"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do,
but how we behave when we don't know what to do."
-John Holt
Today's date is Dad's birthday . I called him up to wish him a Happy Birthday and we talked for a bit. My sister fell on the ice and broke her leg, Lute Olsen's wife died, and he's had a particulary abundant crop of bok choy in his garden this year. So much so he's been cooking and taking it over to Nellie a widowed neighbor he's decided to look after...that is so much like him, he's a good man and a fantastic father. I couldn't have asked for a better one. Even now he spends time doing things with me. He was born in 1929 the youngest of nine children and the second son, raised and spoiled rotten by seven sisters. His childhood was spent during the depression at a time when peppermint sticks and a dime were a delight to find under the tree on Christmas morning. In a place called Lometa, Texas where the only family in town who had a car would leave the keys in the ignition for neighbors to borrow to carry groceries home from the store.
...and you know I never see his humor coming...He said
I'm trying a new plant in the garden and I want to see how it grows.....it's called up dock he says...
What's up dock? I asked.
ooooooooh hahaha Dad a good one!!! I'd taken the bait.
Where did you hear that one?
and then he told me about a pilot who was a POW at the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War who was being interrogated and asked where he was from....
Nebraska he replied.
What do you do in Nebraska? the interrogater wanted to know.
We raise corn, wheat, and up-dock. he replied.Of course the interrogator went onto concentrate his his efforts on the other prisoners by inquiring to one and all....
What's up doc???
Kind of dark humor huh Dad...? I remarked
Yea... he agreed, they had to be that way or they wouldn't have survived. They depended on humor and tapping out the stories of their lives and any news they'd heard in Morse Code on the walls, the isolation was their biggest enemy....and of course he won't tell me WHO told him that story. The best definition of a hero I've ever come up with is a man or woman who does what they can.
Happy Birthday Dad!
A Father's Arms
You saw how the LORD your God carried you, just as one carries a child, all the way that you traveled until you reached this place.
- Deuteronomy 1:31 (NRSV)
Devotion