When Did My Parents Get To Be Old People?

I was talking on the phone with my father this morning. He was telling me that on mornings he doesn't work in his part-time job, he goes off to the mall with some of his friends early in the morning to walk the circuit. "It's hard -- we walk downstairs twice then do the upstairs. But we do it fast -- you really break a sweat!" And then they go for coffee. These are the folks that the papers write about -- "In the Early Hours at the Mall, It's Grey All the Way!"

I like that after all those years of working six days a week in his own store, with one week off a year, my dad now can do a lot of whatever he likes, and have that group of "buddies" to do stuff with that he really hadn't had since way back when he was doing his time in the Army. It's just the image of Daddy puffing his way through the mall with a bunch of other guys at nine in the morning that makes me chuckle. That, and I hope the wardrobes involved don't come straight off the set of the Sopranos. Daddy's not a gold chain kind of guy, but you get that many retired Italian guys from Long Island in one place....