Shoulder High
When I was young my father worked at one of the paper mills in town. For most of my “growing up” years, he worked a swing shift, which, in his case, meant that he worked 7 straight shifts of10 PM – 6 AM followed by one day off; 7 straight shifts of 2 PM – 10 PM followed by two days off; and 7 straight 6 AM-2PM shifts followed by four days off, or what was referred to as a long weekend.
The reality of having a father that worked swing shift
is that you got used to him not being around home much, or awake much when the
rest of the family was present and active.
I didn’t resent it; I simply accepted it as the way things were. Fathers had a responsibility to take care of
the family’s material needs, and that meant that fathers went to work. I am sure that partly due to the lack of time
spent together, plus whatever part of my father’s own perceptions of how father-son
relationships were supposed to play out, led to very little nurturing from him. Instead, around him we learned to 'behave ourselves'. I respected my father at all times; at times I was a bit
afraid of him. That’s just the way it
was.
On his long weekends during the summer months and when my father had a chance to take vacation time, there
was no doubt that the family was going camping.
I don’t really know why he loved camping so much. I know that he went camping with my three
oldest brothers when they were in the Boy Scouts, but I never heard him talk
about camping as a child, or as a youngster. Also, where we were
going to go camping was not open for debate.
We were going to camp at Boulder Lake, near the little town of Mountain,
Wisconsin.
And, while I never accompanied my father on a walk
around the block at home, or see him walk anywhere for that matter, when we went
camping at least one morning we were going to walk the nature trail. I always loved these hikes. I liked the mystery of the big woods. The earliest memory I have of one of these
nature walks was when I was probably only three or four years old.
I was walking alongside my father and I tripped on a
tree root. My father grabbed the back of
my sweatshirt with one hand and he pulled me back upright. He asked to see my hands that I had used to
brace my fall. He brushed off the black
dirt as best he could. There was
soreness, but no blood and no fuss. We walked on.
Shortly after that incident we came to a display of a log section of a huge
white pine. I remember my father trying
to show me how to count the rings so we could tell how old the tree was when it
was cut down. I only recall that it was
older than my ability to count and the tree had more rings than I had attention span. But what I
do remember was that the stump from the big pine was just ten yards or so beyond
the log. And growing out from that pine
stump was a white birch tree that was probably about twenty feet high. I remember at first grasping that new life
was somehow struggling up out of that lifeless tree stump. And I can remember even thinking that it was
perhaps strange that it was a birch tree and not another white pine that was
growing out of that stump. The fact that
it was something new and different wasn’t lost on me, even if I couldn't express my thoughts.
It was in that moment that my father picked me up and
set me on his shoulders. “I got you,” he
said. I was not afraid. My father carried me on his shoulders all
that way back to camp. I can’t recall
him ever carrying me on his shoulders again.
But he did that day, and 60 plus years later, the memory is still warm,
and it still makes me smile.
His Peace <><
Deacon Dan
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