Dad's Moving

For the second time in nearly five years, my dad has moved to be closer to us.  I am grateful for my father's many gifts.   The most notable (and I am sorry to report that I do not have this talent) was his ability to see something and then recreate it without any plans.  His mechanical and design skills kept us in houses and cars without a lot of "expert" labor.  In this irony we call life, my dad's eyesight failed him six years ago last month.  He had lost vision in his left eye at age twelve, and though he lacked self-confidence, his accomplishments were impressive (he designed and built a house for my mother).  Almost to the day one year before my mother's death, my father woke up one morning to great pain in his right eye and little vision.  Numerous surgeries later, the sight in his right eye had failed.  The same virus that causes shingles attacked his optic nerve and then the retina.  This afternoon, as we settled him into his new quarters, my dad knelt on the floor and reconstructed his kitchen table with the "sight" of his hands.  I know that he stuggles to understand why he lost his sight, and I join him in that struggle when I think about what more my children could have learned from him.  But he is closer once again, and the children are older, so maybe this time we'll all learn to cope with dad's loss of sight, and learn from the many gifts he still has to teach us.