Christof's envelope

FATHERS

by Kay Etheredge

June is the month set aside to honor Dads. 

My own Dad was a welder.  He was not a Christian until close to the end of his life which was the same year I got married and moved to Kansas.  He was about as far from perfect as most of us are, and even though he was a tough character he had a tender and very kind heart.  He was always one that stood up for the underdog and taught us to do the same.  I like to believe that our son Grant got his own tender heart from my Dad, even though my Dad died years before Grant was born.  He had a great love for animals which he passed on to me.  When I found my pet cat dead in our front yard as a child, sobbing, I called my Dad at work.  That same day he came home from work with a steel grave marker he had made  in the steel shop, and had engraved the date and my cat’s name, “Tinkerbell,” on the front.  We had a funeral, laying Tinkerbell to rest near the woods behind our house.  It meant so much to me to know that my Dad felt and understood my pain.

One day at BBM there was a piece of returned mail.  One of the men had written a letter to his son and it was sent back because of an insufficient address.  As I processed that days’ mail, I delighted in the fact that this man had put funny and endearing drawings on the back of the envelope sent to his son.  They made me laugh and I could imagine the joy they brought to his son.  One was a cartoon of the son’s dog, and another depicted an imaginary game of soccer where the scoreboard showed the son beating his Dad 102-6. 

The drawings reminded me of a book by J.R.R. Tolkien called “Letters from Father Christmas” that he wrote for his children and illustrated with his own doodling. In the book he details life at the North Pole and tells about an accident prone polar bear called PB for short, who does silly things like releasing the Northern Lights, with awful consequences.  Each year Tolkien mailed the letters to his children, making them believe they were actually written by Father Christmas.  I laughed so much at his imaginative stories, but the book was unexpectedly poignant as well.  The last letter was written in 1943, and Tolkien alludes to “the horrible war” that is making rations tight even at the North Pole.  In this last letter he tells Priscilla not to worry, and that even though she will soon be too old to hang her stocking, he will continue to serve other children, and he’ll be happy to write again once she has children of her own.  I read the book as Christmas neared and I wept as I realized that I understood all too well Tolkien’s release of his beautiful tradition, recognizing that his children had grown too old for his letters and art work and persona of Father Christmas.  I wanted the book to continue.

I talked on the phone a lot as a teenager.  These were the days of wall phones, and there was a phone in my room…not an extension but a phone wired into the wall.  My Dad came one night as I talked to my friend and politely said “I need to make a call.” 

I answered with a distracted, “Ok”, and continued to talk.

Later,  he came back  and said the same thing.  My answer was the same.  When he came back a third time, he asked, with a degree of impatience, “Who are you talking to?”  For some unknown reason that eludes me now, I felt like I could take my Dad…the same Dad who was a welder and had fought in two wars. 

I covered the mouthpiece on the receiver and hiss/whispered at my Dad, “I don’t have to tell you who I’m talking to.”

My Dad never said a word.  He strode over to the wall, where the phone was attached (I realize only people of a certain age will get this) and yanked the phone cord from the wall.  The phone went immediately dead in my hand as my Dad strode back out of my room and quietly closed the door.    I learned a couple of very important lessons that night. 

As years passed we laughed about the phone story.  It makes me laugh now.  My Dad has been gone for 39 years and I’d give anything to see him for even five minutes, to feel the strength of his arms around me, to see his eyes crinkle at the corners when he laughed.  I think when our BBM friend’s son is older, he will remember with fondness the drawings from his dad.  Our friend has told us that he’s done even more, and I gave him a copy of Tolkien’s book for inspiration. 

All of us have or had Dads who were flawed, some more than others.  Some hurt us deeply.  Some may not have known how to demonstrate love and tenderness.  Many wouldn’t have the time or patience to draw funny drawings like our friend at BBM or Tolkien.  My Dad wouldn’t have written stories to me or doodled funny pictures, but he knew that a grave marker for a broken-hearted child was a beautiful way to use his welding gifts to show his love.  On the returned piece of mail to BBM I couldn’t help but notice that in the center of the funny drawings, our friend had drawn a heart.  Inside the heart was written “Daddy loves Will”.  I stared at that heart for a long time, realizing it is the same message that the only perfect Father, our Abba, or Daddy, writes to His own.  He loves us.