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Posted Friday, August 7, 2009

Becoming a father at my age -- I call it "late-onset fatherhood"-- has its trade offs. You're wiser... but wearier. Physically, 2009 has been a rough year for the late-onset dad. Partway through a dismal season of rec-league basketball, I began to notice that my left hip ached after every game. I took Advil, cut my playing down to once a week. After the season ended, I gave my body a 10-week rest, no running, no basketball. The hip thing, I figured, would go away.

But it didn't. At last I went to my doctor, who sent me along to an orthopedist. He put my x-rays up on the screen. "Uh-oh," he said.
Not what you want to hear from your physician.

My hip, he said, was in pretty bad shape. He showed me where the cartilage was worn thin. "See that? You're bone on bone." In fact, he informed me, the arthritic deterioration in the joint made me an excellent candidate for THA.  As in, Total Hip Arthroplasty.

I was incredulous. Hold on, you mean... me? A hip replacement? At 50?

The procedure was highly effective, the doctor went on to assure me, and would improve my motion and comfort dramatically--though I shouldn't expect to play strenuous basketball. As for when to have the surgery, that was up to me. "It's a quality-of-life decision," he said. "It depends on what you expect to be able to do." 

So what did I expect? Five years ago I would have said, "Doctor, do anything you can to give me more basketball." But with Larkin in my life, priorities have changed. A decade from now, I want to be able to take day hikes with my daughter. Play some tennis with her if she's interested. Go on bike trips.
"Well," the doctor said, "that shouldn't be a problem."

It was a good conversation; I came away with a sensible roadmap -- and a booklet on Total Hip Arthroplasty. All right, I thought, I can do this. Then outside I crossed the parking lot, got in my car... and cried like a baby. I understood that I was grieving my athletic self: the Rand who since boyhood had loved to ski hard, whap the tennis ball, play one-on-one basketball, run until his lungs burned.

But there was something else: a presentiment of anguish at the Diminished Dad, perhaps even the Decrepit Dad, that Larkin would grow up knowing. I myself had had a young, athletic father who spent thousands of hours with me on basketball and tennis courts. We'd play three sets of tennis under the hot summer sun, then run to the beach and race full-blast into the water. That wouldn't be the father Larkin would have. She would never know me the way I knew my father, in the full scope of his vigor. I would be an old man. An old man with artificial joints.

Sitting there in the car, I tried to gather myself. Beyond self-pity there was a big adjustment to make, and if I concentrated hard, I could almost feel how it would go. All grief, the work of grief, is a letting go, and I tried to ease up on the old idea of myself that I was clinging to. OK, I told myself, so you will not be young of body; then be young at heart. 

There is life after basketball, it turns out: other things to do with your child, new pleasures to cultivate -- some literally. A few days after getting the bad news from the orthopedist, I took Larkin to a neglected area in our yard, along the south side of the house.

"What do you say we clean this area up and make a garden?" I said.
Larkin brightened. "Sure!"

In the coming days and weeks, the two of us became regulars at the gardening center. She loved riding on the metal carts, directing me with brisk calls of "Right! Left!" I had to restrain her from hauling away every flowering plant in sight. "Daddy, let's get this!" she'd say, grabbing a plastic pot. "This little plant needs a home!" In the yard we weeded and dug, spread garden soil, and planted a mix of annuals and perennials - primroses and marigolds, salvia and coral bells, lots of hardy impatiens. Eventually we branched out to shrubs: a pair of rhododendron, three pink azaleas.

Somewhat to my surprise, I find gardening terrifically enjoyable. There's exercise to it -- hoisting bags of mulch, lopping branches off the oak tree to let some sunlight through, unloading heavy flagstones for a new front walk. Streaming with sweat, I pop open a cold beer, and it's a lot more like my old fun than I would have imagined. Larkin loves it too. For Mother's Day she planted an English daisy, then led Molly by the hand around the side of the house.

"Close your eyes, Mama!" she said.

Molly laughs over this new obsession of mine. "You're the Constant Gardener!" she says, a joking reference to the John Le Carre novel. And it's true. I'm out there a lot. There are fringe benefits to gardening that you don't get from basketball. My own mother loved gardening, and taking it up was something I'd long intended to do with her; but I dallied, and she died.

Now, digging with Larkin out in the yard, watching her somberly wield the watering can, I'm with my mother and my daughter all at once. I've stumbled on a way to draw the generations together, while nurturing a hope for growth, sustenance, color, and beauty that is not just a metaphor, but as real as the dirt in my hands. And how hip is that?