Back and Forth

I'm back home from my trip, where my father celebrated with all his family 80 years of existence, 60 of them with my mother. It was a bittersweet kind of a visit.
I used this tune to illustrate the beginning of their romance, wrote new words in Hebrew, and we all sang it together. It was touching to hear the older generation hum along with us. This song means a lot for them, they remember the context very well.

I took my mother to visit their old apartment and get some things. They live now in a seniors residence. It's a very difficult transition for them. On our way back she was talking about her relationship with her own father, who's been dead for more than 50 years now. I never got to meet him, he died before I was born, but I heard many stories about him as I was growing up, from my grandmother, my mother and my aunt. He was a melancholy and angry man, a frustrated sculptor, and he died quite young of a sudden aneurysm.


My mother still can't forgive his shortcomings as a father, and although she's older than he got to be, can't get over the ways he treated her when she was 5 years old. She refuses to settle her account with him. Perhaps it's her way of keeping in some kind of contact with him, maybe that's how they always did it, connecting through resentment.
As my parents get older, I see a stubbornness in them that scares me in it's familiarity. They refuse to listen to us, we will always be the children. They have their ways and they don't budge. In all likelihood we'll be just like the when we get there.