Just Beginnings

I was just beginning to know and appreciate Ben as an adult. Do you know that feeling? After years of raising up a child with the hope that a responsible adult human being would eventually emerge, struggling through the awkwardness and turbulence of adolescence, and just ... just when there could be seen a flicker of light at the end of that long tunnel ... in just one instant, that flicker, that glimmer of hope-when I was about to reap the harvest of a son having grown up ...

Back to that feeling for a moment, but in this example, I'll speak of my daughter Kimberly with whom I was having coffee one afternoon while she was in her second year of law school. I was then and am still quite simply in awe of this beautiful young woman who so excitedly spoke to me, her daddy, of her legal research with such panache, such passion and erudition! Though I certainly expected nothing less, I sat there thinking to myself:

“Wow! This is my baby girl who not so long before had been the ‘prima ballerina’ in her ballet class!”

(Mind you that was her teacher’s evaluation and not merely the biased opinion of her father!)

I remember one of her first recitals when she curtsied to mark the very end of the performance. Well, have you ever experienced that sensation of utter joy? A lump in your throat so big you can't swallow while the tears rain down in a torrent? That little girl now sat across from me as a splendid young woman, a soon to be lawyer!

That same lump in my throat, those same tears once overwhelmed me at work one afternoon when Ben called me to share the great news that he had just been hired at The Crafty Beaver, a local hardware store and lumber yard. That was a time so fraught with difficulties for Ben, for all of us, that this bit of great news gave me some renewed hope that life might be kind to my son.

Coupling a commanding presence together with a gentle soul, Ben would have been a fabulous father. Little children had always loved him. He had such a way about him. What an unfathomable loss!