In a few hours, I will be heading to Denver with my sons. We are going to watch some baseball, spend a few days together and probably do many of the same things fathers and sons have done around baseball for generations. We will sit in the stands, talk about the game, wander around a city, find someplace to eat and fill the spaces in between with conversations that may or may not have anything to do with why we went there in the first place.
There was a time when something like that would have felt ordinary. When my sons were young, being together was simply the structure of life. There were games and practices, school days and weekends, rides in the car and dinners around the same table. There was always another Saturday coming, another season, another trip, another opportunity to do whatever we had just done again. I doubt I spent much time during those years thinking about how temporary any of it was. We were all looking ahead. They were becoming whatever they were going to become, and I was probably busy thinking about work, the next responsibility, the next milestone and all the things that still needed to happen.
Only later do you understand that some of the moments you were hurrying through were, in their own way, a version of perfection.
Not perfect because everything was easy. It wasn’t. Not perfect because there weren’t worries or frustrations or all the ordinary complications that come with raising a family. Perfect because all of us were there, together, inside a season of life that felt permanent only because none of us understood yet how quickly it would become something we could see only by looking backward.
There is a word for part of that feeling.
Avenoir.
