ON DREAMERS

After six months of silence, I finally have something to say.

I woke early this morning, after a phone call at two pm yesterday telling me my father has "days to weeks" to live, and as I waited for the coffee to brew I sat on the front porch thinking.

It was overcast and the sun, not yet up, was already lighting the sky and there was a lazy wind blowing the clouds about, and I sat watching the clouds~ a Pegasus, a bear, an Indian Squaw with her pap-pus, and I remembered laying in the grass as a girl waiting to see what shape and form the clouds would take next and how on occasions it would be my father instead of my sister laying there beside me looking up.

That's when It occurred to me.

My mother is the practical one, the glue that holds us all together, and it was she who gave my sister and I roots, no small feat when you consider we moved about once every year, yet somehow she managed it. And our roots run deep. We know who we are and where we come from and what home and family loyalty mean.

Our roots run deep indeed and they are strong, strong enough to sustain us through the storms life blows our direction.

But it is my father who taught us to dream. He gave us the branches that reach towards the sky, to believe, to try, and though I fail to follow my dreams bravely, it is because of him I dare to dream at all.

I never thought of my dad as a dreamer, but he is, and has been his entire life.

He dared to believe in a better world, in doing his part to make it better, he even had the audacity to hold to his ideals. He followed his dreams and took great risks to make them into realities, and without one single lecture about following our dreams, he taught us how to do exactly that.

God knows where he would have landed if he hadn't been dragging a small town Kansas Main and saw a girl he just had to talk to, for she has been the power behind the dreamer all these years.

But he did, and after less than three minutes worth of conversation, once back in his car, the promise of a date the following night successfully procured, declared to his buddy that he was going to marry that girl.

And now, just a few weeks shy of their golden anniversary, it is time to kiss the dreamer good bye.

Though he is soon to leave us, he leaves behind a legacy of dreamers pursuing their dreams.

A grand-daughter living in Korea, living her dream of other lands and different cultures.

A grand-son serving his country, loving his wife and child, seeing other places and different lands.

A second grand-son standing proudly on his high school pitcher's mound, working towards a college scholarship and ball playing, knowing he can become whatever he dreams with hard work and steadfast focus on his dream.

All three the product of a practical woman and her dreamer.