Happy Father’s Day! I hope all you dads had a great day.
My family and I spent the first part of our day at church, where our pastor of 40 years preached his final sermon. It was a bittersweet day for thousands of people. Yes, I said thousands. The sanctuary seats 2,500 people, and during the first service, people stood along the walls and filled the overflow chapel.
After church, we came home and had lunch together. I was able to celebrate Father’s Day with all of my children, and I couldn’t have been a happier dad.
After lunch, we loaded up and drove to my parents’ house to celebrate with my dad. Today was not only Father’s Day, but also his birthday. He is now 87 years old and is the last surviving member of his family of four siblings.
For his age, Dad is in remarkably good health. He still gets outside and works in his yard and tinkers with his farming equipment, even though he doesn’t do much farming these days.
We nearly lost both of my parents in 2014 when a woman who wasn’t paying attention crossed the center line on a dangerous curve and hit them head-on. Both of my parents spent several weeks in the ICU. After they were released from the hospital, they stayed with my brother and his wife for several months while continuing their recovery and medical treatments.
Mom never fully recovered from the accident. She still struggles with significant back problems, and Dad has balance issues caused by damage to his inner ear.
They both suffered serious injuries from the seat belts and airbags. While those safety features undoubtedly saved their lives, they can also cause severe injuries during a major collision.
I consider myself incredibly fortunate to still have both of my parents with us. At their age, I know every visit, every conversation, and every holiday together is a gift. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have them around, but I intend to treasure every day that I do.
Days like today are a reminder that family is one of God’s greatest blessings, and I’m thankful for every moment we get to spend together.
I’m fortunate that I don’t have any doctor’s appointments this week. That doesn’t mean I’m completely free from medical matters, though. I still need to drive across town to one of my labs to pick up a copy of the results from my latest MRI, so I can take them to an orthopedic doctor next week and have him take a look at my back.
Earlier this afternoon, I received a text inviting me to go fishing tomorrow. Under normal circumstances, I probably would have jumped at the opportunity, but I had already made plans to pick up my medical records. I politely declined and told him I’d try to make it another time.
The good news is that I had already told my wife I wanted to go fishing at least a couple of times this week. I mentioned that to my daughter today, and while she has commitments every morning, she does have one afternoon available. The plan now is to spend an afternoon fishing with her and then head back out the next morning on my own. One advantage is that I’ll be able to leave all my fishing gear in the truck overnight and won’t have to unload everything until the following day.
Saturday will be spent giving my truck a thorough cleaning. I don’t want my parents riding across town in a dirty truck when we take them out to dinner that evening.
As of right now, my parents have no idea why they’ve been invited to a nice Italian restaurant. To the best of my knowledge, the daughter who’s getting engaged is still somewhat in the dark as well. She believes it’s all going to happen on the 13th. The ring won’t be a surprise—they picked that out together—but walking into a restaurant filled with family and friends who have gathered to celebrate with her afterward certainly will be.
I’m very happy for my daughter, but if I’m being honest, I’m a little scared for her too. Marriage is a life-changing step, and like every parent, I wonder if she’s ready.
She left the nest several years ago when she and her sister moved into an apartment together. At the time, it felt like a major milestone. This feels different. More permanent. More final.
I’m having a hard time putting my feelings into words. There’s joy because I’m proud of the woman she has become. There’s excitement because a new chapter of her life is about to begin. But there’s also a touch of sadness because another chapter is closing.
Maybe that’s just part of being a parent. We spend years teaching our children to become independent adults, and then one day they do exactly that. We celebrate their success while quietly realizing that they no longer need us in quite the same way they once did.
I suppose that’s what I’m feeling tonight—a mixture of happiness, pride, excitement, and just a little bit of melancholy. It’s not a bad feeling. It’s simply the realization that life keeps moving forward, whether we’re ready for it or not.
The older my dad gets, the more stories seem to come out. It’s like he’s been carrying around a lifetime of memories, and every now and then he decides it’s time to unload another box. My visit this past Thursday was one of those visits where he started talking, and I realized I was hearing things I had never heard before.
Dad and his brothers and sisters grew up in a house my granddad built himself in the late 1800s. He cut the trees, milled the lumber, and built the place with his own hands. From what I remember, it had a long front porch, a kitchen with a wood stove, a den with a fireplace, and a couple of bedrooms. The outhouse sat about a hundred yards away, and the only water came from a hand pump mounted on the kitchen sink.
The house sat on top of a mountain — not exactly Everest, but high enough that you could look down over the little town below. My grandfather spent years clearing land out of the woods to make a small farm with chickens, pigs, and a few cows. Most of what they ate came from the garden or from the animals they raised. It was a hard life by today’s standards, but they made it work.
Electricity didn’t arrive until World War II, and even then, it came for an unusual reason. The government wanted to build a signal tower to help guide airplanes toward the Gulf. Dad said he used to lie awake at night listening to the aircraft passing overhead. Every time I visited the old homeplace growing up, I thought that tower was a fire tower. Turns out it had a much different purpose.
My grandparents were the only people for miles who had electricity, and even then, it was mostly used for lights. Fancy appliances were out of reach, so the wood stove and fireplace still did most of the work.
An example of what my dad’s house looked like. Sadly, there were no pictures of the original homeplace taken before a coal company came in and stripped the land for coal.
Winter was especially tough. With no insulation and only the stove and fireplace for heat, the bedrooms stayed bitterly cold. At night, the family would gather in the kitchen or den and sleep close to the warmth. It wasn’t a matter of comfort — it was a matter of getting through the night.
Dad and his siblings all attended a small schoolhouse that taught every grade. The school was a couple of miles away, and they walked there every day in all kinds of weather. Chores had to be finished before school, breakfast eaten, and everyone out the door on time — knowing there would be more chores waiting when they got home.
Dad’s Old School House after it was renovated and moved to Tannehill Historical State Park. Cane CreekSchool
The school building has since been moved to a state park. I remember seeing it years ago, sitting empty and slowly falling apart before someone finally decided it was worth saving as a piece of history.
My grandfather owned more than a hundred acres of land. Some of it was cleared for farming, but plenty remained woods for hunting and fishing. He even built a small pond where he raised catfish, bream, and a few bass. I can still remember being taken there as a kid to catch catfish.
There were always plenty of deer around, and Dad and his cousins would hunt whenever they could. Meat wasn’t something you saw every day on the dinner table, so venison was considered a special occasion.
Years later, the government came in and took over much of the property and stripped the land for coal. The mountain that my grandfather spent years clearing and farming was changed forever. The old homeplace doesn’t look anything like it once did. What was once woods, fields, and family history now bears the marks of heavy equipment and mining. It’s hard to imagine that the quiet little farm Dad grew up on once stood there.
Before he was drafted into the Army, Dad joined the Navy and served aboard an aircraft carrier. He spent most of his time between the Sea of Japan and San Diego. He doesn’t talk much about those years, but he learned electronics while serving and often worked on jet aircraft that needed repair or servicing.
The one Navy story he never gets tired of telling is how he hitchhiked all the way from San Diego to Birmingham just to see my mom before they were married. That’s a long trip even today — and I doubt many parents would approve of their daughter dating a man willing to cross the country with his thumb out.
My grandmother died when I was only four years old. Back then, they didn’t understand diabetes the way they do now. A foot injury led to an amputation, then another surgery when infection set in, and eventually, they couldn’t stop what they called “the poison” from spreading. I only have faint memories of her.
My grandfather lived into the late 1980s and died at the age of 82. Dad is now 86 and the last of his family still living — the baby of three sisters and two brothers.
Dad’s health is still fairly good. Mom lives with constant arthritis pain and severe scoliosis. She used to be nearly six feet tall; now she’s lucky to reach five feet. Time has a way of changing all of us, whether we want it to or not.
Dad has diabetes, like most of his brothers and sisters. That’s where I likely got it from, and it makes me worry a little about my kids. Some things travel through families whether we want them to or not.
I consider myself fortunate to still have both of my parents. At 62, many of the people I went to school with have already lost theirs. I’m one of the few who can still go sit in the living room and listen to stories from a man who grew up in a world that hardly exists anymore.
And the older he gets, the more those stories seem to matter.
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