In honor of Dad's 75th birthday

I was 33 years old, walking from the house to the shop on a warm spring day, the moment when I realized that I knew my parents when they were my age. I stopped mid-stride and calculated the years while the sun warmed my back and the profoundness of my thought altered reality and possibly opened a portal in the space-time continuum.

I turned 10 the year Dad turned 33. My parents were building a house across town. My older brother was one year away from becoming a teen-aged jerk, a more advanced, hormone-fueled version of himself as a pre-teen jerk.

I was well past the years of baby teeth f...