22. My Father Forgave Me.
When I was 10 years old, Lester got blue paint on my dad's brand new car. Lester was my best friend and our next door neighbor. He was a year younger than I, but we did all kinds of things together. His family was into motorcycle racing, trap shooting and bird hunting, plus drag racing. I was into bike riding and running away from my 8 sisters - the very ones who always blamed me when my brother David and I got into trouble as if it was never David's fault for anything.
Lester and I thought it would be really cool to build a go-cart, but we didn't have access to things like engines, steel tubing, and a welder. (If my dad is reading this over my shoulder from Heaven, he must have just shuddered at the thought of 10 yr old Dannie with a cutting torch!) So Lester and I made do with a handsaw, a hand drill, some boards and nails from our old porch, and some lawnmower wheels Lester's dad had sitting around.
We cut the porch boards to consistent lengths and nailed them to a couple of 2X4's, then cut some more boards and nailed a pile of them together to form a seat to sit on. We drilled a hole at each corner through the 2X4 side rails and bolted a lawnmower wheel to each corner. Then we tied a rope to the front so we could pull each other around. Nearly done... if only we had some paint to make it look nice. Fortunately, Lester found some blue spray paint in their garage and we set about spray painting our beautiful creation on our gravel driveway. Near dad's new car. It was a candyapple red 1969 Ford Galaxie 500 that was exactly one week old.
My dad used to get a new car every year because he was a rural mail carrier and would put nearly 100,000 miles a year on his cars, and of course the miles were stop and go, every day-all day. In that era, cars weren't reliable enough to go much beyond 100,000 miles without a rebuild, so new cars were part of my dad's livelihood.
Lester was the first to notice. He backed away from our blue masterpiece to admire it, then turned to look at Dad's brand new candyapple red car parked 10 feet away from our work area. Lester saw that the slight breeze we were painting in had carried droplets of blue paint with it, depositing them on the passenger side door and window of the car. I panicked for a minute because I had had some experience painting dad's stuff when I was a little boy of 5 or 6.
Because we had such a large family, my oldest sisters got to live in a trailer-house parked next to the main house. It was actually pretty cool, although I was rarely allowed inside. The trailer was bare aluminum and I understandably decided that was rather plain and ugly. I pulled gallon cans of house paint off the shelves from where they were stored and proceeded to open them one by one with a screwdriver. (I was always good with tools) I didn't really understand that house paint separated in storage and had to be mixed before applying, so consequently it required multiple cans to come up with a color that seemed to stick when I applied it with a paintbrush. I think it might have turned out better if I'd had enough time to feather out the lines the paintbrush was making before my handiwork was discovered in progress. I'll never forget the noises Dad made, and the looks he displayed as he feverishly tried to eliminate all traces of my creativity, only then directing me to proceed to the pump house and the whipping of my life. So far.
It took me a minute or two to realize that the perfect solution was just a few steps away in the house. You see, since Dad was a mailman, and the cars he drove were normal left-hand drive cars, he always drove from the middle of the bench seat using his left foot for the gas and brake and his left hand for steering. (This arrangement was actually really cool for all of us kids when we were learning to drive. Dad always sat in the middle to teach and when he wanted to show us how to pass a car, he would just say "I've got it" and we would quickly pull our feet away from the pedals and our hands off the wheel and watch the demonstration!) On the mail route he would steer up to mailboxes with his left hand while braking with his left foot, then reach out the right window with his right hand and drop open the mailbox door where it would occasionally contact the car if he was a little close. He prepared for the potential damage from mailbox lids by applying a magnetic protection shield for the paint, one that he could take off at the end of the day, a kind of a prototype to modern removable magnetic signs. Since this car was that beautiful candyapple red, he painted the shield a matching red color. With spray paint he had purchased from Carlson's Hardware store. Perfect.
When Lester saw the blue speckles he said the words, "Your dad is going to kill you!" I told him not to worry. "Dad has some matching paint in the house and I can fix this." I had to hurry in case Dad came out and saw the blue speckles before we could fix them, so I ran into the house, found the leftover red spray paint, shook the can all the way back outside, (I understood paint separation characteristics now at this advanced age) and went to work hiding all that blue.
I was sure we had dodged a bullet until I heard the sound of my dad's voice, an octave higher than usual and an order of magnitude louder than the time he discovered the trailer. I'm not sure why he bypassed all my sisters and my perfect angel of a little brother and came straight to me. He had the nerve to suggest that I had "painted his car!" I indignantly defended myself by saying that "No, I did not in fact paint the car!" Lester was the one who had been painting the blue, so I was not going to take the blame for that! I was the one who FIXED the car! By the time I understood that he was also upset about the red paint for some reason, I already looked like I had lied, so things had gone from bad to worse.
Lester and I had only owned our completed go-cart long enough to take one black and white photo of it under the Douglas Fir trees that lined our driveway. It couldn't have been more than an hour or two after we had taken the picture that my dad, after a new level of epic whipping, required me to watch while he chopped up the go-cart with an axe under those same trees. Ouch.
I was an adult with kids of my own before I connected an event from a couple of years later. We used to get Sears and JC Penney catalogs in the days before Amazon, and in the JC Penney catalog was a ready-made go-cart you could buy, made from actual steel tubing, a steering system not made from rope, and pneumatic tires that turned easily, conceivably able to achieve Indy 500 racing speeds via its 3 horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine. Not once had I attempted to make my dad feel guilty for chopping up my go-cart because after all, that was a much deserved consequence for what must have appeared to be irresponsible behavior followed by blatant lying. But my dad was a man of compassion and was one of the most loving and giving fathers a young boy could have.
I'll bet he remembered chopping up my go-cart.
So Dad actually ordered the twin-seater go-cart for us from JC Penney, a huge brown box arriving one day, offloaded under the Douglas Fir trees in our driveway. And when we opened the box and rolled it out into the open... It was candyapple red.
I love the compassion my dad eventually showed, along with his forgiveness even as he must have remembered how painful my antics were to him. After all, there is some truth to the saying "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you." And isn't God like that as well? We are the ones who sin, yet Jesus suffered to rescue us from death. Today is Easter (Pascha) according to the calendar of the East, and since I am in the 3rd week after infusion Juli and I were able to safely get out and enjoy Holy Saturday yesterday with the Dunn family in Modesto. What a celebration as a black veil symbolizing death was yanked down to show its defeat and was tossed to the ground like a useless rag. The priest then led a train of adorable little girls, all carrying flower baskets as they marched around the nave tossing flower petals into the air in celebration.
Easter is about resurrection. Rescue from death. There is no more to fear when a father is that good.
Lester and I thought it would be really cool to build a go-cart, but we didn't have access to things like engines, steel tubing, and a welder. (If my dad is reading this over my shoulder from Heaven, he must have just shuddered at the thought of 10 yr old Dannie with a cutting torch!) So Lester and I made do with a handsaw, a hand drill, some boards and nails from our old porch, and some lawnmower wheels Lester's dad had sitting around.
We cut the porch boards to consistent lengths and nailed them to a couple of 2X4's, then cut some more boards and nailed a pile of them together to form a seat to sit on. We drilled a hole at each corner through the 2X4 side rails and bolted a lawnmower wheel to each corner. Then we tied a rope to the front so we could pull each other around. Nearly done... if only we had some paint to make it look nice. Fortunately, Lester found some blue spray paint in their garage and we set about spray painting our beautiful creation on our gravel driveway. Near dad's new car. It was a candyapple red 1969 Ford Galaxie 500 that was exactly one week old.
 |
| https://www.streetsideclassics.com/vehicles/2523-dfw/1969-ford-galaxie-500-fastback |
Lester was the first to notice. He backed away from our blue masterpiece to admire it, then turned to look at Dad's brand new candyapple red car parked 10 feet away from our work area. Lester saw that the slight breeze we were painting in had carried droplets of blue paint with it, depositing them on the passenger side door and window of the car. I panicked for a minute because I had had some experience painting dad's stuff when I was a little boy of 5 or 6.
Because we had such a large family, my oldest sisters got to live in a trailer-house parked next to the main house. It was actually pretty cool, although I was rarely allowed inside. The trailer was bare aluminum and I understandably decided that was rather plain and ugly. I pulled gallon cans of house paint off the shelves from where they were stored and proceeded to open them one by one with a screwdriver. (I was always good with tools) I didn't really understand that house paint separated in storage and had to be mixed before applying, so consequently it required multiple cans to come up with a color that seemed to stick when I applied it with a paintbrush. I think it might have turned out better if I'd had enough time to feather out the lines the paintbrush was making before my handiwork was discovered in progress. I'll never forget the noises Dad made, and the looks he displayed as he feverishly tried to eliminate all traces of my creativity, only then directing me to proceed to the pump house and the whipping of my life. So far.
 |
| https://thenoshery.com/glamper-redo/ |
So you can understand that the idea of getting paint on my dad's brand new candyapple red car was causing me to feel a great deal of fear.
It took me a minute or two to realize that the perfect solution was just a few steps away in the house. You see, since Dad was a mailman, and the cars he drove were normal left-hand drive cars, he always drove from the middle of the bench seat using his left foot for the gas and brake and his left hand for steering. (This arrangement was actually really cool for all of us kids when we were learning to drive. Dad always sat in the middle to teach and when he wanted to show us how to pass a car, he would just say "I've got it" and we would quickly pull our feet away from the pedals and our hands off the wheel and watch the demonstration!) On the mail route he would steer up to mailboxes with his left hand while braking with his left foot, then reach out the right window with his right hand and drop open the mailbox door where it would occasionally contact the car if he was a little close. He prepared for the potential damage from mailbox lids by applying a magnetic protection shield for the paint, one that he could take off at the end of the day, a kind of a prototype to modern removable magnetic signs. Since this car was that beautiful candyapple red, he painted the shield a matching red color. With spray paint he had purchased from Carlson's Hardware store. Perfect.
When Lester saw the blue speckles he said the words, "Your dad is going to kill you!" I told him not to worry. "Dad has some matching paint in the house and I can fix this." I had to hurry in case Dad came out and saw the blue speckles before we could fix them, so I ran into the house, found the leftover red spray paint, shook the can all the way back outside, (I understood paint separation characteristics now at this advanced age) and went to work hiding all that blue.
I was sure we had dodged a bullet until I heard the sound of my dad's voice, an octave higher than usual and an order of magnitude louder than the time he discovered the trailer. I'm not sure why he bypassed all my sisters and my perfect angel of a little brother and came straight to me. He had the nerve to suggest that I had "painted his car!" I indignantly defended myself by saying that "No, I did not in fact paint the car!" Lester was the one who had been painting the blue, so I was not going to take the blame for that! I was the one who FIXED the car! By the time I understood that he was also upset about the red paint for some reason, I already looked like I had lied, so things had gone from bad to worse.
 |
| L to R - Dannie, David, Lester (First Day of School) |
I was an adult with kids of my own before I connected an event from a couple of years later. We used to get Sears and JC Penney catalogs in the days before Amazon, and in the JC Penney catalog was a ready-made go-cart you could buy, made from actual steel tubing, a steering system not made from rope, and pneumatic tires that turned easily, conceivably able to achieve Indy 500 racing speeds via its 3 horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine. Not once had I attempted to make my dad feel guilty for chopping up my go-cart because after all, that was a much deserved consequence for what must have appeared to be irresponsible behavior followed by blatant lying. But my dad was a man of compassion and was one of the most loving and giving fathers a young boy could have.
I'll bet he remembered chopping up my go-cart.
So Dad actually ordered the twin-seater go-cart for us from JC Penney, a huge brown box arriving one day, offloaded under the Douglas Fir trees in our driveway. And when we opened the box and rolled it out into the open... It was candyapple red.
I love the compassion my dad eventually showed, along with his forgiveness even as he must have remembered how painful my antics were to him. After all, there is some truth to the saying "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you." And isn't God like that as well? We are the ones who sin, yet Jesus suffered to rescue us from death. Today is Easter (Pascha) according to the calendar of the East, and since I am in the 3rd week after infusion Juli and I were able to safely get out and enjoy Holy Saturday yesterday with the Dunn family in Modesto. What a celebration as a black veil symbolizing death was yanked down to show its defeat and was tossed to the ground like a useless rag. The priest then led a train of adorable little girls, all carrying flower baskets as they marched around the nave tossing flower petals into the air in celebration.
Easter is about resurrection. Rescue from death. There is no more to fear when a father is that good.
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