My daughter's orchestra played a concert today at a local arts festival. They played a short medley of Beatles songs and one of them was "Yesterday." Well, they played "Yesterday" today. I love the song regardless. It is one of those bittersweet songs that Paul McCartney is famous for, kind of like "Eleanor Rigby." Paul used to write a lot about things that were past or passing.
But I don't quite buy the "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away." It seems sometimes like all of the troubles were yesterday. Though they do keep coming it seems.
I'm not one of those old people who think everything in the past was so much better than it is today. It's not true. There is very little of my past that I would choose to repeat. There is much of it that I would love do overs for.
It's not so much regret as wanting to make things right. It seems easy to look back and think this is what I should have done or said or not done or not said. But you wouldn't know that you should have done something differently unless you did it wrong in the first place. Much of it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, even for a fleeting moment.
Oh well. Father's Day is almost over. And it was for the most part nice. I don't really remember what we used to do for my father on Father's Day. It is kind of sad. And it is even sadder that I didn't really think about him today. I saw some people posting about their father's who have died and saying how much they miss them. So I feel a twinge when I just now thought about him.
It isn't that my father wasn't a good person. I do remember that he would play card games with me when I was a kid. He taught me how to play cribbage. And we'd play Chinese Checkers (which I never lose...and it would make him so made when I kept beating him).
But my father never really talked to me about anything important. He didn't tell me how he felt or what his dreams were or what his regrets were. I suppose you don't really want to burden your kids with your regrets anyway. Mine don't seem to want to hear much about my life.
The thing is that I did want to hear about my parent's lives and childhoods. Maybe I was different. It just seemed important to me to know where they came from and why they were the way they were. But neither one of them seemed comfortable talking about yesterday.
And I've come full circle. Funny how that happens.
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