It’s a perfect day for a son’s 30th birthday

Sometimes on a perfect day — and it has to be a perfect day because back then they were all perfect — the colors outside will all be in Kodachrome, and the lengths of shadows will be a little longer than usual, and I’ll remember, just as clearly as right now, hoisting my son’s little BMX bike on my shoulder and hopping onto my own Schwinn Varsity and pedaling down a sycamore-lined road to pick up my boy from school.

My wife surely has her own memories (she’s played at least as big a role as I did in raising our children), but this is about my own recollection of a somewhat typical afternoon when our son was almost 6 years old.

A dad can pick out his child in a crowd from a great distance; the way his arms move, the way his head maybe cants barely perceptibly to the right when he’s in a bit of a hurry, the particular bounce to his step. It’s as if he were the only one in color in a black-and-white crowd.

I’m outside the fence, his bike at my feet, and he finally arrives and hands me whatever he’s encumbered with (on this day it’s a finger-paint portrait of Abraham Lincoln in a stovepipe hat and a blue beard beneath a sun with its rays arrayed like the notches on a clockface and the words taped on the bottom by a teacher explaining, in Ray’s words, “Abraham Lincoln is out for a walk in the hot summer sun.”)

And now we’re pedaling, sycamore leaves crunching autumnally beneath our wheels. “Can we go see the piano?” asks Ray, and, of course we can go see the piano. Have we ever ridden home without seeing the piano?

It’s in the back of a large parking lot behind a church on Studebaker Road. Its days of being a piano are long gone, but it’s maybe too big of a thing to dispose of, so it’s been left to decompose. But its strings are still extant and, while there are no keys, there are still parts of the hammer mechanism remaining, so by fiddling around with it we can coax a melody or a jumbled jazz (to be generous) riff on it. It’s fun, but it’s only fun for a couple of minutes and we’re off again toward home.

A couple of years later, when our daughter Hannah joined the family fray, I might go out to water the lawn, a chore that never ended without the kids getting drenched. Or I might go out and whack Wiffle golf balls and watch our dog Jimmy sprint off after them.

Today, Ray Charles Grobaty turns 30, and it’s another one of those perfect days: 70 degrees and breezy, so you don’t know if you need to bother with a flannel shirt or not. I’m always visited by these memories this time of year.

I am, of course, immensely proud of him as he’s grown up and has a fine job with JetBlue. He travels a lot; when I phone him I always have to ask where he is in the world.

His friends and coworkers threw him a two-day birthday bash over the weekend, but he chose to spend the day itself in the Barn with his folks, his sister Hannah and the pits Annie and Jasper.

“They grow up so fast” is a horrible cliche, though like most good ones, it happens to be true.

I fought against the enemy that is time throughout my kids’ childhood and adolescence and now adulthood. I really did try to treasure all those moments even while they were happening and, yes, I was tired a lot. Yes, I got angry sometimes. Yes, I probably did what the poet Philip Larkin said that all parents do.

And even if time has won all the battles, It can’t take away, or even diminish, the memories that come on perfect days like today.