Dad, Charlie and the rush of time

THIS PAST Tuesday would have been my parents' 53rd wedding anniversary. As it happens, they only made it to the 21st, before daddy died of cancer at 43. Numbers don't mean that much in the grand scheme of things, because they're deceptive. Someone who has lived for decades can be a sorry shell of a human who never made a lasting mark on anyone or anything. Others, like Alex, of Alex's Lemonade, can shed this mortal coil after six short years and be remembered for having a spirit as wide and eternal as the sky.

But the accumulation of days and then weeks and finally years does have an impact, whether negative or positive. On the plus side, it makes us appreciate the throbbing, vital beauty of life itself, filled with the wonders of birth, childhood, romance, friendship and excellent pizza. On the downside, it gives us an acute appreciation for loss.

Recently, my uncle died. I hadn't spoken to him in a while, but that's not the point. His passing reminded me, like my parents' anniversary, that we are all pieces of the same familial puzzle, and that when a piece is lost to death or estrangement - or even the apathy of "I'll call him when I get a chance" - we move one step closer to solitude.

That's why it's important to cherish the people and the present while we can and not leave the tributes to gravesides and memoirs, as important as those might end up being. I remember reading "Our Town" as an eighth-grader and feeling uneasy when the young girl who died in childbirth wanders back through her life as an observer. Emily sees herself and family and friends on her 12th birthday, and has an epiphany while watching them: The living don't appreciate life while they're immersed in it. She asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute?" and gets a negative answer from the only person who can hear, the stage manager.

I was 12 myself when I first read the play, and the passing of the years didn't mean much to me. But it's notable that, even then, I suspected that there was something troubling about our rushing through the days as if they were expendable currency, replaceable with the next sunrise. I didn't know in 1974 that there were only eight more years left to enjoy my father, a few more than that with my beloved grandmother, and that I'd lose a sibling to suicide and friends to disease. But the suspicion of impermanence hung over me like a malevolent angel.

Why am I writing this? What moves me to become philosophical on a Friday when I should be complaining about Chris Christie's veto of a gun bill, the chaos in Egypt, the ridiculous posturing of a Montgomery County registrar of wills or the anniversary of the March on Washington?

I think it has something to do with Charlie Manuel, believe it or not. When I saw the news conference where Charlie's departure was announced, I was down the Shore. The sun was shining, it was an almost perfect August day and there were awfully nice memories flooding my brain of summer weekends with people who are no longer around. Then I saw Charlie's sweet face, hangdog and dignified at the same time, and I started crying. Silly, I said to myself, really silly. I'm not even much of a baseball fan, having sold my soul to the football gods decades ago.

But there was something in that posture, in the eyes of a man who had led a championship team to hometown victory that made me very sad. It was the realization that he himself realized how the ties that bind aren't all that tight. It was also the sense that he, like Emily, was reliving 2008 in his mind and wished he'd bottled the victory moment as some sort of vaccination against the pain of an undeserved firing.

You might be saying that this is all too melodramatic for what is, essentially, a business decision. You would be right, of course. In a day and age where athletes are no longer amateurs who spend their nights hitting balls and their days punching a time clock like the fellows who ruled over Shibe Park in the '20s and '30s, sentimentality is quaint at best, pathetic at worst.

But Charlie is a throwback to those days when you played because you loved the game, not because it feathered your nest. He is class and dignity, and a reminder to me of what is lost when time marches inexorably toward the future.

Marcel Proust dipped a cookie into a cup of tea and the memories came flooding back to him, giving us some great literature.

My parents' anniversary passed, my uncle died and a good man lost his job. It's not exactly literature. But you get my drift, I hope.