Of Cabbages And Kings

            I'm a cynic. This shouldn't be news to anyone. I know the way the world works, I know we're all different and that a great many of us will connive and plot and lie and steal and cheat to get what they want. I also know that some things are inevitable, like love, hate, birth...death.
    With these inevitable things comes what I like to call the Oh Shit Moment. See, sometimes we forget that we're all Somebody Else to somebody else. Some things, regardless of how commonplace and universal they are, seem so distant and impossible to us. Before certain events in our lives, we have that moment where our brains go Oh Shit, This Is Actually Going To Happen. It's that shocked, almost incredulous realization that regardless of how much an individual we are, we're just like everyone else in some aspects.
    I've had several of these. Not as many as I expected, but a decent-sized handful. When I lost my virginity, I had one of those, looking at her body and feeling the excitement and feeling my heart race as she gave herself willingly to me. When I graduated high school, and later college, that feeling of accomplishment and pride as received that parchment. When I looked at my very-soon-to-be-bride at the start of our wedding, looking at the smile on her face and seeing the happiness in her eyes as we stood before family and friends. When that same woman was lying on her deathbed, as I watched the light in her dim and watched the clock tick down the final seconds. When my father walked into my job today and said he had forty-four more days until retirement.
    That's a reality there. A nudge to the reality that time moves on, that people age. There's a reality that my father is NOT a young man anymore. In a way, he is, I'll give him that. He's in his late 60s, hair and beard full gray, the flesh below the fuzz lined and yes, weary. It's a reality that both he and my mother will someday be gone, leaving me the patriarch. I hope that day is decades away, I really do, because it's not a responsibility I want. I don't want to know that one day, my siblings and I will be the elders. I don't want it.
    Reality sucks. It really does. But, it's reality. So what are we going to do about it? What can we do about it? Nothing. Can't change the channel. We just have to deal with it, because it's what we've got.