My Son David

Today is my son David’s birthday. He is 46 years old. Where did the years go? It seems such a short time since he was a three-year-old blowing out the candles on his birthday cake in the den of our home in Irving, Texas, under the smiling eyes of our family: his father, older brother and sister, and me.

That happy suburban family is vaporized. I now live in a retirement home with other old folks. Still active. Still going places. I go to art museums and theater. Others prefer to go to the casino in Oklahoma. All of us agree that the older we get the faster time flies. Remember when you were little and it seemed ages before Christmas came? After you’ve experienced 80 Christmases, it seems as if Christmas is every other month.

David was born in Michigan. We moved to Texas when he was ten months old. When he was five, we moved to Pennsylvania where he started kindergarten. In the middle of second grade, we moved to Illinois. That’s where he grew up. While he was in high school, he witnessed the trauma of his parents’ divorce. David was a freshman at the University of Illinois when I pretty much abandoned him and moved to New Mexico. He never abandoned me.

David now has a wife and two children and lives in Irvine, California. When he was a baby, I never heard of computers or the internet. Now David is a computer expert, handling programming problems for cities all over the U.S.

Last week he called me while at an airport waiting to board a plane.
After chatting for several minutes I asked him, “Where are you?”
He said, “New Jersey.”
Me: “What are you doing in New Jersey?”
Seems there were problems coordinating computer systems at Newark airport and the Port Authority of New York. David flew from California to straighten things out.

David also straightens out this old woman’s computer problems. He knows me well. He set up this blog and suggested calling it “Ilene Rants.”

I’ve always been an independent woman who tries to solve her own problems (and gives others advice, whether or not they want it), but everyone encounters problems that they can’t deal with alone. My children are far away, David in California, Martha in Illinois. But when I need help, David and Martha are there for me.

David is coming to see me next weekend. Hooray! Hooray!