hey dad!
thought i`d stop by to say hi on this my 44th b-day. feel like a newby trying to type on tims kindle, so brief it may have to be!
we are making excellent gains on our backyard again. wish you could see it all unfold, or even better yet, join in the fray. i never saw you working all the projects on the georgia property, but i know your sons come by the passion honestly. your love of wood, and all the possible accomplishments that can be birthed from the wielding of it. the courage and optimism you demonsrtrated when you took on cabinetmaking was...well i guess i would have to think on the proper adjective to describe it. at the time i was shaken by your choice to leave behind life as a professor, the work i knew you`d longed to do since i was a teenager interrogating you about what work you would do upon retirement...you always had such confidence as you described your desire to build engineering skills into the lives of Christian youth. by the time you moved to cabinet making i was disillusioned, compelled to distance myself from you and from the confusion i felt, the shifting of what i was so sure was right, your right. but even admist all of that smoldering loss, i still i felt these tinges of...okay i have it now...ADMIRATION. admiration for the way that you released the one good thing and embraced a new good thing. you created another vision for your life. just like that. no ego, no angst. just the warm solid actionable embrace of a new venture that was tangible. karen, there's a pleasure that comes from creating something with your hands, something that endures, a finished product....these were your words when as a young woman i re engaged long enough to question you. you took the time without judgement to explain how as much as you loved your military career, it never afforded you that type of job peace and release, and then I'm sure you added for emphasis the factoid you'd gathered somewhere about how truck drivers have some of the highest reported job satisfaction, because when they drop off a load, they experience completion. which so many jobs don't give you but that making furniture will....
well here i am, the same age you were when you left the military to forge a new life, stumbling through the confusion of a business that doesn't need me in ways that are comfortable or familiar, discovering the visceral pleasure of working with my hands finishing the massive construction projects your engineering sons created with that irresistable designer husband of mine.
ironic, huh!?
you then, me now.
four fours make 44, twice.
ate carrot cake in the dark tonight, twinkling yellow candles, one in each corner, both pups beside me, tim sleeping behind me, windows open in the night breeze, tree branches in my forward vision, uplit by a low slung string of lights, nothing but open possibilities between me and them.
44 is going to be the best year I've had in an age. i feel it in my bones.
sleep well, my dear dad!
hugs,
k.
