A Gentle Giant

This is a photo we have hanging in our home.  It was taken around 1985 I guess.  I apologize in advance for the quality of the photo as it appears here, because I took a picture of the portrait with my cell phone and from quite up close.

I pass by this photo at least four times a day, as many as a dozen times a day some days.

This is my mom and dad.  The photo was taken after Dad's heart attack in 1984 but before his stroke in 1989. It was a wonderful time for him and me.  A rift that had been there since I was six years old was repaired and our relationship restored shortly after the heart attack.  

Dad almost never criticized me.  He believed in me.  He believed in almost everyone.  He wanted to help, to make someone's life easier. And he hated confrontation of any kind.  I believe it grieved him terribly that Mom chose to discipline (I use a euphemism here) as she did.  Especially me, being the only girl and him - well, he'd always been taught that you never hit a girl or make her cry. Ever.  Even if she's asking for it. He loved us - and he loved Mom.  Looking back I can understand he was just as afraid of her anger as we - well, as I was.  And he was so caught up in the cardinal rule of that generation: "What will the neighbors think?" I can see now that he felt trapped and not permitted to say anything to her.  All that is water under the bridge; I've forgiven him for not stepping in and stopping what he suspected was wrong but which the culture said was perfectly fine. 

His faith in me, his love for me, came through even after I got to be six years old and was "too big" to sit in his lap - my choice, not his.  I never fully appreciated his support or his caring at the time.  Like the day he took me fishing.  I was about 10.  We went to the lake and got in the boat, then he rowed it out to the reeds where the trout would be feeding.  We'd taken along some worms.  He baited my hook for me, taught me how to cast, how to know when a fish was nibbling versus biting, and how to set the hook in the fish's mouth so it couldn't escape.  He talked me through my first catch - a lovely, 16-inch-long lake trout, the largest one we caught that day.  When we got home, I held my fish up high and yelled to Mom, "Look Mom!  I caught the biggest fish!!"  He never said a word to correct me. What a guy.

When I was a teenager, he gave me space - which I mistook for aloofness, for a lack of caring. It wasn't.  He so longed for me to let him just hug me.  Once God showed me that after his heart attack, there was a miracle of restoration in our relationship and I was able to enjoy his company, especially in those years between 1984 and 1989.  At the time I knew it was a great gift from God, but until he had his stroke in '89 and eventually died of brain cancer in '93, I had no idea how much of a gift it really was.

I feel his presence when my husband asks me to thread a screw into its place because, as he puts it, "You can see with your fingers. I can't."  Thankfully, the children have both inherited that trait.  They never got to know him; my oldest was four when he died.

I hear him when I watch my youngest tap her foot in impatience when we are getting ready to go somewhere.  She blurts out, "So are you ready or what?" and I remember my father out in the car when I was growing up, tooting the horn every so often until we came out of the house to go to town.  It makes me grin.   

And I can still hear his deep bass voice, chuckling right along with me.