 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 20, 2003 Volume V Number 3 |
FOCUS - The Bugler
This is a week of milestones for me. They are all bunched up on the calendar. It’s the first month of the year, and like many, we are hoping and praying that 2003 turns up better than 2002.
Last year was a character building year, I suppose. Some of the lessons were hard. It was a reality check year. A rebuilding year. A year to reconsider one’s purpose. To sort through the commitments, eliminate some of the clutter; prioritize. And now, in 2003, it’s time to produce, and live out those new definitions.
This week, the calendar marks several life-defining milestones that all add up to a turning point. Six years ago this week, we said good-bye to my dad. He’s gone now, but his presence is never really far away. Our kids are at that stage where they love to reminisce and recount old stories, many of them now improved in the telling and retelling, and Grandpa is often a player, a character in those stories, evoking laughter and longing, wishing he were here to see what’s happened since he left, knowing how much joy it would give him. And maybe that’s why it’s OK that as I age his image is reflected now in mine when I check myself out in the big bathroom mirror because he taught me something of the value of what I see in these rascals growing up, falling in love, making babies and creating homes of their own. The response that would be his if he were here, has become mine.
Like the familiar story of the Lion King, when young Simba, at the crossroads of his life (would he take on the mantle of his calling, or spend the rest of his life running from it?) on a starry night found the strength he needed in the memory of his father, and the lessons he taught, and his strong voice echoing in the night, words forever written on the young lion’s heart.
Last night, we remembered some of the last things my dad said to us as his life wound down, knowing it was the end, and yet, aware that he left a legacy for seven children, a legacy that filled him with pride, a good kind of pride, and gratitude to the God he long ago asked to bless his children, we remembered some of his words that still live in us. Those words may as well have been cast in stone. They will not be forgotten.
A few days before my father’s memorial service, our firstborn and I celebrated our birthdays. She was born the day after mine (Carolyn still hasn’t forgiven me for all the dumb things I did trying to pressure her into delivering her first child a day sooner.) Kris, this week, will celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday the day after I turn fifty-five. There, I told you. Fifty-five. Sheesh.
I’ve been repressing the thought until now. It’s a milestone of sorts. Celebrated on the window of the movie theater as a right of passage. SENIOR DISCOUNT – 55 and over. At the Sizzler, too. And when we sat down for breakfast at Denny’s (they’ve upgraded the place since last I visited one) there was a whole section on the menu for Seniors who are eligible for both the discount and the carefully prepared nutrition conscious entrées at age fifty-five. If you bring it up at the window or as you order they trim a couple of bucks off the tab with a smile, because, I suppose, you’ve attained a kind of ripeness worthy of admiration and special consideration. I always feared that such consideration would trigger a dark sort of depression, brooding over opportunities lost and the cumulative effect of decades of shortcomings and errors in judgment and unfulfilled hopes and dreams, but au contraire, it turns out to be kind of fun.
* * * * * * * *
This past week, Friday, was Isaac’s first birthday. It’s a birthday you don’t really celebrate; it’s also the first anniversary of our grandson’s passing. It’s a memory still fresh and deep and the wound seems to be healing some, but I understand a little better now when people say that the hurt and the emptiness never really go away. We remember. We embrace the memory. We cherish the gifts he gave us.
We hold on to each other.
* * * * * * * *
Our middle daughter and her husband decided
to plant themselves about thirty miles from our house. Up until now, it’s been
two-thousand and thirty miles. We like the idea. We’ve whole-heartedly
endorsed the plan. As I write, a beefy twenty-four foot RYDER ONE WAY truck
sits beside the house. The two of them, in their second year of marriage, have
secured a little beach bungalow, two blocks from the waterfront and a quaint
little coastal village where on weekends people wander in and out of antique
shops and out-door cafes and bookstores and florists and a Danish bakery that
competes with the French pastries across the street. There’s a bike-trail
along the sand and a pier a few blocks down and a bluff that turns a kind of
burnt orange in the sunset. And every night, a young guy, their new neighbor,
living on the third floor of a breach-front condominium, pulls his shiny brass
bugle out of its case, stands at the rail of his deck just outside a sliding
glass door, faces the breeze coming off the water, and for all those who gather
there on the bluff, stopping for just a moment, hold their dogs on their
leashes, and those standing in the ankle deep water where the waves lap up to
the shoreline, and people who stop along the bike trail straddling their
bicycles, all of them face West as the sun, an enlarged orange ball, sinks inch
by inch into the Pacific Ocean way out there on the horizon, disappearing
slowly in the distance – everyone frozen for a moment in time - the guy on the
deck with the bugle raises the horn to his lips, draws in a deep breath,
inhaling deeply and plays out a clear and flawless rendition of TAPS.
And when he’s done, he salutes the sun, now out of sight, gives a wave to the hundreds of people below along the beach and the sidewalks of Pacific Coast Highway, and gives them all a hint of a bow as some of them applaud in gratitude to the lone bugler and then he turns and disappears behind the sliding glass door, and the people proceed again toward wherever it was they were going.
But in truth, for most all of them, the celebration of the setting sun really was their destination.
* * * * * * *
It was the morning of Isaac’s birthday that Carolyn and I toured the new nursery. Kris (Isaac’s mom) will be delivering Isaac’s brother in the next week or two. She’s two week’s shy of her scheduled due date.
It’s hard to describe what it feels like to see your first-born becoming a parent. Ben and Kris are in a new home and in the decorating, the nursery has been labeled top priority. Ben has become a fine furniture maker, a craftsman in his own rite. He built Kris a solid oak rocking chair (with considerably more success than the Mel Gibson character in the opening scene of The Patriot) and a lovely hardwood cabinet with drawers and doors and a flat top just the right height to serve as a changing table. The crib is made, and little stuffed animals all sit in waiting around the perimeter of the mattress. Two framed photographs of Isaac’s Garden hang on the wall. On a bookshelf little nick-knacks will surround this little boy with smiles and warmth and messages of mother-love and father’s pride and a welcoming world in which one can grow and find happiness and laughter and affection and faith and hope and accomplish wonderful things.
It’s the way it should be.
Soon another milestone: we’ll hold a new little grandson in our arms.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
It’s good to count your blessings. They have the capacity to overshadow the other stuff in your life that brings you down, fills you with anxiety, throws you into retreat mode.
In fact, it’s impossible to live in your blessings and fear the future at the same time.
Stop long enough to take in the sunset. Linger over the scent of a newborn. Watch the love of two young people blossom into a home and a future. Help the kids find what they are looking for, and remind them that in spite of the odds, no matter what the barriers or the roadblocks - it can be done.
That’s why they give guys like me discounts.
We’ve still got important things to do.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
|
|