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Only I know how soft I used to be. There’s soft, as in tender, but I was less than that, I was weak. I got betrayed around the age of 30. It’s embarrassing to recall who I was then, and how poorly I handled that. Whatever you’re supposed to do, I did the opposite. I just sat there in the skillet sizzling with the pain.
My grandmother had died. I’d ended up with a little ficus bush as a memento. As I was unable to care for me, so I was unable to care for the ficus. It was down to one leaf…and there I sat on my couch, just lost, and there it fell, as I was watching, the last leaf.
That wasn’t the end of falling for me.
You have your story, I have mine. Some people are born in the right place, right time, never have to even jump a shallow puddle to get to where they need to get…but that ain’t me babe, that sure ain’t me.
I had to go away, even before I officially left. I had to test the instruction manual, had to test the map, had to assemble myself, screws missing and batteries not included…
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Take a left off 165, down a little country road, piney woods on both sides and then a clearing on the right, a little community of the dead where my VIP’s dwell.
As my father aged, and he felt less secure driving, so many times a year it was he and I taking the drive. We’d park in the same place, where you could see he and Mom’s headstones without getting out of the car.
Wasn’t that long ago that it was a joke between us, looking out and seeing his name next to Moms, a born date, a blank spot and then below, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”
Tender they were, those visits. He’d talk to Mom, always tell her to save his spot, say a few words to his brother, address his mother and father, and off we’d go to find his grandmother and others.
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It was last year, early, long before cancer ever came up, he and I on a pretty day, like today, and as we drove away from the cemetery he started singing Precious Memories and I joined in, and we got to the end of the first verse and one of us said, “Well, that’s all I know,” so we just repeated the first verse and kept humming for a few miles.
And now here I am.
I had a red handkerchief in my back pocket. I pulled up where we always parked and I could see that they’d already engraved the second date. I watered up, but did not cry.
I walked slow, I arrived.
I took it all in, and my mind said, “I guess this makes it official.”
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Yes, I am doing a measurement.
No matter where I was, the one constant, more real to me than God’s love, for the whole of my life, I knew my parents loved me. I could not make them un-love me. Then Mom died.
And there remained The Padre. Some years back, in a bad spot, I remember thinking, ‘when he dies I will be all alone.’
It has come to pass. But to my surprise, I don’t feel alone. It has nothing to do with relationships.
Not a day of my life have I not been prayed for, and God could naught but hear and answer. I have been steered to a life I didn’t know to ask for, to become a person I didn’t know was within me. Somehow I finally fit.
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I sat on the side of his grave and said Thanks. Thanks for leaving me full and not empty.
I feel foundationed. The preacher lived his faith but when I had to go do what I had to do, he had the faith to allow me to be faithless. Surely I scared him, but he was wise enough to never try to steer me.
I am where I am through freedom. A primary reason that I am the voice in my own ear is that my father spoke mostly with his doing and very little with his telling.
The me-who-used-to-be had to be…had to run his course, and the guy who watched the last ficus leaf fall is now part of the foundation of who I am now and who I will become.
A father down here, a Father up there, prayers going up, grace coming down, that’s what the gauges point to…
When I was a kid the grownups would preach about education, “something nobody can take from you…” Here I am, pushing sixty, and I sat on my father’s grave and felt peace. I had something higher than Harvard, the gift of foundation.
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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one.
Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories are posted three times a week on Eighty-one’s Facebook page, Sunday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, about pillow time. Uncle P can be reached at 81creativity@gmail.com.
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