Tag: father

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A Father and Daughter Conversation: Of Magic and Spirit

th“That’s the thing with magic. You’ve got to know it’s still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.” -Charles de Lint

This afternoon my seven-year old asked me why we celebrate Hanukkah, and I explained to her the miracle of the oil and the lights. She was fascinated by the story and asked me what allows miracles to happen, what the force is that compels wild things to occur and make us believe in the magic that can exist in the world. I explained to her that magic as we think of it is just illusion, all of which can be explained, but that true magic is when something unexplainable happens, when the fabric of the universe is unveiled and all its beauty spills out into our hands, but we don’t see where it comes from. It’s the magic of the oil, and the magic of the magi, and the magic of a larger than life human being with a love of giving gifts to children.

“Who is God?” she queried after I told her the story of why we honor the traditions of the Jewish faith.

“God is the reason everything happens,” I explained.

“So is God magic, since he brought about the miracle?” she asked, scrunching her face up like she was thinking hard.

“Yes, in a way, God is the ultimate magic. He creates something out of nothing,” I answered.

“Like the miracle of the oil?” she asked. She asks a lot of questions, but that’s okay. It’s how she learns.

“Exactly like the miracle of the oil,” I said, nodding my head.

“Well then, what about Christmas? Tell me that story,” she said. And I realized that I had never before truly talked to either one of my children about the real reason for the season. Continue reading “A Father and Daughter Conversation: Of Magic and Spirit”

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Looking For a Father

This trip was special because I was with my dad.

I know many others have had it a lot worse than I did growing up. Sure, I lived in a poor part of Southwest Philadelphia, in a row home where I could hear the neighbors whisper if I focused just a little bit. There were drive-bys only a few blocks over, and I realize now just how dangerous the area was back then. But at the time I didn’t think about any of that, and I also honestly didn’t think about the children starving in Ethiopia either, even though my mom always talked about shipping my leftover vegetables there. I didn’t even think about the crack house on the end of the block where Old Leroy would sell his wares, but more often than not just use them himself. We were always warned to stay away from Old Leroy. Instead, what I wondered about more often than anything else was where my father was.

At first it was just like any other family at that time, I guess. It was before the 50+% divorce rate, so if anyone in our school came from a “broken” home it was a huge topic of gossip, but single mother households were on a precipitous rise with more and more women having children out of wedlock. The church frowned on that, and I knew all about it because both of my parents were heavy into the church, my father being a preacher, and my mother a church leader. And at the start our little nuclear family seemed to be just that — containing a nucleus of both parents around which we kids hovered.

Things started to drift into fragments, though, because my dad didn’t have a “home” church. Instead, he was (and is) one of those itinerant preachers who was constantly traveling from church to church, often outside of the city of my birth, and often for long swaths of time. He was also heavily involved in prison ministry so he would be in the jails talking to inmates when he wasn’t doing extensive church tours. That of course left little to no time to continue being a part of the nucleus that helped to keep the family going, and it was obviously very difficult on my mother and on myself and my sister as well.

An old friend of mine from high school sent me a Facebook message a few months ago in which he told me that a man with the last name of McManus had preached an amazing sermon at his church on Saturday, and he asked me if I knew him. Instead of answering his question, I said, “That’s my dad.” Continue reading “Looking For a Father”

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Painting Lines

“… but painting those lines, it was all he had ever known.”

His ancient eyes carefully surveyed the freshly painted thick white line as it shone brightly in the earliest morning hours. He sat on a large machine that made wide turns in a spectacular fashion and purred like a kitten, a quite incongruous sensation when seen and heard at the same time. But he had a job to do, one that he had done more times than even he could remember, which was also part of the reason why he studied that white line for so long. Reputation was a very important thing in his business, in any business really, but painting those lines, it was all he had ever known.

He remembered going out with his father on weekday mornings before tea time, when only the crows would be out, dancing on telephone wires and watching them with those spectacle eyes. His dad would open the large shed, that reminded him of a barn with its massive size, and back out the industrial-sized lawn mower. Ironically, what he recalled most about that behemoth was the name on its side, KAT. He wondered why they would have misspelled the word “cat” but he kept it to himself. The older man would sit him up on the top of the mower with his colossal hands until he could feel its vibrations. They made him have to pee, but he kept that to himself as well. Continue reading “Painting Lines”