Daddy Days: The summer side of life

I’m about to have my last birthday on the “summer side of life.” Singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has a song by that title and it’s a great phrase. While the concept I’m using this for is less dramatic than what the song was about (it was about a soldier’s experience in Vietnam), Lightfoot’s phrase does a great job of capturing the idea of a life being like a year and broken into four seasons.

If you take the U.S. life expectancy for males (76) and divide by four, you get 19 years as the span of each season of life. So, 0-19 is the spring of life, 19-37 is the summer, and so on. Since I’m about to turn 37 I’m about to enter my last year on the “summer side” of life.

It’s easy to see why the spring of life would be called that. There’s an incredible amount of growth, blooming and change in those first 19 years. I look at the flower garden of our family and know I too was once growing by the day like our kids. People are always talking about how kids are “getting so big” and there are new milestones almost weekly in the spring of life.

More: Daddy Days: The daddy/daughter distinction

It’s common, especially for men, to treat the early years of the summer of life as an extension of spring. But come age 30, reality starts to intrude and correct any misconceptions. Learning that is part of the growth that goes on in this season. And that’s really the big difference between the summer side (spring and summer) and the winter side (fall and winter) – growth.

The autumn side of life is marked by loss. That sounds bleak but again reality and experience will confirm that fall is when the leaves wither and the flowers fade. Your kids often leave the house and get married in the fall of life. This of course isn’t a bad thing, nests aren’t made to be full forever, but the cool wind of autumn is often felt more acutely in an empty nest.

We don’t like to talk about the winter of life. Which is silly. Winter happens whether we talk about it or not. Pretending a tree without leaves isn’t really a tree is missing an opportunity to know the structure of a tree. Acting as if the winter of life is an end in itself discounts the dignity of age and experience.

More: Daddy Days: Going to the movies for the first time

Plus, the winter of life is often marked by a new spring: grandkids. You don’t age in reverse but so many people have pointed out the new life grandkids inject into grandparents’ lives that it’s fair to say they have some sort of revivification power. The winter of life isn’t without its holly berries, new snow falls and warm firesides.

One more thought on the whole summer side of life idea. We’re talking in general here and on average, but I’m aware not everyone lives through the same seasons at the same time. We all know people who never saw one or more season of life at all.

Either way, they were right. We often talk about a life being cut short or someone going too soon, but that can only be said when you’re looking at averages. When you’re talking about specific people, individuals, each life is a complete whole: theirs.

However, I came across an interesting comment about this recently. A character in a story I was reading remarked that a life was a complete whole no matter what its length. Regrettably, I can’t find the quote, but I’m 99% sure it was a character in one of G.K. Chesterton’s "Father Brown" mysteries (good thing there are only like a 1,000 of them).

More: Daddy Days: The bathroom amusement park

The seasons of the year aren’t random and neither are the seasons of life, no matter at what age you experience them. So, am I really in the last year of the summer side of life? God only knows. But I think I’ll treat it like the best season just in case.

Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their seven children. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns to thoughtsforcaleb@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Daddy Days: The summer side of life