And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.
---From The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
I had that moment when I was twenty one years old. It was the first time I faced the realization that, as a friend of mine put it, "my dad was not Superman." It was the first time I had cried for years. It was the first time I truly realized that my parents would one day not be here.
It was the first time I allowed myself to think that I was an adult. That all there was to being a grown up was growing old.
I saw this when my oldest brother had children. He was still my brother. We still talked about comic strips and about physics. We helped each other out and we argued. Having children did not bestow upon him superpowers, changing him from my brother into something new.
I see this in my father now. My whole life I had seen him as always having the answers, as always being infallible. Now I see he has always been just a man. A man who did the best he could. A man who taught my brothers and me what he thought was right and wrong in the world. How to behave. What you should and should not do. How to treat other people. That you should always do the right thing not because it is the easy thing, or because you may be rewarded, but because it is The Right Thing To Do. These are the things that I carry on from him, the things I learned from him whether or not he knew he was teaching me.
