Daddy's Secret

My Dad was twenty years older than my Mom when they met one unusually hot, sweaty day in late May. He was a man of the world, vigorous, looked like a young Paul Newman, had his own business -- that seemed to give him lots of money. He was well connected with the powers that were in those days, he was a well seasoned man who had survived the great plague in America and, by then, been in two World Wars and was a notorious womanises.

To her a good catch by all measures.

She was beautiful, youthful, and as my Daddy used to put it, “built like a brick outhouse” (I never quite understood this reference, but was told it had to do with her very ample upper body). She had beautiful, shiny, dark, almost-black hair. Her eyes were hazle and she had the most lovely smile and sense of humour (up to the last day of her life too).

Torrid was their love affair.

He was just divorced from his third or fourth wife; she had seen one husband-buried on her wedding day and three more since then that stuck for a while. She was married at the time actually to that third husband. Which goes to the story of my adoption (but I will save that for another time).

They drank together, partied hardy together with a multitude of their friends -- at a time when others were doing it very tough. She was a chef and they entertained. No one quite understood this unbalanced relationship.

Eventually, they HAD to marry (I was the problem but another time for details) and people were amazed to see this couple together. What was their secret and how did he keep her so attracted to him? For all my life until he died they were together from the moment of my birth (I was going to say from my conception but that is very NOT true).

The Secret

When I was about seven years old my Daddy told me the story of their secret for eternal youth. When he was about ninteen he went on a quest throughout Florida. You see, he had read about the Fountain of Youth and studied maps and purposed not to rest until he found this legendary spring that reputedly restored the youth of anyone who drank of its waters.

Even today stories of this hidden fountain are some of the most persistent stories associated with Florida. He told me about a great Spanish explorer, Juan Ponce de León searched for the Fountain of Youth in 1513 and he found it. My Daddy said he found it too…it was in an overgrown area and surrounded by a graveyard.

He brought a supply back to share with my Mom, but always joked they had really been drinking the water that had filtered through those old dead bodies. Even today I shuddered to think this would be true of my Daddy and Mommy.

Regardless, all my life I watched them never age as others around them did. Men and women of the same age when compared with my parents, looked their age, grew old in heart and simply died.

Seventy-Nine

It was not until they were nearly 80 that the first signs of ageing showed in my Mom or Daddy. When they reached that age -- all at once as if they had run out of this precious fluid or perhaps it lost its potency – their bodies rapidly deteriorated.

My Dad, up until that time could carry a porcelain bathtub on his back up five flights of stairs without growing out of breath. He worked every day of his life, and hard each day from morning to night and five or six days a week, rarely ever sick or injured. Mom did not have one wrinkle on her face till she neared 80. Her eyes were bright and she could still sing in her trained operatic voice and work in a full kitchen chefing (a job that is far harder than digging ditches – I tried it one summer as a favour to her !).

Then it was over. The magic number seemed to be 79. Both gone twenty years apart.

Strange. I have always had unbounded energy and optimism. My body is younger than all I know of my age. No wrinkles on my face. I have the lungs of an athlete...

I wonder what was in my special formula and those special drinks they always gave me every day of my life until they died.