Time is odd. People are odd. The blink of time each of us get to breathe in and breathe out in the company of others attempting to do the same is life. Like the previously mentioned time and people, life is odd as well, but you all new that.

Hopefully you also know that if the breathe-in-and-breathe-out thing ceases to occur you should think (or even exclaim loudly into a telephone with a 911 operator at the other end), “That’s an odd way to try and keep living. I think this person needs help.”

We all need a little help from time-to-time. I once read that being helped makes us feel happy, and helping, although it doesn’t always make us happy in the immediate, lends meaning to our lives in the long run. Makes sense from a parent’s point of view.

Raising kids is no picnic, but when they grow up and leave you alone you feel like something meaningful might have occurred. There are plenty of picnics going on when you’re raising kids, avoid them, they won’t be a picnic. They will be you attempting to balance soggy paper plates in hurricane winds full of food your kids won’t eat because the potato salad touched the Jell-O.

Apparently the person that coined the phrase about something “not being a picnic” never took kids to a picnic, or was one of those psychopaths that says “yes” when the hostess at a restaurant says, “we have room on the patio if you would like to sit outside”.

These people should be avoided, or at the very least, not allowed to interact with the hostess at a restaurant with an option for outdoor dining (a.k.a. a picnic). I don’t have a problem with outdoor dining if it is in the dead of night, there isn’t a swamp forming at my seated parts, and I can’t spit queso blanco on a passing or parked car from my chair. I don’t feel as though those are unreasonable criteria for an outdoor dining experience.

A “dining experience”. Not sure I’ve ever had one of those. I’ve dined a time or two, I’ve had my fair share of experiences, but have these paths crossed? I suppose every single thing that occurs to us as we’re busy breathing in and out could qualify as an experience. Some good. Some bad. Some memorable. Some forgettable. Each lending meaning to the other.

Last year I made the proclamation that I was hanging up my cleats and putting my baseball career out of its misery. Turns out I lied. Actually, I didn’t lie, I was coerced into playing by my son, and teammate, Jackson. I’ve witnessed a steady decline in the opportunities for “play” with my son over the past nineteen years of his breathing in and out so I said “yes”, or at least I didn’t say “no”.

After each game, the physical discomfort expressed by my 46-year-old muscles attempting to do what they did many moons ago, didn’t make me very happy, but the season as a whole was meaningful.

I’ve driven Jackson to many practices and games over the years, but this year I rode with him, and I could feel a shift occur in who we are to each other. I will always be his dad, and he will always be my son, but the meaning of that relationship is evolving.

He may not be happy when it evolves into him changing my shorts, but perhaps he’ll find some meaning in lending his padre a hand…perhaps. Life is odd. So it goes.