Christmas has made
me very reflective this year. It may be the 'getting old' issue, or it may be
the number of people I won't get to see this Christmas. I'm sure when I'm gone,
they will all miss me horribly and wish they could see me for Christmas, or maybe
not, chuckle. Most have legitimate reasons they cannot be part of this year's celebration. But the missing is still there regardless.
A gift I helped another person get this Christmas reminded
me of a Christmas story about my dad and how he tried to teach me the things he
wanted to learn from his own dad but didn't. That's not conjecture; it's what
he told me along with more information than I need to share in this write.
Some time in my
preschool years, my father built me a very sturdy and nice blackboard, easel. If it had been current, it surely would have
had a dry erase board on the other side, but as it was, one side was a chalk
board and on the other side was a drawing board of sorts. I found it several times during the making,
not by snooping, but just by stumbling in.
And I quickly identified it to my father. No, no I was wrong. He gave me a far fetched explanation of what
it really was. Now my father was an
imaginative story teller, but let’s face it, it may have been an imaginative
story, but it was also a variance from the truth and I never doubted that for a
minute. Time and again I saw the
evidence. Time and again I was offered
some wild story.
Finally when its
form was undeniable, my father admitted he had built a chalk board, but it was
for another child who wasn’t getting any Christmas. I was not happy about that. All the times he had offered his ‘stories’
seemed quite illogical and it became a good game. But this story was totally believable
according to my father’s benevolent character and I had fallen in want of the
blackboard easel. This time there would
be no playful reply, no good natured banter.
I didn’t see it again until Christmas morning.
There it was, shrouded in a sheet with a bow on the front, and it was mine! I giggled and bounced for a bit and then I
landed in my daddy’s lap. “You wonderful
old liar,” I said playfully. My dad
laughed, but there was a different feel to his laughter. The story would go around many times over the
years and that same difference was always felt in my father’s laugh.
That Christmas, my
daddy told me he would never tell me another lie. I believed him and through the years, I found that
to be true. As I grew up, he used to
tell me many times that there were very few things you owned and very few
things you truly controlled. One thing you
owned was your character. He taught me
that a person could tell the truth sometimes and not other times, but integrity
was something you had or you didn’t have.
You could not have it part of the time.
He taught me that my word was my responsibility. And between us he let me know that I had
taught him a lesson on integrity one Christmas when I was very young.
