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We spent Saturday night with generous, lovely friends up on their windy ridge. Martin cooked Thai food and we ate chocolate and watched movies while the girls slept. And then the next morning we feasted on a huge platter of dove-colored pancakes and crispy bacon. We must let our friends congratulate Martin on his exceptional fatherhood more often. I'm not sure I would have managed much more than a bowl of Frosted Miniwheats. Tonight, though, sitting next to Martin (who was sweaty and flecked with grass bits from weedwhacking), I informed him that he could choose whatever he wanted for dinner and we would make it happen (I trusted that he would not actually want me to COOK)--so we drove down to the empty parking lot of the local Chinese diner and loaded up on saucy, fried, salty, delicious food, which we all ate in front of the TV. We split an exceptional beer.
In two days, Martin's father joins us for the Big Summer Project: this year, it's a fence across the front of our side garden with six foot pickets. This may sound like the awful privacy fence and it is for privacy, but there will be spaces in between the pickets to afford walkers-by a look into our garden but will give us a much-wanted barrier from the motor cars. How quaint! Motor cars! Try the loud, horrible vehicles that roar by with no muffler or the young guys who stop speeding just long enough to lay on their horns or yell that Martin is a hippie. These people I do not care to hear from.
Dad C., Chester, and little Elspeth, who looks as if she might be about to help herself to a mouthful of fur, in Texas among the spreading pecan trees
Martin's dad is just a wonderful father-in-law and I can hardly wait to see him. When I first knew Martin's family as a pending in-law, Dad C. said, "Hey, Kim, you're not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway." Well, I'm not originally part of the Cockroft crew but they wanted me anyway, and the pleasure, (going on twelve years now), is all mine.
Daddy, with baby Bea, in Seattle
Well, for my own father, I thought I'd cheat and cut a piece I wrote for a writing group--Daddy, I know you've already read it but it's still true months later.
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The gifts my father gave me are many-faceted but simple. As a doctor of public health he and my mother gave me the gift of a childhood overseas, in Bangladesh and then in Kenya. He gave me his damp and warm smell as he motored my sister and I over dusty roads that ended in the green swirls of rice paddies. He gave me the smell of the rain that rolled in a wall to wet our feet at our front doorstep. My father gave me the cacophony of crowded trains at midnight, the quiet of his voice, the gentleness of his hands. He gave me the faces of the poor, the hungry and downtrodden, and they are ever with me.
My father gave me the deep rivers of his voice as he wove adventures about we children and the Red-eyed Crocodile. He gifted me with the voices of Aslan the lion and Gollum and Piglet. He gave me a love for the trees that met over my head as we hiked. From him I learned a quiet determination to do right and be reconciled. From him I learned to be patient with answers that have no questions, to choose to risk love instead of choosing small certainties. When I turn my head to the words of Jesus, when I hear 'the least of these,' I imagine my father on his journeys far away from us, I see my father at our breakfast table, I feel him sitting next to my bed. These things and more my father gave to me.
