New year's Morning

I called up my dad on New Year's Day morning to wish him a happy new year and, as usual, to make sure he and mom are in good health and good spirits. I dread the day I get the call from one or the other telling me that one or the other is in the hospital and has had a stroke or a heart attack or fell and broke a hip. Having lost two siblings in the past 3 years, I dread the continuing dissolution of my family. The past two years have been a quiet, reassuring interlude.

Anyway, my conversation with dad somehow went from vague niceties and talk about the weather to reviewing all the threats to humankind facing us in the next 100 years. Dad thinks the years around 2050 will be the watershed when things really begin to go downhill. I was reminded what a pessimist dad is at heart (he always called himself a "realist," however). That is where I got that streak, too, and I wish I didn't absorb it as if by osmosis, but there it is. And like dad, I have contained that nuclear core of despair with a protective shell of pacifism and strained positivity and trying to get people to get along. It's weird. I am very much both my mom and dad distilled into something different than either. But I love them both so much.