It was too cold for me to be standing outside the Albany Greyhound station wearing a dress without tights.

But I couldn’t find any tights without runs in them, and even though it was the dead of winter, my mom had told me to look nice, so I made the choice to suffer. Beauty is pain, or whatever. It would have been a non-issue if my family were there to pick me up on time, but my mom texted me that they had to turn around to get some notes that my dad needed for when he speaks later. I speculated that they were joke notes. She said she figured it was just a list of people to remember to thank. I was not convinced.

My dad’s retirement party took place in the wood paneled main room of an Elks Club in upstate New York. There was bad wine, fluorescent lighting, and a DJ (which is to say there was a 65-or-so-year-old man in the corner with two turntables, one speaker with horrendous sound quality, and fifteen crates of presumably his own records). My dad’s dispatcher has an affinity for baking, and she made a cute, albeit enormous, school-bus-shaped cake and some eight thousand cookies with little retirement-related quips on them (“Quitter,” “Most of us will miss you,” “Goodbye tension, hello pension” — you get it). And if at any point you somehow forgot that you were in an Elks Club, there was, thank goodness, a taxidermied elk head on the wall to remind you.

The retirement party for a public school district transportation director is full of administrative personnel and bus drivers and mechanics. A group of men will sit at a table and they will all be over fifty and white and bald and have mustaches and plaid shirts and big bellies. You will have to be more specific when talking about any one of them. Especially because they are also all named Stan.

Lots of people came to celebrate my dad. However, he is the boss, so maybe they just felt like they had to. But he is also very funny and kind and good at his job, so maybe they wanted to even if they had to. He made the rounds and worked the room as he does. My dad is probably the funniest person any of these people will ever meet. I used to work as a teacher’s aide during summer school in his district (shout out to nepotism), and when I first went to the district office to fill out paperwork, the women working there recognized my last name. “Are you John’s daughter? Oh my God, he is just the funniest. He comes in here and he is just a riot. Is he funny at home?” When I relayed the story to my parents afterwards, my dad laughed and told me I should have said, completely deadpan, “No, he beats us.” That made me laugh, but I think it would have been lost on the ladies in HR, who likely would have been suddenly (and, to be sure, needlessly) concerned for my safety, so I wasn’t remiss over having kept my mouth shut and just agreeing that yes, he’s very funny.

I sat at a black-tableclothed table, adorned to remind attendees that death awaits, with my mom and my brother. I watched from a distance as my dad made people laugh and accepted various congratulations and welcome-to-the-best-job-you’ve-ever-hads, even though he isn’t actually retiring for another month or so, and even after that plans to work another state job. He had a few drinks and ate some not-great food with us. My brother and I gifted him a bag of Lindt truffles (his fave) and a generic “congratulations” card, purchased from the Duane Reade next to Port Authority after some text-deliberation as to whether or not you say “congratulations” to someone who is retiring (turns out you do! Thanks, Google).

My dad and I are very similar. For years I tried to lean into the idea that my mom and I are the same — we were both high-achieving students, so when that was the majority of my identity, I ran with the idea that I was just like her. And I wanted to be like her — my mom is amazing, and I think when you’re a daughter fortunate enough to have a great mom, you want to be like her. She’s very smart and compassionate and caring. She is driven and hardworking with a bootstraps mentality. She is measured and rational and put together. I would love to be exactly like her. But it just isn’t the case. I am lucky to have some nice dashes of my mom, but I even look more like my dad in the face, so maybe I should just stop lying to myself. My dad and I can be outgoing. We like to chat and tend to be relatively comfortable with strangers. We can project a lot of confidence, even if we don’t feel it all the time. We are generally approachable. We sometimes struggle to self-motivate. We try to be funny. We have high cheekbones and deep set eyes. Inside each of us lives an inherent sadness. Et cetera.

It turned out that the notes my family had to turn around to retrieve, leaving me and my bare legs shivering on the sidewalk, were definitely not joke notes. When he got up to speak, my dad meandered through his speech, almost completely directionless save his name list. It was certainly not the tight five I expected — he very seldom actually reached the end of a thought, let alone a punchline. I thought his theater degree would have served him better than this, but he seemed more lost than nervous. He thanked some people, he made some futile attempts at reflection of his time in the position, he thanked some more people that he had forgotten to thank in the first go around, he told a half-story or two. He encouraged his staff that, while things would be different, they would still be great. He did not sound convinced.

I think that retiring is entering a phase of major flux for the first time in a long time - especially when your retirement is really just switching jobs, from one where you are the boss to one where you are presumably not that, and not just transitioning to a life of golfing and playing cards and shuffleboard and water aerobics (this is what my maternal grandparents do, and they have been retired for the entirety of my life, so my scope of what goes on in these supposed “golden years” is narrow and highly defined by the activities board in their retirement community in central Florida). Here I am, in my early 20s and living in New York City with very little money, single, working a job that I’m pretty lukewarm about, and feeling completely unsure of what I’m doing at any given time. Ambivalence is the name of the game, and I can empathize with those experiencing similar difficulty with change. But I’m young, and I’m typically expected to chalk my struggle up to transition. And that’s fine with me. Any grander (or, more likely, more minuscule) problems can be taken up with my therapist the following Monday morning. But I think to re-enter such a phase of uncertainty in your life at 55, when you’ve had the same job for 18 years, and the same one at a different school for 7 years before that... It’s not the same as wondering if you, in your minimum wage glory, have the money to ball out at Starbucks today and get yourself a coffee AND a disgusting pre-packaged bacon/gouda/egg sandwich, “heated up, please” (as if that’s going to make a difference). I would imagine that it’s a little scarier than that.

After an eight minute video on my mom’s phone and a seven minute video on mine when her phone ran out of storage, my dad relinquished the microphone to DJ Crate Records. His assistant director presented him with some cards and gifts, the most exciting of which was an engraved bourbon decanter, featuring his name, the year, and some corny, unattributed quote about retirement. He welled up upon opening it.

I have never known my dad to do anything other than be a public school district transportation director. His career is older than I am. I know more school bus-related anecdotes than anyone else I’ve ever met. I have school bus keychains and stress balls and oversized t-shirts that he didn’t want, because he already had too many school bus keychains and stress balls and t-shirts. I can remember being young and thinking it very cool that my dad had a say in when his district got snow days. When I got older, I got a peripheral glimpse into the DEFCON-1-esque text messages that are exchanged among the region’s public school transportation directors at three in the morning when a snowstorm is imminent. And when inclement weather dictates that every district must forgo two-hour delays to close completely for the day, all of those transportation directors go out to breakfast. It may be too snowy to send buses of kids out on the roads, but it’s almost never too snowy to go get pancakes. Such an ingrained passion for school buses is not easily let go. He will likely drive one as his next job until he hits the illustrious year 30 of state employment — the point at which the State of New York decides that you’ve sold enough of your soul to public service, and compensates you accordingly in your retirement. He covets the day he reaches his thirtieth year, but is not averse to driving in the meantime. He likes kids. He has the appropriate licensing. It makes sense. Even if his paychecks will look a lot more like mine.

After the party we loaded the gifts, fifty pounds of leftover school bus-shaped cake, and seven thousand nine hundred fifty cookies into the car and drove home. My mom and brother went to bed soon after we arrived. My dad took some time to carefully wash the decanter and then settled in the living room with a Manhattan to watch yesterday’s DVR’d late night shows with me. After a few minutes, we heard a bang from the kitchen.

The decanter had slipped from where my dad had propped it up to dry, fallen into the sink, and broken. It wasn’t completely shattered — it was mostly intact, just with one corner broken off — but it was now unusable. He cursed. “That’s not a good omen,” he said. He commented on his own stupidity, having stood it up to lean rather precariously on the windowsill. He halfheartedly pretended to laugh it off, commenting again and again, too many times, on how he should have known that it would fall like that, of course it would. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. The tension in the kitchen hung heavy as I watched him pick up the largest piece out of the sink and rinse the smaller ones down the drain. He stared at the now useless decanter — a personalized memento to commemorate the time spent in his career, essentially ruined by his own hand. A seemingly bad omen indeed. My mom came down to see what had happened, having heard the initial noise and subsequent ruckus from upstairs. My dad looked like he may cry. I wanted to, too.

The mistake reminded me of being a fourth grader. My dad surprised my mom with a trip to Rome for her fortieth birthday. When they came back, they brought me a beautiful glass box, among other, less fragile Roman relics. Being in fourth grade, I had to bring my Italian treasures with me to school to show [off to] my classmates. The box made it to school safely, but on the bus ride home it suffered fatal injuries — it was dust by the time my mom found it in my backpack. I was devastated. This special thing that my parents brought back from Rome for me was reduced to sand in a Hannaford grocery bag, and it was totally my fault. Fourth graders are not notoriously gifted in the handling of delicate items, and, despite my moderately advanced reading level and consequent pompous air, I was no exception to that rule. Frankly I’m still not, and glass things don’t tend to survive particularly long in my hands. This is, clearly, an inherited gift.

I removed myself from the situation amid the Code Red Decanter Break. My mom made my dad relax a bit. She suggested we get another one with the same engravings on it. I, from the adjoining dining room, thought that was a stupid idea. They did the same thing with the Roman glass box. A week or so after it had disintegrated, my brother (because fairness) and I were gifted with new, beautiful, glass items from Rome. And I did not give a shit. This thing had been shipped to the US and it was therefore not special. The original box had been chosen for me by my parents when they were actually in Italy themselves. It wasn’t about having any Roman glass thing. It was about having the specific Roman glass thing that had been picked out, brought home, and given to me. And while in my adulthood I do appreciate the pretty glass perfume bottle my parents gave me as a replacement, I observe that retirement is already kind of a sad, lonely transition in one’s life. Doubling down on that by also purchasing your own retirement gifts strikes me as borderline masochistic. But who am I to pass judgment? I’m glad I have my little keepsake — that replacement perfume bottle still lives on my shelf, because I never subjected it to the treachery of my backpack.

After everyone left the kitchen I went to throw something away and saw the remains of the decanter in the garbage. Then I really did cry. I wished that I had broken it, so its demise could have been chalked up to my lack of grace, rather than any sign from God or shortcomings on my dad’s part. Things like that just happen. But when you’re amid a difficult or uncertain time in your life, I can understand that it’s harder to frame it that way: what should be “oh well” moments can so easily slip into “oh no” moments. Even in this case, where the thing that broke had a random WikiQuote about retirement on it.

As she drove me back to the bus station the morning after the party, my mom told me that my dad had made the choice to retire rather quickly. His job is very stressful. As good as he is at it, he also has to fire people and field loud complaints from parents all the time. It’s taxing, and it’s justified that he’s over it. But she said it felt like it came out of nowhere. It reminded me of me, telling everyone I knew that I was going to move to LA the last time I got dumped, despite having just renewed the lease on my apartment. My mom had told me then not to make any rash decisions, even though all I wanted to do was make rash decisions. I saw myself.

I think there are times in our lives when we’re made to reckon with the idea that our parents are people. We only ever really know our parents to be our parents. I’m speaking from a fortunate place: my parents are still married and I have good relationships with each of them, but I also think that if I met them outside of the context of them being my parents, I would still like them and want to know them. Even so, it’s surprisingly difficult to separate your parents from their roles as such. It’s interesting, jarring even, to notice yourself in the position of having known and loved someone for twenty-three years and then suddenly realize you’ve never really known them. When someone, particularly an adult rather than a peer, has been in your life for literally all of it, it’s difficult to view them as anything but that: an offshoot of your own life. Even the way you address your parents is determined exclusively by your relationship to them - not by their names, but by their titles as related to you. My dad’s being a parent doesn’t negate his autonomy, or his consciousness, or his life, or his story, or whatever, it just minimizes my own perspective of it. I see that that guy is my dad — full stop — until I’m made to see beyond that. I was so fascinated by his going around to all of his coworkers and making everyone laugh. I was so interested as he floundered a bit when speaking, trying to reflect and look toward a rather uncertain future, ultimately revealing that there was more to be seen beyond his confident facade. I was so struck by the breaking of the decanter and the near-spiraling that ensued afterwards. I felt like I knew just what was happening in my dad’s head because it so viscerally reminded me of what happens in mine. I think that the perspective needed to “get” your parents on a more human level creeps in as you get older. So maybe I know him better than I think I do.

I know that my father is funny and nice. I know that he loves Monty Python and the Beatles. I know that a fart joke will never be lost on him. I know that he drinks Maker’s Mark from the second iteration of a personalized, retirement-commemorative decanter, which he purchased for himself. I know that he’s pretty good at being a dad, all things considered. I know that he really wants me to be okay. I really want the same for him. And these moments where I am given the opportunity to understand him as a more fully realized individual make me appreciate that he is my dad. I’m only just starting to know who he is, but the more I get to know him, the more I see that we are the same. And if I’m going to be like anybody, I’m very lucky to be like him.