Banjo’s Note: In Episode 4’s challenge, Forging Honor members are asked to reflect on their heroes and their influence on who we are today. The following is a personal reflection on one of my heroes, my Dad.
My father stank when he came home in winter. The smell ran in with him as he opened the door and the brisk December air poked and prodded its way into our home. It was effort and exertion crystalized in half frozen beads of sweat, persevering through the cold. Dad stank when he got home. But I loved it.
Dad didn’t do much for himself when I was growing up, at least, not that I saw. A father of two boys before thirty and another one shortly after (plus a little girl a few years later) he studied hard in seminary, spending Saturdays in a mildewy basement next to a clattering, clanking treadmill, and a dusty globe which I’m certain I remember being there but may be making up. He stayed down there for hours most afternoons before coming up to the rest of the world for a bite and a couple of hours of sleep before going out into the dead of night to stand outside a rich man’s mansion as a security guard. Other nights he went to label packages for UPS and toss them into big brown trucks before running back home to shower, shave, and take a power nap and a pop tart before running back out to classes.
After all that he was back home again, reading me and my brothers stories in bed and helping Mom with things around the tiny, downright miniature, apartment. I visited the place a year or two ago and felt I could fold the whole place in half and put it in my pocket with ample room to spare. Saturday mornings the apartment filled up quickly with the smell of pancakes frying on the griddle and eggs sizzling in the pan. The incense of breakfast mingled with the sounds of weekend news breaking in over the falling anvils and exploding dynamite of my morning cartoons.
Later, in the middle of a cold afternoon, Dad would put on a long sleeve t-shirt and thin gloves and a set of long-johns he was inexplicably enthusiastic about, the way a computer nerd is thrilled over ram and gigabytes and graphic cards. He topped it all off with a beanie cap with a yellow ring of aged sweat on the inside lining. Then he would move his thin, spectacled frame out the door and into the Pennsylvania snow. I was too young to understand the joys he got from those thirty minutes he spent alone in winter on icy, asphalt roads.
I’m older than I was then of course, but I’m almost as old as my father was when he had me. Which makes me wonder lots of things. Mostly it makes me wonder what kind of man I’ll be. What will my little boy see when he looks out the window on a cold December day as his father returns from a six mile meditation in the kind of play that looks like misery. I hope he sees what I saw.
I saw more of my Dad the year he didn’t have a church to pastor. In pastoral work you’re not unemployed, you’re without a call. My dad was without one for about 10 months and while most of the realities of this fact went over my head, the immediate effects were not outside the realm of my personal anxieties, even at the ripe, old age of twelve. I have a distinct memory of the holidays that year. After Thanksgiving and the calendar closing in on Christmas, my Dad went back to work at UPS while he waited for what God had next. I kicked around the house without any school needing to be done, wondering where Dad was. I felt his absence keenly. I knew he was supposed to be here. It was Christmas time.
We set out the dinner places that night, candles were lit, food was prepared and darkness fell in that quick and eerie way it does in winter. He wasn’t back. We had all sat down for dinner when I saw the lights coming down the driveway. I got up and I ran to the hallway in front of the door. The door opened and there was Dad coming in from the cold, smelling thickly of sweat and exhaust and wreathed in the aching bite of winter air, smelling only the way a father smells who spends himself in service of the ones he loves, who works and works hard, and makes no complaint. He closed the door with his back, falling against it.
He hadn’t seen me yet. Dad’s soft face looked gray and worn, like a stone eroded by centuries of water cascading over it. I wanted to cry, for reasons I could not fully understand. I think I said, “Hey, Dad,” and he looked up and saw me in the hallway. The gray stone broke. His face warmed in a grin as big and warm as Christmas day and said, “Hey, bud! How’s it going?” as if he’d never carried a package in all his life and all was right with the world.
When I think of what kind of man I want to be I think of that night and I think of that smile. I think of the man who worked like an ox though he was skinny as a rail, never quitting for an instant but always faithful in service to his God and in provision for his family. I think of the smell I knew in an instant, the stink of work done well without complaint and brimming with love and the sweat that made it tangible. On the best days when I come home from a run after work and walk into my home and greet my wife with a kiss, she says I stink, and yes, I know. I smell the sweat heavy and foul-odored hanging about me and I smile. The smell of that sweat is very dear and sweet to me. It reminds me of the man I wish to be.
