At Twenty Years Past

I stop at the corner store for an anything-but-real-food treat. A honeybun and a North Carolina born soda the color of the Sun. I'm nearly thirty and my tastebuds have matured drastically from the seven year old girl who would sidle up next to her daddy in his S-10 pickup on a Saturday morning to cart the bags of garbage to the trash dump. Carolina humidity and summer heat are the recipe for minor burn at the hands of vinyl seats and my cotton shorts provided little protection from the blisters, but I didn't care. Those mornings always came with the promise of a stop at our corner store, Bob's, for a honeybun and a can of the sugary elixir that would leave me bug-eyed and bouncing off of the wall. I never went along for the treat. It was always about the man driving the truck.

Once a year I would dig the prettiest dress out of my closet. The green velvet with the lace collar and pink sash always stick to my memory. He would tie his tie and put on his finest suit. He would shave clean and I would lean hard on the wooden door frame to watch him and breathe in the aftershave smell. He always let me rub my cheek against his to test how well he had done. Funny how smells can live in our memories as vivid as words and pictures. All this dressing up would culminate in one glorious night at the circus. While the rest of the crowd wore t-shirts and jeans we sat hip to hip in our finest. To this day I think of the circus as a fancy affair. Elephants, acrobats, sno-cones and clowns, but the spectacle I loved best was the eye's of my daddy that danced and lit up just for me.

I crossed a threshold yesterday. It has been twenty years since his heart gave out. Twenty years since I last saw his face. It was my first experience with death. It was the day I started to hate carnations. The way they smell and look and what they came to symbolize in my life. This twenty years past and I sit on this side of time and I don't really know how to feel. I will always carry sadness around with me. You can't lose someone you love and not have a piece of you go with them. It is the brokenness of this world that breaks bits and pieces of us over time. But there is a greater part of me that is just me. The me that went on after he died and has become a young woman, wife, mother, writer, Christ-follower. The little girl that was so often defined by the loss of her parents has become a grown woman who is herself whole apart from tragedy. A woman who is her own self and more and more herself in Christ who puts us back together right well.

There are the memories that are fading as I age. The scruff of his cheap sport coat as I took a nap on his shoulder during a too long church service. The row of blue work shirts ready for another week in grease up to his elbows. A ride around the yard on the ancient Snapper lawn mower. The year we gave him a giant Craftsman toolbox for Christmas and the shed he built the following year to protect his precious toolbox. The way he'd kiss my mama as I danced on their toes in between.

He was a blue collar fella who didn't shy away from gawking eyes to dress his best and take his daughter to the circus. His physical heart was weak from birth, but his heart of hearts beat strong for those he loved till his death. I was blessed to be loved by such a man. Blessed to learn love from such a man. Blessed to bare the scars of loss for being loved by a daddy so dear. The passing of time aches. The wounds of loss are long healed, but just like arthritic bones there are days in the bleak midwinter that the joints wear thin and the hurt feels fresh. Twenty years later the ache remains, but the joy of having been loved well grows bigger and deeper. My daddy invested his love in a sure thing and it has paid dividends in my life.