I've done the math, even counting the leap years (we've both lived through two). On the 290th day of the 10th year of my life my father slipped away from us all, which means that on the 290th day of the 10th year of Lucas’ life, we are at a point of stasis that we will never reach again.

Today our experience in the art and craft of being a son is equivalent. Tomorrow he will outstrip me forever. His one extra day of son-hood experience will stretch indefinitely until my death, and nothing will even up that score.

Lucas seems older to me now, having reached Balance Day. Having gone as far down the path of son-hood and showing no signs of stopping, no trepidation at moving past this benchmark. I can't tell him what awaits him as a son—the titanic father/son battles I never got to have, 

and all the other things that wash into this thing called love like runoff toward a river after a flood.

My father and I, too, are in balance today. I have been a father to Lucas V. Wingate exactly as long as Thomas J. Wingate was a father to me, though I suspect this day is less momentous for my dad because my brothers Tom and Mike preceded me. He might not have been counting the days. Might not have even noticed this day if I hadn’t alerted him to it.

Do you feel it now, dad, since I’ve brought it up? The pull, the gravity? 

Tomorrow I will be a father for more days than I had a father, which makes me feel like I have to stop coasting and get my act together. Tomorrow I will step off the ledge and into uncharted territory, no longer able to rely on aping my father's voice and gestures in the way of stomping around the house to let everybody know that he was pissed off, dammit, and that things had to change.

I guess it never mattered that we never knew exactly how things had to change. And I guess that's the kind of father I've been these 10 years and 290 days. That's the kind of father I can't be anymore because there is no example left for me to follow after this day.

I feel alone on the journey of fatherhood. I want to reach out my hand toward my father's and ask him to show me the way, though I don't like the way he knew to go and never have. Though I have sought not to go down it myself, and in most ways succeeded— except in those ways I can't help, and can’t name, and can’t escape from without sacrificing of the vision of fatherhood I have clung to because I knew no other.

Will I wake up a gentler man tomorrow, once this brief balance is overturned? Will the pieces of my father's armor that I picked up and riveted together to make my own fall off me and clink to the ground for me to ignore?