declaration of his pragmatic nature. It was nothing I wanted to hear, though.

He sought my gaze, I turned away. I'm still his little girl, and I want him to live forever.

Dad and the blogger, 1963

On the topic of being over the age of seventy, my dad recalled when he was a young man, he would look at men in their seventies as they would slowly walked by and he would wonder how they made do...how did they get by. How difficult it must be to be at that time in life. He then shrugged his shoulders and told me, "Well, look at me. I'm those men now, and I'm doing okay. I'm still alive, I get around just fine. It's not all that bad, it certainly could be worse".

I will stare down the buzzards. Better yet, perhaps I won't concern myself with the buzzards at all, for when they do finally proclaim victory over me, I wont be around to notice.