1999

For too long I had dammed a stagnant stream, backed it up in an effort to move forward in a more expedient and mundane direction.  Life took precedence over the detritus of the past that festered and rotted, clogging some deep spiritual reserve that had always whispered, "God is good."  I could still hear a chorus chanting of His might and sovereignty.  God can know all and do all capriciously without "caring" particularly for the specifics of His creation.  My parched heart would cup its hands and try to drink from the stream of His benevolence; but, just as the proffered sweetness reached my lips, I would remember loss and all would evaporate.

I did not quit my God; I could not forsake the One I had loved so long.  But, I no longer trusted Him.  He seem arbitrary with our lives; and, His power, which is beyond understanding, was confounding and oblique, not counterintuitive and wise.  Best to put distance between myself and His electrifying, untamed hand.

The  presence of a vacuum, at first just a whispering, a hint of discontent, made me edgy.  A craving, undefined and subtle at its root, spread like a soul-eating bacteria until it had created a surprising cavern of need so great it must be abated.  Emptied of the goodness of God, convinced of His reticence, the hollow cravings called out to another to be satisfied.

In 1993, Bill and I purchased a tutoring franchise, and the first three years I spent long hours growing it.  By 1999, we had two facilities that were strong enough that I began to hire employees to take over some of my tasks.  I rarely thought of my father in those years, and when I reached down to that place in me, it was too uncomfortable to pause there for long. I lived above that current, for touching it was like touching a live electrical wire.  After experiencing the same reaction from that contact each time, I finally avoided it all together. I was also aware there was no closure for me with my father because I was convinced he still molested children, though I could not prove it.

In June of 1999, on my thirtieth wedding anniversary, I received a letter from one of my two sisters that began the demolition of my dammed up stream.  The ugly water had to gush out sometime or kill me with its poison, but the timing was unfortunate for me.  The gist of the letter was Daddy had carpal tunnel surgery on the tenth of June, and she and my other sister, in caring for him afterward, realized that he was going to need more intensive care as time went on.  My relationship with both of my sisters had been strained for a while; so, the correspondence ended with, "We'll all need to participate. I'm hoping that you will be able to release whatever it is that keeps you from being willing to communicate with me.  I'm not someone you need to avoid or be afraid of.  I'm part of you family, warts and all."

The perceived unfairness of the closing words and their accusation that I had built the wall that separated me from  her hit me broadside and threw me into a bizarre, screeching rage. I remembered her birthdays and Christmas!  That was more than I got from her during those years!  "Fuck her!" I screamed.  "Fuck Daddy!  I don't need any more condemnation! None of this is my fault!"  My mouth regurgitated filth. Stomping around all three thousand square feet of my home, I swore and bellowed, cried and justified, until Bill shook my shoulders and talked me back to sanity.  Some early smoke released from a deadly volcano.  We had not known it was roiling so near the surface.  Not an anniversary I choose to remember.

Two weeks later, I received a letter from my older sister.  The last time I had spoken to her was the previous Christmas when I had called her.  Apparently, I spoke too much about my feelings about Daddy, which was my wont, most certainly.  With her husband sleeping, she cut the conversation short.  Her letter began, "I've been thinking of you a lot lately.  I know we're very different, and that you wish you had a different family.  Many people do, myself included, sometimes.  However, we are who we are, and we've got what we've got.  My apprentice asked me her 'question of the week' yesterday - if you had one lesson that  you wish you had learned earlier, what would it be?  I had to think a long time...the principal one I came up with was this - not to live in the past and keep recreating it, but to live in the future and create that."  My sister went on to say that Daddy was old, frightened, and guilt-laden, and she wanted to forgive him while he was here and because it was healing to her.  The family needed me and I needed to "rejoin" it to help "see him through."

The smoke again.  A boiling, steamy mess rising up in me.  We did not know the same father.  Frightened, old, and guilt-laden and done with boys?  I did not think so!  I had seen him with children recently.  She had taken the "high road" and forgiven our father, and I should do the same!  Again, it was I who had relinquished my family.  They had no part in that?  Shaking, wanting a voice, I crumpled in my living room floor and wept the inequity into the hands covering my face.  No, I had not forgiven him!  How do I forgive what has not come full circle?  There is no cleansing in the forgiving of a crime still in progress!  My quandry was how to live in the midst of the ongoing chaos and still protect my sanity and my children.

I did not respond to their letters for several days.  I wanted an appropriate reply, not one filled with the histrionics I was manifesting.  My response was, for me at the time, measured.  My sisters were correct in their assessment of my need to forgive so that I could let it go.  There was an endless, surging surf of buried words, thoughts and feelings that once given power by the slightest wind would pound mercilessly from my fractured heart.  No catharsis seemed in sight for me.  My father and I were at an impasse.  My letter, in part, was an effort to explain the inexplicable.  "My latency in responding to you has not been over a lack of love for Daddy or an inability to forgive him.  I have always been there when I am needed and have no intention of leaving his care up to the two of you..Daddy recently wrote a letter to Bill commending him for his ability to stand by Daddy and love him regardless of circumstances.  I was absolutely left out of that scenario though it was I who had picked him up from jail, despite Mother's desire to leave him there, offering to take him home with me.  He came to California on two separate occasions to visit the ten-year-old boy next door and tried to correspond with him, leaving me with the responsibility of telling the boy's mother that my father is a pedophile and must not be allowed to contact Daddy.  Afterward, I made another effort to speak with him about his difficulties and was screamed at that I was never, NEVER to bring up that subject again as long as I lived. Subsequent conversations with him would cause me to immediately have the runs so that I was virtually sitting on the pot crapping while listening to him speak.  Two years ago, when I discovered he was teaching children's Sunday school and having a young boy from his church spend the night with him occasionally, I called and said I would say what I needed to say and if he would not listen, I was no longer his daughter, for I could not live the rest of my life in the position into which he had forced me.  He listened.  He did not reply.  That is where we are.  Never has it been acknowledged that I was there for him, trying to understand his difficulties, praying and fasting that he would not go to prison.  Never has he understood what it took to have him in my home after he took Will to the park for hours without telling me where he was.  He does not have the capacity to understand.  That is not a thing of the past. That is a reality of the present. I have forgiven the past, but I take care of my family and myself in the present.  So, let's just be honest and say you both need my time and monetary resources to take care of Daddy and we need to get along in order to provide whatever care he needs.  I understand your need to contact me for the benefit of help. As with Mother, none of us wants to do this by ourselves. I do not know specifically what it is you want me to do.  What is it that you need from me now?"

I ended the letter with this: "I am as mature about this situation as is possible for me, and it seems, as the two of you are.  So, please try not to couch your desire for me to be available in this situation with any more insinuations, intentional or unintentional, that I cannot accept you or do not love Daddy or wish you were not my family.  The real issue here is Daddy, and he is difficult for all of us. Love, Kay.

On my fifty-first birthday, I received a response to my letter.  It was honest and heartbreaking once again.  This land of forgiveness into which my sister wanted me to venture, unfettered, seemed a foreign destination, and I had no clear road map to it.  She did not want to talk with me about Daddy's problems any more as we had better things to discuss.  Of course, she was right.  Her list of offenses was also long, but she had overcome.  We all agreed that we needed to unite for Daddy's care, and her final suggestion, a wise one, was that we meet together to talk over what we were willing and able to do for him. For years afterward, Bill opened letters from my family before I read them.  I was just not whole.

They made me look, the sincere words of my sisters.  My own heart was diseased and attacking me.  It was dark and angry, insistent in its quest to destroy me.  I wanted to run, though I could not say to where.  To comfort?  To a well from which I could drink some joy?  That race is destructive; I came upon a spider's web, and it entangled me.  The wicked ruse is that pain will take a broken spirit by the hair and drag it into more pain, nearly destroying the will to fight and live.

2005

"Enemy, don't laugh at me.  I have fallen, but I will get up again.  I sit in the shadow of trouble now, but the Lord will be a light for me.  I sinned against the Lord, so he was angry with me, but he will defend my case in court.  He will bring about what is right for me.  Then he will bring me out into the light, and I will see him set things right." Micah 7: 8-9 (New Century Bible)

My Bible was my necessary food as I made my way back to God.  Micah 7:8-9 became my life verse, and I quoted it daily, knowing that my responsibility was to get up again and start walking with God.  His responsibility was to show me where to go.  I sent these verses to my father with a note explaining briefly how they were changing my heart.  I did not want him to depend upon me for spiritual guidance because there was too much room for manipulation on his part if I pulled in that close to him again.  "Please, Father, give Daddy his own, authentic relationship with You."  My daily prayer.

For a second time, Daddy did not receive jail time for his molestation charges; however, the court appointed a trained chaperone to escort him to church services because vulnerable children would inevitably be present. That is how Daddy became friends with Jesse, a Christian man who volunteered to watch over the sad elderly convicted felon who was a member of Jesse's church.  Accountability is a powerful deterrent against recidivism and an effective agent for the stripping off of the false self in order to expose the real self.  Countless hours of confrontation and conversation, of confession and contrition, bonded my father to Jesse in trust as God began to peel away the layers of manipulative masking the pedophile father had worn for decades.  The process was deeply painful and was the catalyst for ugly arguments with Jesse.

Court ordered counseling was also once again mandated.  This time, however, Daddy was less reticent to expose himself to the process.  He was required to journal and to complete probing homework assignments.  His first task seemed to be coming to grips with the fact that his homosexual pedophilia was wrong! Justification and denial had been twin companions of his for so long that they had to be slain before light could be shed on the abject depravity of his actions.

The love and support of the very congregation Daddy had sinned against was nothing short of miraculous.  If my father is in the presence of the Lord today it is because the people of his church loved Daddy despite his sin, giving him the freedom to seek a merciful, gracious Father. The church became his lifeline in their compassion.

Daddy had been trapped for most of his life in a dark pit, stuck in the deep, thick clay that made his movements constricted and kept him from climbing to the light.  The decision to escape this pit of addiction, helped along by his second debasing arrest, was an arduous choice, at best.  My father had his first sexual experience at the age of twelve, with a man.  By the time he was fifteen, he had had other homosexual encounters.  His sexual history necessarily had barnacled to it every fathomable manipulation - lying, justifying, minimizing and blaming.  In order to throw off the darkness of the pit, Daddy would have to experience the blinding light of revelation not only on the perils of pedophilia, but on the reprobate actions he had always employed to live his covert lie.  Had Daddy not had Jesse, he might have lacked the raw courage to boldly look at the pedophile he was.

On June 19, 2005, I received a letter from Daddy.

Proverbs 3:11-12

Dear Ones,

Eighteen long months have passed since God began His chastisement.  I do not despise this nor do I detest His correction.  Rather, I praise Him in this period of darkness as He takes things of the flesh from me and reveals many of life's secrets.  More and more each passing hour He strips away all veneer and reduces me to utter dependence on Him!  I revel in the light that inserts into the darkness.  He teaches me how to budget my time and my finances; how to depend on public transportation; that even my breathing (supported by oxygen) is in His hands!  Still, He permits the darkness, yet a little while, to continue until I learn the infinite completeness of His will and desire for me.  When His light completes its victory over the darkness, then shall I claim Micah 7:8-9 as my prize!

I love you,
Daddy
P.S.  Your thoughtful Father's Day gift was an extra ray of light thrust into the darkness!

Hopeful, I tucked the letter away with the others and prayed because, I, too, know what it is like to cry out for forgiveness and restoration from the God I have disappointed.  Somewhere in that deep despair is a gift from Christ - the realization that it is much more painful, finally, to hold onto the addiction than it is to walk out of it; it is just harder to walk free.  It is dark either way, but there is His light at the end of the tunnel. Daddy, I prayed, was walking toward it and discovering his true self in the process.

1976

Albert Jackson Strickling came into this world on August 6, 1882, the same year as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Aloise Hitler, the elder half-brother of Adolf, James Joyce, John Barrymore and Samuel Goldwyn.  On their way out were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mary Todd Lincoln.  Jesse James was shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford, and Charles J. Guiteau was hanged for the assassination of President Garfield.  It was a momentous year for births and deaths.

Ninety-four years later, on May 25, 1976, A.J. Strickling did not wake up in this world.  Howard Hughes had died in April and Mao Zedong would breathe his last in September of 1976.  Jimmy Carter would become president of the United States in November, and Microsoft was formed that same year by a couple of computer geeks. For my father, the momentous decisions A.J. made between 1882 and 1976 were more significant than the history being made while the man was growing older, and those choices were the catalyst for Daddy's reaction to the pre-dawn phone call from Ohio that May morning to be fraught with confusion and emotional upheaval.

I had only seen my grandfather, Pop, once, that I remember.  We had lived for a couple of years in Lake Charles, Louisana, when I was five or six years old.  We girls had been told Pop was coming to visit us there, and his impending presence seemed to precipitate an unusual bustling in the house.  Of course, I did not know what I know now and did not think to question why this would be my first peek at the man who had fathered my father.

Mother made a delicious meal, I am sure, and had set out her crystal and china to welcome this wayward parent.  He was, as might be expected, late.  We sat around watching the proverbial "pot boil" until finally we saw an enormous Cadillac pull into our driveway.  Unrolling one arm and one leg at at time, out of the driver's seat was Daddy's daddy.  Onto his bald head he placed a large hat which he had reached for from the passenger seat before he stood fully beside the car.  I had never seen such a fat man!  He buttoned his coat over his enormous belly and shook hands rather formally with Daddy.  He smelled of aftershave and sweat, and he barely looked at his three gaping granddaughters standing in the driveway.  The visit, for me, was a non-event, as I cannot recall anything except the fact that he could not see his feet and had difficulty putting his shoes on.

Though Grandmother Smith, Celestia, stayed with us on a rather frequent basis when we were young, I do not recall any conversations about or references to Pop.  Daddy had put him and his abandonment away; but, it had shaped his entire life!  After Pop's visit, we girls asked Daddy why we had never seen him.  That is when our father told us the story about A.J. leaving the dollar bill on the ironing board and walking out for good.

I can only imagine how difficult that short visit from Pop was for Daddy.  Years of dammed offenses pushing against his heart, needing to be addressed.  Fear of further rejection keeping them at bay.  The man was present before Daddy so that he could look into his eyes and ask, "Why did you leave me? Why did  you not love me?"  But, the questions would never be asked or answered, as the phantom father had no response that would heal the wounded heart of his son.  Pop probably did not know why he did not care enough to stay.  Surely he had not thought deeply about Jim, then or now.  Jim still needed a father who would never manifest.

Upon Pop's physical death, all earthly opportunities to get some closure on his childhood disappeared for Daddy.  His first response was to brush the death of his father off.  "I'm not going to Ohio for that!"  But as he began reminiscing with Mother about his life as a boy, he decided to make the trip with her to Ashland, Ohio, for the funeral.

The small commuter plane landed at Ashland County Airport the afternoon before the services.  Mother and Daddy rented a car and drove south on Route 58 into downtown Ashland.  My father was uncharacteristically sullen and terse, his mind and heart in a necessary reverie, forced to touch the buried mutiny of a childhood spoiled.

Though his living brothers and sisters were there, they had not had his same history with Pop.  Their grieving, such as it was, did not touch the place his father's death reached in Daddy.  As Mother and he turned from the open grave, past the stands of carnations and empty folding chairs, and walked to the rental car after the funeral, a sob arose in Daddy, then tears he could not control. Mother knew only to hold his hand, for the crying was not for the beloved lost patriarch of the Strickling clan, but for the Daddy who did not love him.  Words cannot recoup such a loss.

Once safely inside the car, Daddy leaned his arms and head against the steering wheel and sobbed, Mother patting his back, sorry for his pain.  From out of his coat pocket, my father finally pulled a handkerchief, blew his nose and started the car.  He drove down Main Street to the middle of Ashland.  The late spring day was marked by sunshine and a light breeze, so he rolled his car window all the way down and took a deep breath.  Getting his bearings, he turned up Union Street and announced to Mother that he was going to find his home - the one A.J. deserted.  It took some time to locate the old neighborhood, but when he pulled the car up in front of the tiny house in which he had been reared, tears came again.  This time for the little boy who had stood at the screen door watching his daddy walk away.

Hoping perhaps for a catharsis that did not present, Daddy went back to Texas still fatherless and abandoned.  No real epiphany calmed the turmoil of his rejection.  There was no closure but death.  The sins of his father hung with impunity in the caverns of Daddy's memories, forever unconfessed and never atoned for.

1989

Calvary Chapel church was hosting a women's retreat in the Arrowhead Mountains in early 1989.  I would not have gone except for the urging of a new friend I had made in the fall when I began teaching at a local high school.  Teri was a beautiful woman with massive amounts of curly hair cascading everywhere around her lightly freckled face.  She was the secretary to the school counselors and had a real heart for the students, as I did.  We connected almost immediately and found great commonality in our beliefs.  I had only just begun to wander with trepidations into the territory of speaking about my father.  I could say that he was a child molester, but not without stomach cramps and tears.  At least I could say it, though.  There was some relief in even that.

I know that I wore on my face and in my countenance the strain of carrying Daddy's difficulties and Mother's death.  I had put 1985, for the most part, on some interior shelf, and it stayed perched there until occasionally a light would shine on it, exposing anew its presence.  Teri noticed this posturing of mine and asked me questions.  That was a gift. So, I told her and waited for the descending shame.  There was none.

"Come with me to women's retreat, Kay," she pleaded.  "You will be refreshed."

There are so many preparations to be made for a busy mother to leave home for the weekend that the thought of driving up to the mountains to retreat sounded daunting.  Bill encouraged me, however; so, I decided to go, though I did not really relish the idea of being with a gushing group of women I did not know.  My pain had introverted me somewhat.  I was living over it as best I could, but the stream was always flowing just beneath the surface.  It made me uncomfortable with myself as though something intrinsically wrong with me encouraged the discord that kept my heart and mind out of sync.  I did not call it shame then because I did not know its name at the time.  I just understood that whatever the debris was floating in that river of hurt, it made me want to run away.  How can a person run from what one takes with her?

While I was packing the old peach and green colored comforter and folding my jeans and sweaters, I remembered a counselor friend of mine telling me I should write a letter to my father.  The contents of this letter would ultimately be healing because I would tell him how he hurt me.  This letter I would not mail, but simply burn, shred or pitch.  The point was to articulate. I put my shampoo, curling iron, and hair dryer in my suitcase atop my clothes and thought writing the letter would be a good idea for me.  I determined to get alone on the mountain and regurgitate pain onto paper.

I picked Teri up at her home and we set out late on a Friday afternoon.  The air was chilly and my big fluffy blue sweater felt soft and comforting.  We talked non-stop through the weekend southern California traffic until we finally exited and turned left onto Highway 18 to Lake Arrowhead.  The dusky pink light of the closing day fell softly on the large arrowhead that adorns the face of the mountain.  The tension in my body began to fall away as we wound through fir trees and sheer rock walls up and up, four thousand feet to the retreat center.  Clouds scented with pine hugged the sides of the cliffs and slowed us down as we passed through their misty frothiness.  Our headlights were turned on by then and cars approaching through the fog seemed like ethereal balls of brilliance pressing in on us as if from some alien siege, starting small then shooting us past us in the night.

The main hall of the retreat center was, by contrast, too bright.  It hurt my eyes at first and seemed to slam itself up against the promising peace of mind that had been growing in me as we ascended into the forest.  It was loud, also.  Two hundred women away from home, all talking at once.  I knew only one of them.  We found our room, which we shared with two other women, and began to unpack.  We did not get far before there was a call to dinner.  The cafeteria was literally packed with chewing, speaking, laughing women.  It was hard not to notice the joy present; joy seemed like an old firend I had not seen in a very long time.  I watched it more than partook of it; but, it was pleasant to be in the midst of such happiness again.

I did not sleep well that night.  I rarely do my first night away from home, but that night my mind kept inviting me to pre-write the letter to my father.  However, I would just get started and the entire endeavor would go dead - my mind, blank.  I had still never cried about Mother's death or Daddy's arrest. Too ineffable to acknowledge tears.  Articulation might be a dam breaker.  Even my subconscious was afraid of the flood.  I tossed and turned, anxious for dawn.  I could not wait to get into my little black Pontiac and find some quiet, isolated place to talk to God.

By the time my three roommates awakened, I had showered and dressed and made my bed.  Sitting atop the flowers of the comforter, I tried to read my Bible while they took turns in the bathroom and flitted about the room preparing for the day.  I could not seem to quiet my mind or still my body.  When the four of us were ready to go to the cafeteria, I bowed out, telling Teri I would meet her for lunch.  She was a little disappointed, but I explained I needed time alone.  We arranged a meeting place outside the eating area; and, I all but ran to the car, digging in my purse for the keys so that I could get into it quickly.  I felt like I was about to make an escape, although I did not know "from" what or "to" what.

Once inside the car, with the heater blowing warm air and my heart racing, I pulled out of the parking lot and headed back out toward the highway.  I was looking for a quiet, undisturbed place to ultimately pull over and be alone.  Just before Running Springs, I noticed a small campground and drove into it.  Hidden among the trees was a solitary spot just big enough for the car.  I parked, turned the motor off and sat there taking deep breaths, wondering what to do next.  I knew this was going to be an important moment for me, but I was not quite sure how to proceed.

Reaching over to the passenger seat, I grasped the pen and paper I had brought along with me.

"Dear Daddy...." I began.  "I wish.."  No. Erase that.

"Dear Daddy.." I tried again.  "My hands look like yours, so I have acrylic fingernails now.  It masks the shape of them - makes my fingers look longer so I do not think about you when I look at them now.  Why did you keep your fingernails so long?  It kinda made me sick."

I was crying by then, and nauseous.  My reactions when it came to Daddy always surprised me.  I looked at my hands and cried quietly for a while.  Then I wrote again.  "I have made some poor decisions with my own life, Daddy, because ..."  I had to think why.  What had driven my actions - was still driving them?  I was barely hanging on emotionally, trying to function above the undercurrent of grief.  I was about to reach down and touch that current, and I knew it would shock me.

I continued. "...because I think who I am changed when I found out who you are.  It seems the weight of  understanding all of this is so heavy sometimes that I want to escape it and find a place to be where this pain does not exist.  I have run away from God, I think.  I have hurt my husband."

Then I just felt dirty.  Marred and useless.  I could not get this right and had no idea where to begin.  I sobbed and sobbed and the well became a prayer.  I honestly did not know who I was anymore.  Though it made little sense to me at the time, I understood that my father's pedophilia had somehow redefined me.  He had covertly passed the gauntlet of shame to his children, and it had so clandestinely floated down upon me that until that moment I had not recognized its presence. I loathed a part of myself that I could not even find!   Intrinsic, bottomless shame lurked about, an enemy too formidable for me to conquer yet.\

I cried out to God, throwing the useless missive to Daddy onto the floorboard of the car.  I did not need to talk to Daddy; I needed God to talk to me!  I crossed my arms in front of me on the steering wheel and laid my head against them, bowing before the only One I felt could give me any clarity.

"I don't know who I am anymore, God!  I don't understand how to recreate my present in light of the redefining of my past. I have failed You in the process of coping."

As the words spilled out of me and onto God, it became clear that what I really wanted was His opinion -His acceptance.

"I feel unclean and ugly, Father," I cried.  "It is as though I have been placed on hold or set out in the hall because I have been bad.  I am a wanderer looking for home, disoriented and confused."

A question was forming itself as I prayed.  It seem rhetorical - unanswerable save for some miracle.  But I could not hold it back.  I nearly screamed it!  "God, how do You see me?"

It bounced off the car windows and seemed to echo around the interior for a few minutes.  Then I became extraordinarily still.  Spent.  The question had gotten to the bottom of it.  Did God still love me?  I sat in a vacuum waiting for an answer.

I glanced at the clock.  How it could already be time to meet Teri was beyond my understanding.  I wiped my nose and my face with the tissues that were in the glove box, then started the car and left.  The question still hung in the air as though freshly asked.  How could I expect God to answer such a query?  How foolish to ask it.  What did I expect? An audible voice? "This is how I see  you."

When I arrived at the retreat center, the morning session had not quite ended.  I slipped through the back door and took a seat on the back row just as the leader told everyone to rise and sing the last worship song.  I stood with the group and sang quietly, arms lifted up to God.  The atmosphere was sweet and in it I felt a great sense of peace.  My heart was focusing on God and not myself for the first time that morning. I was unaware of the women standing in front of me, and they seemed equally unaware of me; so, I was taken aback when one of them whirled around and grabbed my hand as soon as the singing ended.

"God told me to tell you that you are beautiful!"  she proclaimed. "And you are!"

1987

Maybe it was because Daddy needed a conscience that he would call me from Europe to tell me of children and young men he had met there.  The long distance revelations literally made me sick to my stomach, leading to immediate diarrhea.  Though I did not know of any other children my father had molested save the one he had been with when he was arrested, he did confess to me right before Mother died that the struggle with homosexual pedophilia had been lifelong.  We were in his car on a rainy Saturday afternoon running errands in Fort Worth.  I broached the subject of how his counseling with the psychiatrist was going; and, it was the only time he ever answered that question, though I asked it once again several months later, after Mother's death.  "Your mother would just lie there!" he hissed.  "I need more than that!"

The sum total of his counseling experience to that point was that Mother was the reason he was "in love" with a little boy!  If she had been an adequate lover, he would not have strayed.

"So you are saying it is Mother's fault?"

At the question, Daddy set his face, bottom lip reaching up to cover upper lip, and nodded his head in self-righteous indignation, as if now I understood what really happened.  Stunned, I felt myself shrinking into a tiny wad in the passenger seat beside him.  The idea of his pedophilia was so new and my knowledge of the sexual addiction so limited that I just shriveled for my mother's sake at the suggestion that she made him desire perverted sex.  The desire to abuse children sexually could never have been Mother's fault.  That was clear no matter how ignorant I was of actual reasons people turn that direction.  But if he truly believed that, I was left with nothing to say.

"...and before that...before Mother was inadequate in bed...?  You never struggled with this...this..thing?"  My obvious trepidation was so evident in my demeanor and voice that I suppose my father was caught off guard so that he confessed he did not remember a day when his mind was free of desire for men and little boys.

Many circumstances and conversations made sense to me then. Angelica, my parents' apricot toy poodle, for instance.  Before Daddy's arrest, in the months Mother was so ill, he had suddenly given Angelica to a small boy at their church.  Shocked, Mother called me to tell me what Daddy had done.

"I don't know why he would just give her away like that, Kay."  Her heart was clearly broken.  "Does he think I'm going to die soon, do you think?"

"What did he say, Mother?"

"Just that the little boy lives with his grandmother and is lonely - wants a puppy."  There is such incredulity in her tone.

"I don't know, Mother.  I don't know what he is thinking."

Sitting in the car, listening to my father, it all made sense to me.  Angelica had not been gone a week when the child's grandmother brought Mother's precious little pet back to her.  Did not want the dog.  Did not want to see Mr. Strickling again. Angelica died a few weeks later; Mother saw it as a precursor of her own death.  My mind was racing so frenetically with newly birthed clarity that it did not give my reason long enough to process the burning question that exploded, minus diplomacy, from my gaping mouth.

"So, the little boy you gave Angelica to..did you...?"

Sternly.  "I didn't get that far with him."

Could that really have been my Daddy's answer?  I do not know this man beside me in the errand car.  The mundane mixed with the complex - the convoluted.  "How many, Daddy?"  That should have been the next question my mind constructed, but it never came.  The possibility of two children had short-circuited the progressive process of my thinking as even one had been almost impossible to comprehend.

"I'm not going to talk about this anymore, Kay."

So much noisy buzzing in my head sent up from the pounding of my heart made his imperative sound far away and muffled.  He had arrived at the grocery store parking lot, turned off the engine, and was pulling his weight out of the car one leg at a time.  Before he lifted his body from the seat, he turned to say, "You coming with me?"

Sleep that evening was preempted for me by parading images and reconstructed conversations crowding my consciousness, energizing every nook and corner of my wakeful psyche.  One revelation climbed upon another, making sense of random events or words.  From Germany came a phone call from Daddy during which he commented about the bodies of the young servicemen with their "long legs and high hips." I had not response at the time - no understanding of the evolution of the thought.

"I love Bill more than you do," his pensive comment, again with no context, during a family outing when he was watching Bill play with the kids.

On a recent afternoon with Mother, when she and I were alone in her home, she took me to her bedroom and sat me down on the side of her bed while she rummaged through a stack of papers beside her bed. Hidden in the midst of notes and cards, written upon and blank, was a picture from a magazine that Mother hugged to her chest as she came to sit close beside me. The small pocket of air between her body and mine became dense with a tension that was either foreboding or precious; clearly what she wanted my eyes to examine with hers was either quite meaningful or certainly dreadful.

"I don't know what to think of this," she sighed, handing me graphic pornography she had found among Daddy's things.

There is no occasion on which I would have purposed to glance at the copulation before me on the printed page.  No excuse could be made for a motive I did not understand except Daddy was a man, and men look.  Speaking was not necessary, as Mother clearly knew what she srumised form the purloined porn.

"You know he doesn't have sex with me.  He hasn't for many years."  She stopped, clearly gauging whether or not she should share the thought bursting to be said.  "And when he did have sex with me, it was like a big old bear!"  There!  She had told someone.  It was not just she who was inadequate. "He told me on our wedding night that he was 'slow to arouse.' I guess I know what that means now."  No tear.  Resignation instead.  "Should I show this pornography to your father?"

I did not know.  I was a daughter struggling to understand, on any comforting level, my parents' relationship.  My only question, "To what purpose?"

"So he'll know I found them. So he'll know I know he thinks about this sort of thing but not with me."  Anger was blushing her cheeks and pushing her voice louder.  "Do you know what he said to me at the mall last week?"  Rhetorical.  "He looked me up and down, like I was on sale, and said..."  A pause; an embarrassing pause.   "At least you still have nice legs."  Now tears, and they are not angry; they are abashed and the hazel orbs from which they escape are asking me to define that moment for her in a way that saves her.

"He's fat, bald, toothless, and arrogant, and he is looking at what is wrong with you?"  Unbelievable!  Half-smile now creeps across Mother's stricken face.  Correct answers are a lovely thing!

"One of our friends called yesterday and told me your father had asked her if she and he were close friends.  Affirming that they were, Daddy eagerly asked her: 'Would you do anything I asked you to do?' "   Confused, the friend asked for clarification and was appalled when Daddy's tone became sexual.  Her friend had called Mother to let her know she had sufficiently rebuffed Daddy and was duly insulted.

My father's aberrant behavior, flowing in sensory recollection during the fitful night of revelation, started to make sense, but only as some pieces of a jigsaw puzzle begin to create a sense of the entire picture.  I knew of his pedophilia by this time, and that had been missing when in weary wonder I had tried to synthesize the overload of the uncharacteristic conversations and actions of my daddy.  A second father was rising out of the miasma like an unsteady monster from the ocean in a forgettable horror flick.

After Mother's death, Daddy made several trips to Europe; some alone, some with groups he had organized to take there. He and Mother had made friends with some military families while they were there; and, Daddy visited them and their children.  It was disturbing to me that these acquaintances had such trust in Jim Strickling.  They had loved Mother, too, having experienced many lovely evenings in her German apartment.  Frustrated that I had no way of contacting these families and worried that I was being hyper-vigilant, one afternoon I determined to contact my father's psychiatrist, to whom he no longer went.  Maybe Daddy is well; perhaps he was simply "acting out" because Mother was dying and he felt groundless, more afloat in life.

"I know you cannot reveal things to me that you and my father talked about, but I have some concerns about his continuing behavior with children," I began.

"Yes, and whata might those concerns be?"  his doctor queried.

"He tried to build an inappropriate relationship with a boy who lived next door to us, and now he is in Europe calling me to tell me when he has met some young man or discovered a new family with children.  It makes me physically and emotionally uncomfortable."

"As it should."  Very terse.  Guarded.

"Honestly, I do not want to be hyper-vigilant," I began.

This time he interrupted. "You cannot save everyone from your father, you know.  That is not your position."

"How should I treat him?  Is he doing well?"

The doctor took a deliberate breath, giving himself time to form an answer to my question.  "Treat him like you would the man next door with the same problem."

There was only breathing on both ends of the line while I let that sink in.  "I would have nothing to do with a man next door with the same problem."  It was half question - is that what the doctor meant?

"Precisely."  It sounded like the psychiatrist might have taken a drink of water before he ended our conversation with, "Your father stayed in counseling only as long as the court ordered.  I did not find a great desire on his part to change."

"Thank you."  Click.

Because he had finished his probation and participated in his court-ordered therapy, Daddy was basically free to do as he wished after a year.  So, he decided to teach Sunday School to young boys in the church he had joined following Mother's death.  Of course, these people did not know him.  I lived in California and my sisters in south Texas, so policing everything Daddy did was impossible.  Why he felt the need to call and tell me of the Sunday School class is to this day an enigma. Perhaps to have his children become the conscience he did not possess without Mother in his life would explain the confession.  A murderous indignation inflamed me, however.  Being his conscience was of no interest to me, but keeping him from abusing children was!

"You cannot teach Sunday School to little boys, Daddy! If you do not quit today, I will call your pastor and tell him what you are!" What could he be thinking? He wanted me to protect him from himself!  Would that the law had done that on the January day in 1985 when he showed himself to be a pedophile!

He hung up with a brusque, "Okay, Kay."

Stomach churning and emptying, mind reeling and unsettled with the outcome of the conversation, I was left feeling helpless and ineffective.  I sat down to compose a letter to my father. For the first time in the two years since his arrest, I was able to look at the words homosexual pedophile and actually robe the man in the garment he owned.  Had he been an alcoholic, I challenged him, he would not keep a cabinet full of liquor by which he intended to strut every day, feigning contempt for the very elixir that hypnotized and debased him.  A drug addict would also be unwise to strew his paraphernalia about his lodgings in perverse abandon, mocking the medicine that bends and tortures his existence.  So, a homosexual pedophile does not engage with young male children, garner their trust, and hope to God he can control himself.

The letter was a virtual slap in the face, the kind a person needs when he or she has lost all sense of reason and must be brought back to reality.  The cheeks need to sting, the eyes to water, so the mind can jar awake and comprehend again.  I put a stamp on the churlish chastisement, my only hesitation being that I had not said quite enough.

Late in the evening a few days later the phone rang.  The children were in their rooms either asleep or studying.  Our door was closed and I was getting ready to bathe while Bill sat on the scarlet chaise longue and read.  I was unprepared for my father's vitriol that spewed across the miles to me almost at the moment I said hello.

"Kay! Never, ever talk to me again the way you did in your letter!  You have no right to speak to me the way you did!....."

The voice that is my father's keeps trouncing my senses in an ever louder, ever more rancorous rant.  I cannot breathe.  Taking a deep breath is not possible as my heart has swollen so large from the attack that it has left my lungs no room to expand.  Not as equipped for this battle as I thought; I needed to be rescued.

"I am what you say I am!" he is screaming.  I know he cannot speak it, either - and he hates me that I did.

Getting just enough wind in my throat,  I manage, "Da......da....daddy....I...c..c..can't...t...t...ta.lk..t.t..to..you."

Bill is holding onto me and taking the receiver from my hand.  I go to the bathroom and vomit up my father as my husband takes the battle on for me.

1987

In the fall of 1986, we moved  our family to southern California.  Bill had taken a new engineering position with a small building division of a major national developer. This would be our third time to live in California, and Bill could not have been more pleased.  Housing there was so much more expensive than in north Texas that the perfunctory relocation trip to preview potential homes was deflating.  After several long, tiring days of walking through over-priced housing, Bill and I settled on a new development in a small growing community approximately sixty miles from Los Angeles.  The problem with our choice was, the house was yet to be built.  We put a deposit down on dirt; I went back to Texas to sell our home there; and, Bill searched for a rental.

Despite the packing, cleaning, tossing, sorting and saying good-byes to friends, I was glad to leave the trauma of the past few months behind.  Mother's death, Daddy's arrest and the trial that had not gone well for Bill's company had left me confused, disappointed and essentially emotionally and spiritually disoriented.  I knew my son's safety was in question if my father was anywhere near and I had become hyper-vigilant around him, necessarily.  Every mile away from Texas that the humming tires of the van took us was another deep breath I could inhale.

Daddy had begun to take groups of elderly people to Europe on tours of places he and Mother had visited when they lived there in the seventies. I do not have a real understanding of how he kept his budding tourist business alive; but, he did make several trips across the ocean with his septuagenarians in tow.  He was by then living with the two Cambodian men.  If I tried to speak with him about the appropriateness of the situation, I was immediately cut off with the angry response that it was none of my business.  Actually, it was; if, of course, he wanted a family.  If.

I still found it impossible to actually say "homosexual pedophile," so confronting  him was always very passive-aggressive.  Always at the top of my emotional pile of confusion over his life was the hope that it was just one time, with one young man.  Mother was dying.  He was emotionally barren with grief. He had acted out.  Daddy's living paradigm was, however, counterintuitive to that hope.

Mile after mile on interstate 10, state after state falling away.  The subtle hope I was not dragging behind garbage from the past eighteen months proved a bit unrealistic, as I had not dealt with how any of the trauma had affected me.  I brought the garbage into the car and did not even know it.  And, I could not get away from Daddy.  He came to me.

Daddy loved to watch "The Price is Right" and had written the show for tickets in the spring of 1987.  Out of the blue, the tickets showed up in the mailbox of our rental home one afternoon in May. I am not much of a television watcher and knew almost nothing about the specific games played on the program.  My daughters loved the show and could not believe I had tickets!

"You gotta go, Mom!" they shrieked.

I had no desire to fight Los Angeles traffic to sit around all day and wait to be selected for a television game show I did not even know how to participate in.  It was a shame Daddy was not there to enjoy himself, I thought.  The next afternoon, unannounced, my father pulled up into my driveway - from Texas!  I literally nearly fainted, but not from the sheer joy of seeing him.  My heart and mind, not to mention the schedule of my busy life, needed some preparation in  order to relate to him.  My greeting was stiff - a bit unrelenting.

"Daddy, what are you doing here?"

He had come up to Long Beach for the wedding of a young Cambodian couple.  Of course, he had known all along he was coming to California; thus, the tickets to the show.  It took me a while to put all that together in my confounded state.  I just thought it a happy coincidence, and he made me none the wiser.

Over dinner that night with our family, we decided that Daddy, Bill and I should go to the taping of "The Price is Right" together, and Daddy would return to his friends in Long Beach from the Burbank studio.  In the meantime, I had him to entertain for three days.  My daughters were in school, and my son was at home with me. There were also several other little boys in the neighborhood who were buddies of my son. I would  have been more comfortable if I had owned an AK-47 and walked around with it over my shoulder in order to blow my father away if he looked at one of them wrong.  My son could not sit on his grandfather's lap.  When bidden by my father to do so, my child made it clear to Daddy that Mommy had said he could not.  Daddy found this rule hurtful and offensive. I thought the rule was better than having to use an assault rifle!  If the neighbor children came to the house, I did not let them out of my sight.  They also were not allowed to be near Daddy or alone with him even when we went swimming in a local lake.  Though Daddy felt cornered, I knew he was so lucky not to be in prison; so, it was even more fortuitous that his daughter even allowed him in the same room with her boy!

Next door to us lived a child of nine or so - a bit too old to play with Will.  We knew his parents reasonably well considering the short time we had been living in the lease.  The young man's dad and stepmom both worked, so the boy was a latch-key kid who came home and rode his bike around the neighborhood or shot baskets in the driveway until his stepmom came home around four. He was a nice, gregarious child and Daddy befriended him almost immediately, shooting hoops with him in the evening while I was making dinner.  Then my dad would sit on the front porch in a lawn chair enjoying the "cool down" of the California desert evenings and the boy would come over to chat with the old man next door who paid attention to him.  I could see all the action from my kitchen workplace and felt uneasy about what looked to me like my father's manipulation of my neighbor's son.  After observing Daddy's game plan for  a second evening, my stomach was in knots so I could not eat.   When the dishes were cleared away and my children were  preparing for bed, I went to my father where he had wandered again out onto the front porch.  Certain of my innate understanding of his designs on the boy yet very uncomfortable in approaching my father as his superior, I found myself just standing in the porch light glow, feeling very much in the dark and inadequate to meet the obvious head-on.

I tried to put words together in my mind and practice them.  They would not string together correctly; and, I was, quite frankly, afraid of a confrontation with Daddy over his pedophilia.  I had tried the day before when he went out to golf at a local course to broach the issue of how his counseling was going, and he had all but told me to never talk about it again.  This was not just the "pink elephant" in the room; Daddy had a serious, criminal problem.  I had rescued him from jail, yet I was not privy to information about his healing process.  Of course, there was no healing - or any desire for it.  That was the "rub."

"Daddy, why don't you come inside, now," was about all I could muster.

Maybe it was the condescending tone of my voice or his own guilty conscience, but Daddy rose from the lawn chair, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, then turned to follow me inside.

"You know, that young man next door is lonely.  I think he's enjoyed spending time with me."  Clueless?  Or was he trying to justify himself?  Maybe he just thought me stupid.

"You cannot help him, Daddy," I seethed. "You, of all people, cannot help him."  Then immediately I ran upstairs with diarrhea, an emotional reflex that had become common for me whenever I tried to communicate with my father.

Driving to Burbank the next morning gave Bill and me a break from Daddy, as he followed us in his van.  Neither of us really felt like talking about my father, and I did not want to relive the evening before.  I absolutely expected Daddy to be a contestant on the game show because the timing for it all worked out so well. The process for entering the audience is rather arduous. We arrived by ten in the morning, relinquished our tickets, then sat around chatting up all the other audience members for literally hours.  Daddy had prepared himself to be selected by wearing a ridiculous fishing hat and a shirt with crazy Texas stuff all over it.  He wanted to be as obvious as possible.  I, on the other hand, was wearing a turquoise sundress and, around my neck, a silver necklace that kept slipping off center.  Bill had donned his usual Dockers and polo.

Over two hundred people were called forward in groups of five beginning shortly after lunch break.  The producer and his assistant interviewed each person, asking some pretty inane questions.  It did not really seem clear to me what the producer was looking for, but I really was not paying much attention.  It was not in my expectation at all that I would be chosen as a contestant.  I did not even reapply my lipstick after lunch.  Nor did I find it odd that I was asked five or six questions to the one question asked of the others in our group, including my father.  So, when the familiar words "Kay Farish, come on down!" blared from the auditorium speakers about half way through the taping, I could not have been more unprepared.  Of course, my necklace was crooked for the entire show, a reflection of my awkwardness in the moment.  I guessed most nearly correctly the price of an oak entertainment center and found myself beside Bob Barker onstage.  He was announcing that I could win a mini-van if I could just guess correctly its price by moving some numbers around on the board that was being shuttled toward me.  I tried and failed.  Guessed too high, I think.  However, as luck would have it, I was the second hour's best chance at the "big wheel" which I spun with gusto and won.  That put me into the "showcase showdown."  Oh, God.  This was way further into the program than I wanted to go.  If you lose the "showcase showdown" you must be an idiot, which I was beginning to think, by then, I was.  Sure enough, not only I, but the other contestant, also, bid too high; and , no one won the showcase that day.

I "lost" a mini-van, a big spa, a sailboat, and trip - and my father was mad at me!  Unbelievable!  He wanted the mini-van to take over to Europe for his tours. He would have won it because he knew the game.  My children were not even that upset!  Adult fathers do not stomp back to their cars mad because their children get to participate in something they do not.  I had stolen his thunder, lipstickless and wearing a sundress; I had played the game poorly!  It was not fair!

Where had my father gone?  Who was this stranger who had emerged from a jail cell months earlier and left my Daddy behind?


"My son should be ashamed of himself," my neighbor was saying to me a few weeks later.  "Your dad has written him a couple of letters, and my boy just has not taken the time to respond."

"Really?"  My stomach was beginning to rumble.  "What did my father say?"

"Oh, just that he wants to be my son's friend and your father cannot understand why he has not written back."

I would have preferred death to this conversation.  Quite literally.  I was finally going to have to verbalize the unspeakable.  Best just to blurt it out.  No practicing in my head - no time to rehearse how to tell her.  "My father is a homosexual pedophile and your son cannot - should not - ever write to him."  All in a rush of breath.  Vomited words born on air.

"What?"  My neighbor was incredulous. Thought she had heard incorrectly.

I had to say it again.  I didn't know if I could. "My father is..."

My friend finished the sentence for me..."a homosexual pedophile?"  Her face froze in its horrified expression as I fought back angry, mortifying tears.  When she finally exhaled, my name came flying out with the force of her breath. "Oh, Kay!"

Rushing to respond, I said:  "I am so very sorry and embarrassed.  Your son can never write my father back, and I will call my dad and tell him never to bother your child again."

Of course, my friend wanted to know the whole sordid story as did all my neighbors by the afternoon.  It was good practice for me, saying "homosexual pedophile" several times in one day.  It was no less horrifying for the repetition, though.  The words themselves had the effect of a nauseating virus each time they were uttered.

Daddy's phone rang several times before he picked up that evening.  After each unanswered ring, I had to force myself to stay connected.

"Hello."  At last.

"Daddy.  It's Kay."

"Hi, Kay."

"Daddy?"  Going over my lines in my head before actually saying them.  Then:  "Daddy, why did you write the young man next door?"

"What?"

"Why did you write letters to the neighbor's son?"

No response. Just Daddy's breathing.

"I told his stepmom she is not to give him any letters from you because you were arrested for having problems with young boys, Daddy."  I still could not call him a pedophile to his face.

"Okay. I won't write again."  His feeble response.

"I cannot believe you put me in this awful position, Daddy.  I felt so embarrassed for you...and for me.  Please do not ever do that again."

"All right, Kay."

What did I expect?  Something more than "All right, Kay."

I hung up the phone and went to the bathroom.

1994

 I took the phone with me to the back patio when I heard my friend's voice, weak and tenuous, on the other end of the line.  My face began to flush and already I was asking God to help me know what to say.  In May, only two months earlier, I had visited my dying friend and had held her close as she spoke of her desire to stay on earth for her husband and two young sons.  As the journey onto earth from the darkness of the womb to the light and hope of living and breathing is a solitary journey, so death must be borne alone as a passing through the shadowy unknown into an uncertain light. My friend, while readying for the pilgrimage, faced the fears inherent in the process of her death.

"Kay," she was saying, "this will be the last time I will be able to talk to you."  My friend was choking on her  tears.

Slowly I eased down into the padded lawn chair that faced my beautiful back yard.  Hummingbirds in flight around the bottlebrush trees and the bright happy faces of the magenta and gold gazanias that smiled at me from the back slope made Cathette's message surreal on that August afternoon.  How could she be dying when so much life abounded?

"There are many things in my life that I am thankful for.  And you are at the top of my list."  Composing herself.

I cannot seem to speak. Words will not even form.  Only an impression.  The face of my beautiful friend, fair lovely skin, uncommonly large dimples, perfect lips, and the thickest, most luxurious dark hair I have ever seen on a woman.  Before me are her enormous blue-green eyes, and I can see her tiny hands move to her mouth to cover it as she giggles.  I only want to touch my friend.  I cannot bear her voice.

"The doctor has begun my morphine and already it makes me tired and often incoherent.  The pain is great; I am told I will need more and more medicine; so, before I cannot say it, I must thank you.  Thank you for always being my dearest friend.  Thank you for introducing me to Jesus.  Without you, Kay, I would not know HIm; I would be without peace that I will see Him soon."  Controlling a sob.  " I called to say good-bye."

"Oh, friend."  I wished to be eloquent, but could only weep and call her friend.  "I will miss you so much!"  Bursting from both of us were heaving sobs of sorrow, uncontained for a few rending moments.

When we could speak again it was of friendship and the joys of knowing so deeply another's very heart and soul.  Oh, I loved my friend!  I did not understand why she had to leave so soon.

When the line went dead, sounding like a heart monitor that no longer has a beating organ beeping its significance, I greeted loss; it had become my companion in recent years.  At the time I could not have identified it by name, only by the haunting doubt it brought and the detritus of disappointment it left behind.  Where is justice in the battle for life and death?  Surely my friend will see the Lord to whom I introduced her, but what could be His purpose for a mother's death and a family's grief?  I am a Christian; I do not want to blame my God.  But I am now afraid of Him; He seems untamed and capricious in His choices.  It is clear I do not think like He does, but what I could not yet admit was that I judged my God to be wrong again.

God had taken Becky "home" almost exactly two years before - also in August, like Cathette...and Mother.  A mother with a husband and two children, she was felled as Cathette was, with metasticized breast cancer.  I had first met Becky at Calvary Chapel when we worked together in the nursery.  Though she had a gurgling, gorgeous baby girl close in age to my youngest, she began to tell me of the daughter, Lisa, she had just buried.  Lisa arrived with microcephaly, a condition which caused the fontanel to close, making brain growth impossible. Lisa's severe disability was the catalyst for Becky's faith in Jesus.  She wanted to tell Lisa's story, but knew writing was not her gift.  For the hour or so we were in the nursery, Becky told me the heart-breaking story of her little Lisa, and I just knew I would write it.  It was published in 1980 by a major Christian publisher and went on to be translated into Spanish and Portuguese.  Becky and I traveled to Canada together to appear on Christian television there; and, she and her husband, Sam, were guests on the 700 Club in the United States.  The book was a great blessing; our friendship, an even deeper gift.

We could not have known at time how evanescent our precious relationship was.  Her hand brushed across an unfamiliar hardening in her breast on what began as an ordinary day.  The tumor had been hiding, a covert enemy that would prove deadly.  After her mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy, Becky chose to have her breasts reconstructed.  Life seemed to settle back into its normal routine; we all relaxed - her husband, her children, her friends.

A few months later, Becky called to say the pain she had been experiencing in her upper body was a recurrence of her cancer; this time in her bones.  The prognosis was grim; the chemotherapy brutal.  Ultimately a hospital bed was brought into her home, and Becky wasted away a day at a time.We had several conversations toward the end of her life about leaving her children and Sam. As a Christian, there were questions about God's purposes and miraculous healing.  We prayed, begging God to touch her body and bring her back to health.  When she became too ill to have visitors, I would talk to her for a few minutes on the phone.  The last time I heard her voice was three or four days before Becky died when, with some help from her mother-in-law, she phoned me.  Her voice sounded very far away, as if she were already suspended between heaven and earth; and, I found myself trying to take deep breaths for her as I listened to the struggle her words were having in their desperation to manifest.

"I have already given up my family - Sam and the kids.  I've made peace with that."  Her breathing is labored; her voice very small. "...but, Kay...I just didn't thing it would take this long to die."

So profoundly weary of the hopeless conflict with her unvanquishable foe and so fully given over to the victory that is her imminent death, Becky lay in a netherworld between heaven and earth.

"He will come and get you soon," I promised as my heart cried silently to her Savior that this be true.

"I hope so," she breathed. "Pray for me."

I did.  I prayed for her as I heard the raspy breath from her closing lungs push in and out of her, awaiting the command to cease forever the effort.  I did. I prayed for death, though that meant leaving a son and daughter and a man who loved her.  I did.  I prayed for her deeply, deeply weary husband who had watched his lovely Becky fade away; who needed solace that she suffered no more, but saw the face of God.  I did. I prayed that in her last moment here on earth she would not be afraid, for her first moment in heaven would be the salve that healed for eternity any suffering here on earth. I did pray.  But when I put my phone back on its cradle, I had many questions that my God had left unanswered.

1979

October 12, 1979, should have changed Daddy's life forever.  He awoke as usual to have breakfast with Mother, who had cut the last remaining roses from the garden and put them in a crystal pitcher on her kitchen table.  From the bathroom where he was shaving, Daddy could smell bacon frying and hear the sounds of utensils clinking as Mother fluffed eggwhites and folded them into the other waffle ingredients.  The bay window behind the table was opened and the fresh morning air gently wandered into the room.  Mother was busy slicing and sugaring fresh strawberries when Daddy slipped into his seat.  There was not much conversation between them as they savored their breakfast; they were conscious only of the other's chewing and swallowing.  Daddy took his napkin and wiped his face while Mother picked up her Bible to read their morning scripture verses as they always did after breakfast.  Her reading was deliberate as if she were devouring the words as she had her waffles.  When the Bible was closed, Mother and Daddy clasped hands and prayed together with special emphasis on the lives of their children and grandchildren.

The morning routine now complete, Daddy kissed his wife good-bye and set about his day selling insurance.  Birds flitted back and forth in the trees outside and called to each other with the news of their morning as Daddy got into his car and turned the key.  It could not have been a more beautiful day!  He rolled the windows down and turned the radio on to the love songs station and cruised slowly down the street toward the freeway and work.  My father's appointment that day took him to a rural area west of Fort Worth.  The drive in the country was refreshing on such a sparkling morning.  Fall was cheating winter out of some of its days, and the golden, red, and purple leaves clinging to the trees that lined the highway on either side mesmerized my father as he rode along.  He was not paying attention to the road ahead, so the bend in it took him by surprise.  To his right he noticed a work crew oiling down a dirt road that ran alongside the highway.  Trucks were coming in and out of the area hauling sand.  The construction of the access road had created oil slicks on the blacktop which were indiscernible to the driver - my father.

Just as the road began a slow upgrade, Daddy saw a truck come across it fifty feet in front of him - too late for Daddy to adequately stop.  My father's big sedan hit a large oil patch and careened out of control.  Frantically, he tried to maneuver out of the spin as his foot searched for the brakes. Suddenly the car began lurching forward at great speed, as Daddy's right foot failed to find the correct pedal and pressed hard down onto the accelerator.  The nose of the car then headed straight for the tailgate of the huge truck, and by some miracle missed it.  Daddy found himself looking up into the face of the very surprised truck driver as the car then headed straight for the cab of the truck.  Only inches from contact, the car suddenly swerved to the left and took flight, sailing through the air for fifty feet, crossing over a twenty foot deep ravine in its trajectory and shooting between two large trees before it nosed down for landing. The front end of the sedan hit a large oak tree, effectively stopping the car, which then settled down in a sand pit on all four wheels, upright.

Though the wreck happened within the space of a few seconds, to Daddy it seemed an eternity. Everything was in slow motion as he floated through the air over ravine and between trees. "Lord, is this the way I am going to end my life? Here, alone, without even a good-bye to Flossie?"  Suddenly the aromas of strawberry juice and syrup and the touch of his wife's hand as he had held it in prayer only hours before were all too vivid a recollection of a life that seemed now in the process of ending swiftly.

"No. It is not time for you, yet.  You still have some things to accomplish before you come to Me." Thought he heard a voice emanate from within the car as it sank into the sand.  Thought he had heard God.

Two wreckers dug the car out of the depths of dirt that cradled it.  The front end was heavily damaged and would ultimately require over a thousand dollars to repair; but, the man who was driving it home that evening had never felt so grateful to be alive.  The aroma of food slow-cooking in the oven assaulted his nostrils and piqued his awareness that he had left the nightmare of death for that day - cheated it out of its prize.  As his wife walked toward him to greet him with a kiss, she looked angelic - surreal - so glad was he to embrace her once again.

At dinner, Mother cried a little at the idea of losing Daddy without a real good-bye.  In contrast to the morning meal, the conversation over roast, potatoes, green beans and biscuits was animated and alive.  Both parents were  praising God for saving Daddy's life so he could do "what he still needed to accomplish."  My father had a fresh desire to serve God; a new understanding of God's love for him.

The following Sunday morning, my father heard a television preacher quote from the Bible: "This is the day that the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."  That was exactly how Daddy had been feeling since his brush with death!  Compelled to find the exact scripture verse, Daddy looked through the concordance in his Bible.  Psalm 118.  He read the entire psalm and found something even more astonishing. Verse 5. "I called upon the Lord in my distress.  The Lord answered me and set me in a large place."  That was it!  That was what God had done with the airborne car!  Set in a large sandy  place of safety, assuring Daddy that God was watching over him.

Some time later, my father wrote a letter to his dying sister.  He wanted her to be comforted by God in the last days of her life.  Within the letter, he told my aunt his near-death experience on that October day, wanting her to grasp the extent of God's love for him and her.  Curiously, nestled within the platitudes nd lofty longings of the letter was this telling sentence: "I know that He loves me, filthy and imperfect though I am; and if He can love me, how much more certain I am that He loves you."

1985

For her funeral, Mother had composed a letter for her family and wanted me to make a copy for each member.  A line was left at the top of the page, and I was to fill in the blank with the person's name.  Her legacy in question, Mother wanted each of us to know her heart.  Her words were generous and heart-felt, and spoke to us from her heavenly home.

"The trumpets have sounded and the King is coming!  Praise the Lord! He is carrying us through in His loving arms!  As I stand before Him today and look into His face, these are my requests of Him for you.

For Jimmy, my precious, devoted, loving husband who has gone far beyond the call of duty in his caring for me in recent days - I ask, Lord, give him an ever "closer walk with You."

And for my girls - when we started planning for our family we asked you, Lord, to give us mentally, physically and spiritually healthy bundles form heaven.  Since you always give us more than we dreamed of asking, we were overwhelmed at the beauty of each 'flower' you presented to us. Each flower was a different color and design with unique petals and form.  Slowly they unfolded at first, giving us glimpses of the talents and abilities that were part of the whole plant - the plan and design of their lives.  Then is seemed, Lord, we turned around one day to see each flower fully opened and we realized you had blessed each girl beyond all we had ever expected.  As their Creator, Lord, don't ever let them become complacent about or lazy with their miraculous gifts.  May they use them, Lord, to fulfill the separate, individual destinies for which You created them.

Thank you for our sons, Lord - for sending them just when we needed them to carry us through the good times and the rough times.  As different as their wives are and yet equally well designed, I pray for them that You give them wisdom, love, understanding, strength, and courage and that ever more You help them see more clearly who You are."

Mother then blessed each grandchild specifically and individually. "For all these, my grandchildren, I give you thanks today, dear Lord, and praise You for the short time you loaned them to us.  Bless them, protect them, and help them, with Your daily intervention, to find what they were born to be and then give them the grace and power to do it.  And, dear Lord, help them to somehow remember how very much I have loved them while I could touch and kiss them on the earth.

So now I give them all back to You...each one of my family and ask Your blessings.  We prayed each day for each one singly and I ask that they  learn to pray for each other in my absence. May we all meet here, in Heaven, one day for that final 'family' time with You.  For them this is a dark "Friday of death.'  But I know it is true that 'Sunday is on its way!'

I love you dearly and leave you my love, my Christ, and my blessings. 'For I know Whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day.' II Timothy 1:12.' "

A haziness shrouds much of my memory of Mother's actual funeral service.  I had been very busy with my children and with funeral preparations in the few days between her death and the church service for her.  I had written a poem for Mother, but knew I could not read it aloud.  Bill thought he could.  Mother wanted two songs sung: "It Is Well With My Soul" and "We Shall Behold Him."  A man with a rich baritone made us all believe that it was well with her soul because she was at that moment beholding Him.  No tears for me, though.  The experience was ineffable and bypassed the well from which tears are drawn to reach for a more unsettling, deeper sphere.  She had escaped.  How could I cry?

Somewhere between singing and preaching, Bill arose to the podium to read the poem over Mother's open casket.  There she lay all dressed in pink, peacefully present at this celebration of her life.  Stoically, Bill began to read in steady cadence my eulogy to my precious mother whom he loved.  Not surprisingly, in the recollectons of her sweet smile and welcoming hospitality, her former joys and recent sorrows, her love for her God and her children, came for Bill memories of robes that are "perfect" and fresh lemon meringue pies, weekend retreats for us when Mother cared for our children, her willingness to serve, her devastation over Daddy, and Bill's voice began to quiver.  In the rush to get home, it seemed at first that he had forgotten why he had been summoned.  In the reciting of the words, his heart was jolted and quaked with the reality that Mother was gone. He cried then.  Read and cried.  Stopping to control himself a bit, then going forward like a lurching train, he finished - made his way to the end.

August is so hot in Texas and I can still feel the sun on my neck and the sweat on my upper lip as I picked up daisies and rose petals to throw on Mother's open grave.  I remember wondering what she was doing in heaven at that very moment.  Was she still mesmerized by the face of Christ? The wonder of it eased the pain as the the light wind caught the flowers and placed them atop the casket now down deep in the ground, Mother inside forever.  She was not dead.  She was somewhere else and she was ebullient.

The processional finally made its way to her home now vacant of her presence yet overflowing with the sense that she had only recently departed.  Everything was still where she had placed it, as if she had only gone for a few minutes and would return soon.  From car after car came people carrying food into the house.  Casseroles, cakes, pies, breads, fried chicken and salads began to pile high on every imaginable kitchen surface.  The food was to nourish our family for several days as well as feed the funeral attendees as they came to pay their respects and to encourage us.  The kitchen bustling made my heart ache for my mother.   Bustling there was what she did best!  Her friends were so efficient that I made my way alone to the back porch where Mother and I had spent so much time that spring and summer.  It was there I had asked her to somehow let me know she was all right.

On the porch was a large circular redwood table and beside it a settee where we had sat and drunk sweet iced tea. In the chairs were vinyl cushions with bright white, yellow and green flowers printed on them.  I sighed wearily as I sat down, so thankful for a few minutes to reflect.  My body relaxed as I sank down into the vinyl meadow and laid my head back to look up at the crystalline blue sky.  Deep breaths.  Thoughts cleared.  What happened next, I would never have expected!  Mother's face appeared before me, glowing! It was as if tiny stars twinkled in the air around her and the radiance of her countenance made me sit up straight. Mother's eyes gleamed with joy and her smile seemed to be the purest of reactions to a sense of complete peace.

"It's all right, precious," she cooed.  "It's all right."

She hung there a moment longer so I could drink her in, and then she was gone.

"I'm so glad, Mother," I breathed.  "So glad."

2005

Like all the other photographs of executed prisoners at the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, this young teenaged boy wore a white card with a number emblazoned on it.  What caught my attention, though, was that his number was attached to his body with a safety pin!  Face after beaten, swollen face assaulted me as I walked through the museum in October of 2005.  Six thousand of them!  Up to twenty thousand Cambodians were tortured and murdered in the former Tuol Suay Pray High School that became known as S-21.  Only seven people survived.  The government mandated each prisoner be captured on film before execution.

From 1969 until 1973 the United States killed nearly one hundred fifty thousand peasants by the intermittent bombing of North Vietnam sanctuaries in Cambodia.  For refuge, agrarian peasants fled to Phnom Penh, the capitol, by the thousands, disrupting the economic and military balance of the country.

Pol Pot, the leader of the Red Cambodians, or the Khmer Rouge, seized this instability as an opportunity to form the communist peasant farming society he had worked toward since he had witnessed it firsthand in China.  Mao's "Great Leap Forward" involved the forced evacuation of cities and the deaths of those deemed to be enemies of the vision.  Pol Pot created the "Super Great Leap Forward" with his army of predominantly trigger-happy adolescent boys, and seized control of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975.  Declaring it to be "Year Zero," Pol Pot began his cultural cleansing by purging Cambodia of capitalism, western culture, religion - any foreign influences.  Embassies were closed, foreign languages were banned, money was forbidden, businesses were shuttered and parents were made to relinquish control of their children.  Bicycles, radios and television were outlawed and citizens were isolated completely from the outside world.  All Cambodian cities were forcibly evacuated, including over two million residents of Phnom Penh, who were marched out to the countryside on foot.  Those who did not perish along the way were forced into the "killing fields" where they died by the millions from disease, malnutrition, overwork or execution.  Deadly purges eliminated the educated - doctors, lawyers, teachers.  Annihhilated also were religious leaders, including Buddhist monks, and the wealthy, for redistribution of their possessions.  Red Cambodians wanted to remove "what is rotten" from their realm.  Up to twenty-five percent of the population of Cambodia was crucified in this coup.

In the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's, Cambodia sent its best and brightest to universities in America and Europe. Many of these young people traveled to southern California to attend UCLA, USC, Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Los Angeles.  With degrees in hand, most of the graduates returned to their homeland to integrate their skills into the economy there.  Many of these intellectuals became the first casualties of the bloodbath that followed under Pol Pot.  Those who had settled instead in the United States became a refuge for their relatives who had escaped the carnage of the Khmer Rouge.  Ultimately a community of approximately thirty-five thousand Cambodians grew in the port city of Long Beach, California.  Many of the refugee families branched out from the west coast to the midwest for jobs and education.  This was how my mother met the Cambodian family from Long Beach at her church in Texas one Sunday morning in 1983.

Aware of their intense struggle to survive and their undaunted courage in pursuing escape, Mother befriended the family.  Love made up for the language barrier as Mother spent time with her new friends in her home.  As she became aware of their needs, Mother called on friends and family to supply food, clothing, and even employment.  Though Daddy was supportive of his wife's new ministry, it was she with whom they related.  Over the weeks and months before Mother's cancer recurred in 1984, my parents became acquainted with the extended family of their Asian friends, dining on several occasions with Long Beach relatives who were visiting Texas.  Such a strong connection was forged that my parents were invited to family weddings, birthdays and Cambodian holiday festivities.

The events between 1983 and 2005 had all but stunted my memories of Mother's sweet relationship with the refugees.  When I saw the missionary film presented at our church one Sunday in early 2005, I was unaware of why the faces of the Cambodian orphans so deeply resonated with me, compelling me to make plans to travel half way around the world to be a part of a groundbreaking ministry to orphans, Foursquare Children of Promise.  That is how I found myself face to face with images of the Cambodian holocaust in the Tuol Sleng Museum that October day.

It was apparent to Daddy after Mother died we children were not going to be responsible for him, especially in terms of regulating his conscience.  Nor did he really want us much involved in his activities.  In 1987, after our family had moved to California, Daddy sold the house in which Mother died and rented an apartment with two young Cambodian men.  On a visit to Texas in 1988, we met his roommates briefly when we came to his apartment to take him to lunch.  His new home was dark and depressing, and there was a palpable aura in it that made my skin crawl. The blinds were closed and the over-sweet scent of incense clung to Mother's sofa, which looked odd in its new environs, as if it were a pedigree puppy, once loved and pampered, now looking out forlornly from its dirty cage at the pound.  In fact, all the artifacts of life before then that now sat in Daddy's apartment seemed drudged up from another hemisphere and another age and plopped down will-nilly into the wrong universe.  In the recreation of his persona, my father had necessarily thrown the best part of my history with him away.  Feeling out of place and fidgety, I stepped outside to wait for Daddy in his parking lot.

The two Cambodian men were quite Americanized - tight pants, close-fitting silk shirts, greasy, slicked-back hair and designer sunglasses.  My gut understanding that they were homosexual partners was confirmed later by the journals that Daddy kept in therapy years  later. Daddy, it seems, felt no guilt about his sexual relationship with them because they were already practicing homosexuals when he met them.  At least, they were adults. Inserting the father of my youth into this alternative lifestyle was paradigm crushing and heartbreaking.  Making it through lunch with Daddy that day was like closing my eyes and jumping off a cliff, wondering when I would finally hit bottom and be done with it.

By the early nineties, Daddy had purchased a home in Arlington, Texas, and wrote to his children that a Cambodian family, a young man, his brother and his wife, were moving into the home with him.  In an effort to assure that he was taken care of in his declining years, Daddy had agreed to deed the home to the family upon his death if they would take care of him as he grew older.  Already Daddy was beginning to experience health difficulties, many of which were related to his weight, keeping him from being able to adequately oversee the upkeep of a home.  The Cambodian wife cooked and cleaned and the men manicured the yard and managed household duties.  Daddy exacted some rent from them, also, though it was minimal.  Both men had jobs, so Daddy was alone with the young woman during the day.

The arrangement worked relatively well until a baby boy was born to the couple.  Daddy's interest in the child was unsettling to the young mother.  Before the child turned two years old, she packed her belongings in the night and left without telling her husband where she was going or why she was leaving.  Aside from the fact she felt like a slave in his home, it seemed to me she was rescuing her newborn.  That I know of, her husband did not see her again.

The two men continued for a few years to live with Daddy, though the relationship became more fractured as some of Daddy's promises to them vaporized.  He changed his mind about deeding them the house because Daddy felt they were no longer carrying their weight with its maintenance.   Certainly the young men felt tricked and used.  Their parting with my father was bitter.  The last words he heard from the young deserted husband were, "I don't care if you live or die."

Daddy was, of course, trying to create for himself an alternate family in his insecurity about whether we sisters would come to the plate when he needed health care in his old age.  As a convicted child molester, he was not allowed to be admitted to any assisted care facility, as he might be too close to visiting children; so, he knew he needed a plan.  Also, he had lost the sense of family with us because he had destroyed it with his own two hands.  The Cambodians did not know he was a pedophile. To them he was Flossie's grieving husband, safe, old and needy.  My father actually made a few trips to Long Beach for their family celebrations over the years, and he was lovingly embraced.  But, he used them up and was finally left to redesign his life once again.

In 2005, when our plane landed in Phnom Penh, Mother's vision for impacting the lives of her Cambodian friend seemed to have come full circle.  Military men with guns on their shoulders watched our every move as we traveled through baggage claim and headed warily to the Foursquare Children of Promise headquarters downtown.  From the windows of the ministry van we watched in wonder as we saw trucks stuffed to overflowing with as many Cambodians as would fit in any vacant space.  No bicycle seemed reserved for just one person or just one dead chicken hanging from the handlebars.  Around the downtown hotel which overlooked the Mekong River were beggars- some children, some victims of land mines or ravaged by disease- and, oddly, a man walking his elepant. Orphans ran about the streets of most cities and towns in Cambodia where the human trafficking of children is near epidemic.  Our trip was organized in order to understand the Foursquare ministry as a refuge for orphans as well as an evangelistic outreach to a nation in desperate need of love and healing.  Each orphanage is led by a "pastor" and his family. There are so many widows in this ravaged nation, that they are taken in also and are charged with the oversight of five children as their "mother."

Cambodian roads outside of the three big cities are largely made of dirt, and deep, dangerous potholes are ubiquitous. Some of the orphanages are in very remote outlying areas, so our team was exposed to the soul of Cambodia with its lavish foliage, roadside markets that sell gasoline in old two liter soda bottles and sticky rice treats from baskets, incomprehensible poverty, and small, tanned generous people.  In our suitcases we had brought candy, balloons, toy cars, dolls, toothpaste and toothbrushes, body lotion, clothing, and fingernail polish.  It was the hands of the Cambodian girls I will never forget.  The Ba Lang orphanage had just been completed on our first trip, so the children had been there less than two weeks and were still wearing their street clothes. Unwashed, as yet, and feeling somewhat unsure of their experience, they gathered around us in awe as we approached their beautiful new home. One of the children was attached to an IV; one of the "mothers" who oversaw the children had bleeding gums that were exposed as an almost beatific smile spread across her face when we hugged her.  God gave me two daughters that day.  They do not know it, but I do.  They were only ten years old and freshly saved from the ignominy of slavery in Thailand, and they were absolutely beautiful, though they still smelled of the streets.  Our team bought them uniforms for school and other clothing, but that first day we just loved them, and I painted fingernails-dirty, ragged, sticky fingernails. It was in the touching of their skin, in making them feel loved and lovely, that I thought of my Mother. Trying to right two wrongs, though that was not my mission in the beginning.  While braiding their dark, tangled hair I thought of all the mornings my daughters and I had taken for granted this intimate bonding routine.  Vanessa had come along with me and was prodigiously creating balloon animals across the room to the utter delight of every child and adult in the orphanage. Three generations of us were across the world loving the people Mother had originally been so compassionate about and passionate for.  Mother, of course, in spirit; but, I know now that had it not been for her prayers for them, we would not have found ourselves touching what touches the heart of our God: widows and orphans.

1979

Wichita Falls, Texas, the county seat of Wichita County, was first settled by the Choctaw Indians in the early 1700's.  By the late 1860's white settlers had moved into the area to create cattle ranches.  1883 heralded the arrival of the Fort Worth to Denver Railway, putting Wichita Falls officially on the map.  There were no "falls" there after 1886 when a flood destroyed the city's namesake.  For our little family, in April of 1979, this northwest Texas city of 100,000 people became our new town.

Bill had taken a position at a manufactured housing firm there and we had purchased a new home on the south side of town.  Monday, April 9, 1979, we closed escrow on our new home, opened an account at the local bank, and drove around the area to locate schools, stores, restaurants and parks.  At the entrance to our subdivision was a driving range, and our two young daughters had to stop when we passed by in order to wonder at the enormous golf ball set on a forty-foot high tee that announced the presence of the range to the neighborhood and passers-by.  That day would prove to be the last time we saw the icon aloft above Southwest Parkway, the main thoroughfare in southern Wichita Falls.

The gentleman who had packed our furniture into the big van lines truck in California had been coerced by my many and varied pleas to get our belongings to Wichita Falls on Tuesday, April 10, instead of Thursday or Friday, as he had originally scheduled it to arrive.  It was a gift for which I could not thank him enough.  The motel room in downtown Wichita Falls was small for our family of four and our palates were ready for fresh bread and steamed vegetables, our backs ready for our own bed, and the girls ready for a sidewalk on which to play.

Clouds began forming mid-afternoon on Tuesday, the tenth, as we pulled up to our new home.  The air began to cool somewhat as we stepped out of the car and were greeted by our neighbors, an affable and charming older couple who had recently moved into their custom home next door.  For thirty minutes or so, while our daughters ran about the yard and up and down the sidewalk, we chatted with our new acquaintances.  Storms in Texas in the spring are not uncommon, so we had no inkling of the impending disaster being created by the deepening low pressure system and warm, moist, unstable air above us. We were busy in the house, scurrying around to ready it for occupancy while the upper level atmosphere was swirling into supercell thunderstorms, readying itself to rip through north Texas from Colorado.

Our 1976 red and white Cutlass pulled out of the driveway at about 4:45p.m., and we headed back to the motel for an early dinner.  Greenish-black clouds were by this time hovering menacingly over the city.  It was clear this was not ordinary thunderstorm as we watched the edges of the clouds dip down and curl around, creating the sense that we were at the top rim of a maelstrom that might at any moment suck us into its furious center.  At five o'clock we pulled into the drive-thru of the Wendy's restaurant downtown and ordered four hamburgers, fries and drinks.  Then the sirens began blaring, sounding like the clarion call for the end of the world.  The drive-thru employee was yelling at us to get out of our car and come inside immediately.  The Cutlass abandoned at the window, we grabbed our children and barreled through the glass doors held open for us by a teen-aged Wendy's employee.

"Get inside the meat locker!  Now!" he screamed, pointing toward it.

Other employees and patrons had already been ushered in.  Bill ran forward with the girls.  I turned to look back - Lot's wife - to see the destruction upon us.  A swirling, heinous funnel was eating its way through this small town and heading toward Wendy's!  A hand on my back pushed me forward into the refrigerator, and the manager locked the door.  We were trapped inside a horror movie, the monster, egregious and angry, ready to devour and destroy, haphazard and deadly.  My daughter's heart beat its pounding fear against my thigh as she gripped my leg for safety.  Prayers went up from our frozen foxhole; our teeth gritted against the expectation of breaking glass, flying roof and swirling debris.  At any moment we knew we could become part of the twisting super cell and be transported, Dorothy-like, to a less than happy Oz.  People were dying, no doubt, as we held our breath.  Would we be next?

Tears sparkled in all of our eyes the moment we heard the "all clear" sirens.  We sighed as one, hands unclenched, shoulders relaxed.  As the inserted key turned in the meat locker door, the thought on everyone's mind was, "What does it look like out there?"  We had no idea how close the tornado had come to us nor the extent of damage.  Tiptoeing out, we looked around like POW's who could not believe they had been released from captivity.  Wendy's was intact; our Cutlass sat alone and silent in the drive-thru.  Electricity was still functioning, and oblivious to the destruction along Southwest Parkway and the east side of the city, the cook went back to work and made us our burgers.

"Terrible Tuesday."  April 10, 1979, now forever known as "Terrible Tuesday."  It was an F4 tornado and was part of a record storm that created thirty tornadoes in the region.  Forty-five people were killed in Wichita Falls, twenty-five in their vehicles.  Our moving van was on Jacksboro Highway trying to get our belongings to us as promised.  One hundred eighteen people were injured because the monster struck at rush hour.  Twenty thousand people were suddenly homeless, their possessions lifted up and purloined by the tentacles of the tornadic demon.

Emergency vehicles screamed past us as we watched the surreal rescue scenes play out before us.  The window of the Wendy's served as a frame for the eerie 3D spectacle unfolding in real time as pick-up trucks with wounded and bloody victims tore past us on their way to the nearby hospital.  Our young daughters were munching burgers, slurping frosties, and playing with their fries while I felt caught between fantasy and reality and did not know my place in this drama.

As we parked the car at the motel after dinner, it became quickly apparent that many of the suddenly homeless were desperate for temporary shelter.  A line began to form at the motel office as shocked and disheveled citizens congregated, wide-eyed and weary, to buy a place to decompress and synthesize, if just for the night.  Bill took the girls inside and I walked over to the crowd to get an understanding of the storm's damage.  I did not really have to inquire, as the conversations were painfully self-explanatory.  There was nothing left of the south side of town.  The storm had lifted homes from their foundations and dropped them randomly elsewhere.  Semis had been thrown off the highways by the mighty monster's flailing arms; electric lines had been smashed to the ground; there were no traffic lights or street lights; all was plunged into utter blackness as if in an effort to hide the carnage until morning.

Our home, our neighbors, the driver of our moving van - panic surged to the surface.  I had to know what happened to our neighbors and if our home was still standing.  The information at the motel queue was that there was not brick left on brick in our new neighborhood.  Restless, sleepless, anxious, I pleaded with Bill to take me to our house.  "There are no lights, Kay.  There will be debris everywhere."

"Please."

At nine o'clock that night we drove city streets trying to find landmarks we could recognize that would lead us to our home.  Darkness is an ominous creature and it seemed to smother us as it wrapped us up in its essence. Without street lights, stop lights, the glow from neighborhood homes, and the missing moon and stars, hidden behind a blanket of clouds left by the twister, the headlights of our car cut an almost imperceptible path through the ebony night as we veered into the masterpiece of mayhem designed by the wind.  Supermarkets, banks build of brick, gas stations, restaurants, and convenience stores that had all been there that morning when we drove by were nowhere.  The bank vault stood like a flag on a hill or a little hut in a storm.  Even the bricks from which the bank was built had been picked up and thrown so only a few lay on the ground like olives that had fallen unnoticed from the tree during harvest.

It took us nearly an hour to find our neighborhood and to maneuver through the traffic and detritus.  The landmark golf ball and tee were conspicuously missing, driven by the wind to heaven-knows-where.  As we drove into the subdivision, the narrow car lights revealed one shiny foundation after another; here a door jamb with a door swinging open inviting us into the open-air home behind; there a roof picked up and carried off. 

"Oh, my God, Bill.  Our house must be gone!"

The girls were quiet in the back seat. I could hear Bill breathing.  The streets finally became impassable, so we finally stopped the car and walked, with the little flashlight from the glove compartment, the block to our house.  And there it was! There it was with roof and walls, a fence and doors, with windows uncracked and bricks still on bricks!  The miracle of it took my body and made it shake uncontrollably. The glow of the flashlight revealed, house by house, that the miracle extended all around us.  Our block was left  undevastated.  Our neighbors had foolishly gotten in their car and tried to outrun the tornado, but were safely back in the darkened sepulchre of their home, candles lit.

"Let's go now, Kay."  Bill put his arm around me and led me to the car.  The night was long, punctuated by the whining of sirens and the commiserating of family and friends discovering each other in the motel rooms and parking lot.

Early Wednesday morning, groggy from the restless night, I went in search of coffee.  The motel's restaurant was  packed, so I walked over to Wendy's. Long lines had formed even there.  Twenty thousand displaced people needed caffeine to cope, and all the utlities on the south and east sides were non-functioning - no water, electricity, gas or phones.  In my wakefulness during the night I did not know how to discover the condition of the moving van driver; I could only pray he was alive.  Our furniture was not worth his life. My predicament was minor compared to those in the coffee line at the fast food restaurant.  Not certain when we would have good again, I ordered coffee and breakfast for the family and headed back to the motel to pack up, check out and see what would happen next.

Bill left to go to his office, also on the south side of Wichita Falls, as soon as I returned.  If the building was still standing, he wanted to call relatives and friends to let them know we were all right.  Pay phones had been jammed the night before and service was sporadic because of downed lines.  Roadblocks had been set  up by the police.  No one was allowed into the disaster areas without specific consent.  Bill had to navigate through the area to arrive at work.  There was no discernable damage, but the phones were down, a co-worker told him.  As my husband stood talking to his friend, he noticed the red light on the incoming lines blinking.

"I thought the phones were out," said Bill, quizzically.

"We can get incoming," was the response.  "But the phones do not ring."  At this the associate answered the blinking line.

"It's for you, Bill."  He handed Bill the receiver.

Bill had given the van driver his office phone as a contact number.  His haggard voice on the other end of the line betrayed his annoyance at the monumental upheaval and unavoidable inconveniences created by our small town disaster.  He was stuck at a roadblock on Jacksboro Highway and needed our help to get through to our house.  Dumping our furniture and getting the heck out of Wichita Falls as quickly as possible was his only goal.  The two men agreed that the driver would wait an hour or so for Bill to get the girls and me to the house, then Bill would escort the van to meet us there.

Daylight shone a revealing light on all that the blanket of darkness had delayed our seeing as we drove to our new neighborhood.  Everything had simply disappeared.  Leveled. The voracious storm had swallowed up everything in its path and spit out the leftovers in mocking, random abandon over the landscape. Scores of people picked patiently through the debris around their foundations only to find pictures of people they did not know or  pieces of chairs and tables from someone else's dining room.  Storm-carried souvenirs were actually found several miles outside of Wichita Falls.  We heard the storm drove the big golf ball clear into Oklahoma!

As Bill was on his way to free the van driver, I busied myself with finding a place for our clothes and deciding where our furniture would be placed.  We were under a self-imposed deadline to get everything set up before dark so we could sleep safely in our beds.  I was walking through the living room when I looked up and saw my mother standing there, pink-lipped and smiling, tears of joy and relief dancing in her eyes!  Daddy was right behind her and I could see the exchange of anxiety for relief transform his face the minute he saw me.  It was probably a reflection of my expression.  Never had I been so glad to see anybody!  Squealing my joy, I opened my arms to include both of them into one grateful embrace.  My children ran in from their bedrooms for a prolonged "group hug."

"We had to know you were all right, precious," my mother was saying.  "So, we got up early this morning and decided we would come see for ourselves."

"Outside of town, we hit the roadblocks,"  Daddy continued.  "We had to talk our way into the disaster area, but they let us through when we told them your address and that you needed help."

The miracle of a good salesman!  My Daddy was determined to take care of his daughter and her family.  He and Mother did not know all they bargained for that day. Our irate driver could find no available movers to help him unload his truck, and he was not about to spend a minute more in Wichita Falls than he had to.  For fifty dollars each, he "hired" Daddy and Bill to help him empty his load into our house.  The five us threw ourselves into over-drive in what became an effort to establish a place of order at the core of chaos.  Set things in place, eyes hungry for evidence of a universe that had cease swirling.

Beyond fatigued, with stomachs growling, we reached a stopping point as the sun was going down. Bill had dug a couple of flashlights out of a box in the garage so that we could maneuver in the darkness of the house at nightfall.  Our children and Mother and Daddy needed to rest and eat; so, as darkness once again began its endeavor to hide the hideous holocaust of "Terrible Tuesday," we foraged for some food.  Disasters are inconvenient on every possible level; the simple task of finding food and running water became monumental.  One-fifth of the city was weary, hungry, dirty, bereaved and homeless.  On the perimeters of the disaster zone were restaurants, but all were jammed with people and the queues for food were literally hours long.  Truck routes had been diverted around the city in order to make way for emergency and clean-up vehicles, so restaurants were running low on food as were supermarkets and convenience stores.  Going outside the city seemed our only hope of eating before midnight.  Half way to Fort Worth we pulled off the highway and found a cafe where the wait was only an hour.  Each of us took turns in the restroom, washing our hands and faces and brushing our teeth.  It had been the business of many disaster victims to do the same all that day from the condition of the washrooms.  The little restaurant had unequivocally never had so much business, and there were few menu options from which to choose by the time we ordered our dinner. It could not have mattered less; we dined with clean hands and empty stomachs, grateful for family, food and a home.

As I watched the tail lights of Daddy's car fade away into the distance on its way south that evening, a little girl rose up in me and caught me by surprise as a lump of longing homesickness lodged for a moment in my throat and I blinked back a stray tear.  The tiny arm of my three-year-old then wrapped around my leg; I picked her up and kissing her, headed toward our waiting car.


















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