Old Ranger

A birthday trip for Dad proves some things don’t change.

Twice, at least, on our six-plane trek through three airports, I looked up to find him gone—his seat vacant, or his gray Stetson no longer bobbing along beside me on his 89 year old head.

It’s easier than it should be to lose your aging father in a crowd.

Both times, the concourse was busy. Dozens of people passed by the minute, travelers of every age and shade, size and gender. Yet none of them was Dad.

Because I am also a father, I immediately feared the worst.

I’ve seen him fall, right next to me on a missed stair. I failed to catch him, even so close, and had to watch his cup of coffee splash across the tiles and his head bounce, which caused a lady to gasp and left a bruise.

Where might he fall in the whole of an international airport? Was it in the men’s room? Who would hold a napkin to his bleeding ear?

I texted him, very angry. I expected a barking alert on the intercom, and any second a medic to cruise by in a golf cart.

But then he was back, looking up at me with his one good eye. Maybe patting his pockets for his iPhone, or wiping the corner of his mouth with a little towel he carries.

Asking me, “You need to go, son?” Because he’s a father too.

Never has the carousel of generations seemed so obvious to me. I’m up and he’s down. My kids are already around the bend.

Historically, Dad’s been a durable figure. He drove tractors at nine, broke broncos and tarred roofs in his teens; he took the brunt of a grenade tossed his way beside a creek in Vietnam then fell into a punji pit for good measure. He survived infections and cancers and bleeding ulcers, an infantry career with twenty-odd moves and two waring children, nearly sixty years of marriage, and then Mom’s death.

He didn’t know he was lost in the airport, not even once. He was just taking point in our little two-man platoon.

Today is Dad’s birthday. He spent it touring ancient pictographs in a canyon on the Navajo Reservation where my brother and his wife practice medicine.

It was probably his last trip out West, but who knows? Dad’s from New Mexico and Texas. The red rocks and mesquite, the far horizons are part of him, maybe the oldest, most important parts.

Two days from now, my brother and his grown sons will accompany Dad to the airport in Albuquerque and put him on his flight home.

One leg of that trip, a layover and plane change in Dallas, he’ll have to navigate on his own. He’s supposed to get wheeled from gate to gate and probably will. But he’s been known to slip his handlers and scout ahead.

“Come on, son,” he said on our last trip through DFW. He ditched the chair and its attendant who had stepped away for just a minute.

The Stetson was on the move.