This is my son. We are on a beach, hunting for clams and other wet and squiggly things. It was late winter and the world was very cold.

There was an instant in the past, a brief moment when I was exactly 30 times Colin’s age. Today, I am barely twice his age. If he keeps accelerating at the same rate, he will soon overtake and surpass me and will end up older than I am. I cannot determine if the foregoing is a conundrum of life, or mathematics, or some transcendent quality of time itself.

I do not think I was a very good father. In retrospect, there are so many things that might have been done differently. I wish I could disperse a world of hurt and turn our cold beach sojourn into an endless warm afternoon of summer joy.

All my love, Cols