Pass the posts

by Paul Kandarian

One of the very few good things about social media is coming across old posts you’ve made.

In early October, I came across one that made me sad at the time, but happy now and quite grateful in this, the mandated month of gratitude. I know because there’s a name for it, that of course being Thanksgiving.

It was a post from 10 years ago. My son, Paul, was in the Army, infantry – boots-onthe-ground, kill-or-be-killed kinda job – and I’d just driven him back to Fort Drum in upstate New York after a few days home. I wrote that I missed him already, and hadn’t seen him in months, and how the instant we get together after time apart, we ease into that seamless way of fathers and sons of busting each other’s chops, making fun of one another while never losing sight of the face we mean the world to each other.

He was winding down his Army career. The year before, he’d gone to Afghanistan, and saw and did things no young human should ever have to. I’ve said it before: if the men and women who send our boys and girls to war had to go themselves, there’d be no damn wars.

Before he went, he fought his own war – addiction – and beat it down, only to return home with wounds you never see and fell down the rabbit hole again. I refuse to use the war as an excuse, but it is a reason. He came back, fell hard, got up again, and with the help of the muchmaligned but lifesaving Veterans’ Administration and mostly his own inner strength, he got sober and has been in long-term recovery ever since.

Now he's counseling young folks at a middle school in New Hampshire and is in a far better frame of mind than I've seen him in a long time – not surprising given his compassionate nature and a former addict’s desire to give back by helping.

This is a weird time of year. It’s that holiday season with its fine line between happy and sad, with memories of joyous holidays of the past blended with the sadness of the loss of those who gave you those memories.

I tread that fine line every year. I’m not sure what the definition of an “empath” is, but I guess it’s those of us who feel greatly, good or bad, happy or sad. When we feel up, we’re explosively up, and when it grumbles down the other way, our sadness is exacerbated, be it real or imagined, and even the sadness of others. I can’t watch sad news, especially that involving children. It hurts too much and the ache it leaves can be crippling, at least for a little while. Maybe it’s because I unwittingly put myself in the place of those families and their unimaginable pain.

I guess that could be called bipolar, I don’t know. I get the feeling we’ve all got a little bipolar in us, which tends to ramp up this time of year. But then the wisdom of aging, one of the few things good about getting older, makes one realize: hell, we’re all different, all 8 billion-plus of us, and we can feel however we want.

But in this month of giving thanks, I give thanks for my son being my son, and ditto for my daughter, the best mom on the planet, and of course thanks for the son she has, my grandson Mikey, in whom, now and forever, the sun rises and sets in my loving eyes. She is raising him as a single mom and is doing a singularly incredible job; motherhood is unquestionably the most difficult and important job a human could have.

Sometimes I run across my old social media posts about Mikey. My words, a photo or 10, maybe a video clip, and I cry again as I did when originally posting. They say that whenever you feel down, think of something that brings you absolute joy. Mikey is that something. Never fails to boost my mood, no matter how lousy.

I’m lucky because he’s at the tail end of being seven and while still in the blissful stage of adoring his grandpa, he is showing signs of independence that means he’ll always love me but may not be as demonstrative about it with his hugs and kisses. That’s fine. That’s growing up.

Me, I’ll always be about the hugs and kisses even when they’re not cool and he pushes them away because soon enough, he’ll get old enough to realize it’s cool to welcome them back.

Gratitude is a funny thing. If you practice it (and I struggle sometimes to remember to do that), it elicits the happy part of your heart and soul, and come what may, you smile through. And this aging thing, as I go down the path of life that was wide open a long time ago and now seems to narrow like arteries as we get older, has given me the wisdom to realize how important that is.