Hold My Hand

If you were to ask any of my children what colloquial truisms they recall their father uttering as they passed from toddler to young adult, they may each provide a different oft-repeated phrase. Differences caused by the forming of memories over a lengthy passage of time, 32 years to be exact, living in three different states—Texas, Alaska, Georgia and back to Texas—and the wordiness of their patriarchal leader; me.

As I sit at my desk calling up 32 years of fatherhood...

32 years...it started in 1986 with Jennifer and Elizabeth, the following year James came on board. For eight years it was just the three, then in 1995 Sara Rose came into my life. God wasn’t quite finished yet, five more years and with the turn of the century Joseph Tyler was born in 2000, eighteen years ago. Added all up, that is 32 years of playing the role of Dad.

Now back to the truisms, the one I recall having said more times that I could ever count... “Hold my hand.”

Hold my hand as you learn to walk. Hold my hand as we cross the street. Hold my hand as walk through the doors on the way to your first day of school. Hold my hand as we carefully walk onto to the frozen surface of Arc lake or climb the snowy hills of Kenai. Hold my hand as navigate through the crowds at the county fair or in the busy shopping mall decorated with holiday cheers. Hold my hand.

The last three decades have been like a mighty roller coaster. We have trudged slowly upward, climbing ever so higher not being able to see where the journey may take us. Upon reaching the top we held hands and our collective breath and looking out we were finally able to see where the journey would go. At breakneck speeds we traveled together over the hills and through the loops of life sometimes laughing, sometimes screaming, sometimes crying, sometimes closing our eyes and hoping.

Always holding hands.

An hour ago, my 32-year journey came to the end of the ride. My youngest, my last, Joseph Tyler, entered the halls of higher education at Texas State University. His new journey begins as my old one ends. For the first time in a very long time I am alone. My house is quiet.

Someone asked me yesterday what I would do now. I have spent the better part of my life, more than half, being the dad, the gatekeeper, the provider. The hand holder. I didn’t have an answer to their question. If I could do it all again, if I could get off the roller coaster and run back into the line waiting anxiously for the climbing and falling, for the crawling and the speeding, for the crying and the laughing...

I’m too old for that...but if I could, knowing it would be with my children I would do all it all again.

Today as I drove away from the campus of Texas State without my last born I realized for the first time in my life that you, my children were not holding my hand, I was holding yours. You were leading me on an incredible journey, one I shall never forget.

Hold my hand.

Love, Dad

It was never about getting high, if that’s what you are thinking. Better ways to get high are on every street corner in the good old U.S. of A. It was about getting lost. About forgetting. It was about going numb. Going numb to the whole friggin world. Opiates will do that...make you numb. They take you away and you don’t even know your gone. It’s not about getting high. It’s about dying. Beautiful dying.

It has been a busy year! My pitiful efforts to write in this blog with regularity was hampered by life and time spent on the back porch letting the imagination soar.

A new book is scheduled for August 31, "Whosoever Believes". I enjoyed writing it and have included an excerpt below. But I began this post with an excerpt from what has become my favorite book, "Beautiful Dying." I spent the weekend updating the book that was originally released last year. There were, of course, the typographical errors I overlooked on the first go around. They were easier to correct than to notice. As I read Beautiful for the first time in some while it dawned on me that this is a love story. I don't think when I first penned this short I had intended it to fall into a genre I have never written in. Crafting a love story requires emotions I long ago buried. But somehow in Beautiful Dying a love story was born. Jacko, the main character meets an unnamed woman in a pub one Saturday night. The meeting takes place on the eve of his planned suicide day.

Originally I intended the story to be about addictions and the struggles, including suicide, the addict will face if they choose to stay high. I see that now as a subplot. The breath of Beautiful Dying is about love. I hope you will consider getting your copy this month.

Now, from my newest novel, "Whosoever Believes"

If a poet were to scribble a sonnet to this Saturday night in Patriot, Texas, he or she would likely chronicle the midnight skies littered with millions of stars, spewing poetic words of twinkling diamonds juxtaposed with the lonesome melancholy of the deserted streets. An artist, witnessing the same scene would crosshatch the background with water colors of dark blues and blacks swirled together adding an endless depth to the speckling of the bright white stars. Keen on detail, the talented artisan would depict the late-night desolation of Patriot township by adding to the landscape a solitary pickup truck parked aside the curb a hundred yards southeast of Patriot Baptist Church.
A writer would caution you that inside the lonely pickup truck sits a young man named Frank Lynn Dawson, nineteen years old and confused. The radio-CD player delivers the sounds of Rascal Flats singing What Hurts the Most, while the truck’s heater delivers only chilly air. Our lone occupant had meant to fix the heater before winter came but had never gotten around to it. It didn’t matter, he wouldn’t need it after tomorrow. The late-night loner knows no matter how things turn out tomorrow he would be someplace warmer.

Whosoever Believes