Monday, June 17, 2013

David Thompson

No, not the basketball playing David Thompson.  My guy is a tic under 5'10".  Although very athletic as a young man, the sight he lost in his left eye at age twelve caused educators to worry that he might lose sight in the other eye if he played sports.  No, this David Thompson is my dad.  He is a gifted father, who I will never come close to emulating as a dad.  It is a rare gift for a man to pour himself out for others, but that is what he has done.  He loves children, so often my dad would be a kind of neighborhood dad for friends.  More important to my later life, he opened our house, along with my mother, to two nephews and raised them as if they were his own.  Though I know now that my mother was the glue that held our family, both nuclear and extended, together, my father provided the structure for the glue to hold.

My sense of being a father comes from his presence to us every day.  I have often shared with others that my dad hated his job.  Given that most of my adult life has involved reflecting on the idea of calling or vocation, I am aware of the shadow of my dad's presence at our dinner table and his disgust with a job that was meaningful to him at at twenty but had become obsolete by age forty due to computer technology.  My dad's love of drafting was outsourced to the power of algorithms in computer-aided design not a foreign country.  My dad, however, had a calling, and it was two-fold.  He loved his family and he did his job for more than twenty years to take care of them.  And he was a builder.  He built my mother's home, every piece with his own two hands off the plans he drafted.  And he built us into a family.  My dad's love drove him to think and to act for others.  Since I have children of my own, I understand what he gave up of his own interests and dreams to help us pursue ours.  His grace in just showing up far exceeds anything I am capable of at this point in my life.  I am trying.

He is not perfect, and the loss of his eye-sight in his right eye eight years ago and the loss of my mother seven years ago has put a strain on him.  As in all families, that strain on him has radiated out to all of us.  He is stubborn to a fault, like his mother before him.  I wish his grandchildren could know the independent, creative man I grew up with who built houses out of thin air.  What they do know is the man who loves them unconditionally and shares in their successes and grieves in their hurts.  For that, I am grateful that they know him in the most powerful calling of his life: love of family.

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