Wood Box Wisdom

I usually scan and post a scrap of Wood Box Wisdom and in days I know how I feel

about it and I go on to post some memory

of my father. Some inspiring, some not, sometimes funny and usually an exercise in remembering the father I was too young to remember.

Despise no man...or thing...I couldn't think of anyone or anything I despise.

I have thought about this long and hard and it just won’t leave me alone so I figure if I post about what’s been haunting me about this clipping it may go away. So after not being able to think of anyone or anything I despise I thought who or what my Dad did despise. This chain of thought has brought back some of the most painful memories of my life. The things that would be better off forgotten but never will. The day I first saw my Dad broken. Completely. I was nine, the same age as my eldest daughter. It was the day my sister died. She had battled leukemia since she was eight and died when she was sixteen. My Dad was out of town in NYC when she died. As my school bus drove by my house I saw the ambulance pulling out of our driveway with the lights flashing. It was a long walk down from the top of Masters Drive. Only nine but I knew my sister’s next trip to the hospital may be her last. I only remember bits and pieces of that day. My big brother was up in his fort in the woods in our back yard and him wanting to be left alone.  My aunt Linda was there and by the late afternoon my mom and us kids were all home together for the first time since Karen died. To me and for me as a nine year old, I felt a sense of relief that Karen wouldn’t be suffering so much anymore. There was this sense that everything was going to be ok. We were all so brave. Just after dark my Dad got home from New York. I remember him coming through the front door with marine face on and I remember thinking someone’s gonna get it. My mom went to hug him and he just broke. He fell apart. He wailed. He cried and he cried. We had been crying on and off all day. He must have kept it in all day. It was a display of grief so profound that I hope not to witness anything like it again. I learned that night that there is no amount of suffering that makes life not worth living.

It is moments like this that had kept me away from the wood box for six years. I knew some of it would hurt.

To answer the question, my dad despised no man, but he was really, really mad at God. I heard him say many times he wasn’t looking forward to meeting Jesus. He was going to have a word or two for him about how life had treated his daughter. God was going to hear about it and there can’t be a good enough reason for her to have gone through what she’d gone through.

He made sure I got baptized at the Chevy Chase Baptist Church and he always believed in Jesus Christ as his savior, but he didn’t seem to happy about it.

When he died I couldn’t help but picture him getting all up in Jesus’ face.

On my last visit with him he told me he was ready for the Good Lord to take him home and it wasn’t the dementia talking so I told him when he gets here be nice.