What My Father Taught Me

Image by Ange Soleil ( a.k.a Tweng ) via Flickr

Three days from now, writers everywhere will tell you all the things they wished their fathers had taught them. I think I'll save that for later and instead, tell you about some of the things my father did teach me. But first a word to my father: Dad, you were right, you really did get a whole lot smarter when I turned 21.

A couple of days ago I mentioned an aging black Shetland pony I had as a small child. Well, he died when I was in fourth grade and I was bereft. He'd been my companion at a time when, living in the country, I had few others. Despite my desire for "another black pony," my father sensed my real need was for a horse I could bond with. We'd planned and saved for a family vacation -- the first dad would have taken in years -- when one Sunday afternoon my father and I came upon a sorrel gelding for sale. When I'm asked if I believe in love at first sight, I remember him, and say yes. Our vacation paid the bill and I rode him home. Fathers make sacrifices for their children.

The camera advances twenty years or so and I'm in the kind of marriage you rarely hear about, where the wife is abusive and the husband barely gets out alive. Although it would eventually (and thankfully) be annulled, there had to be the obligatory divorce and mine took place out of state. My father insisted on making the trip with me, having told my mother, "My son's been through enough hell all alone, this time I'm going there with him." Fathers stand by their children.
 
Another thirty years and now, my father has leukemia, no doubt the result of chronic exposure to carcinogenic chemicals in the leather industry, but back then, who knew? Nevertheless, given six months at the very most, my father looked his disease and his doctor in the face and said, "We'll see about that." He would not live to see me enter medical school. But just before his death, two and a half years later, he said, "I can tell you were meant to be a doctor." Fathers never give up on their children.

St. Paul writes, "Now abide faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love." I didn't realize it until just now, but these are the lessons my father taught me. Love simply and freely loves, faith walks us through the deepest darkness, and hope takes hold of a blade of grass and turns it into a lifeline.