The gift of hope.

As I entered his office I noticed a picture of a beautiful Gretsch White Falcon electric guitar on the top portion of his wall calendar.  I have always had a secret fascination with musical instruments which typically forces me to hold on to music store catalogs that come in the mail until I have had an opportunity to calmly drool over its pages before I am able to throw them in the trash.  I suppose that somewhere in the back of my mind I must be a musician at heart.  At the age of 7 I started taking piano lessons after one of my sisters received a console piano as a Christmas present from Santa Claus.  For almost 10 years I continued taking lessons until one day my teenage interests switched to other age appropriate things and I was able to convince my mom that I needed a break.  Still, for years to come, as soon as I walked into a room with a piano my mind wandered to the ivory keys with a sudden rush inside me driving me to want to play again.  The drive has always been strong, so much that while I went to college in Mississippi I remember sneaking into an empty large room in the Student Union building and sitting before a beautiful grand piano and trying to play from memory some of my favorite George Winston's compositions.  Other times I would walk into the Music building and wait until a music student would be leaving from one of the small practice rooms to reach for the door before it would lock itself behind him or her so that I could sneak in and play a little.  As an adult I have learned to hold back my impulses, so now days when I walk into a room that has a piano I just look and almost never touch.  However, I am sure that if at that very moment I was hooked up to some anxiety meter the needle would probably tilt off scale since my heart rate and many more of my vital signs are obviously affected by this sudden internal rush.

"Wow, that is a beautiful guitar" I told my co-worker and friend as I stared at the image on the wall.  He then proceeded with a chuckle and a comment on how expensive and desirable that particular instrument was to many people.  One thing led to another and in less than two minutes I was sharing with him how proud I was that my oldest son had learned to play guitar on his own so marvelously beautiful.  He then went on to tell me how driven he too had been as a teenager to learn to play the guitar and how later on in life circumstances had forced him to stop playing for almost 17 years.  Another co-worker one day enticed him to try again after revealing to him how so much had changed in the amplifier technology and that almost anyone now has access to a great deal of this and other music technology at a fraction of the cost from the past.  After we shared some more on the subject I was bold in making a comment where as I reflected on all of the admirable qualities that I had learned to admire from my dear friend I could not ever imagine being able to compare him with my son.  I said, "My son is good at so many difficult things because of the compulsions that drive him to impulsively learn whatever it is that motivates him at the moment...I would however, not dare to compare him to you since I am sure you were probably nothing like him as a teenager...this boy is truly a handful...sometimes so wild and scary at the same time that I am terrified of all the possible outcomes...between his way of thinking and his alcohol and drug abuse, I am sure such a level headed individual like you was a much different child."  Instantly he started to laugh and as he looked at me he leaned back in his chair and started to share with me a great deal of stories of his wild teenage years.  Sure enough, my dear friend had also been a handful to say the least to his parents.  One by one he accounted for how one mistake after another eventually taught him enough about himself to want to make the changes that make him who he is today.  As my mind processed his words my heart felt lifted, relieved, and in a very special way blessed.  Without him knowing that he was doing so, every account, every tale, and every word suddenly became a gift of hope about my son.  Not once did he say, "don't worry...your son will be OK."  However, everything he shared in those ten or fifteen minutes that I was in his office brought a great sense of hope to me.  I would probably be betraying a great deal of his confidence if I wrote here his stories without first asking, so I defer to your imagination to fill in the blanks.

I hope that this does not sound too righteous or religious, but I have to share my thoughts on this gift given to me by a good friend.  I remember over 13 months ago when I started to write this blog how desperately hopeless I felt about my parenting of my difficult teenage son.  If you read from the bottom up it is not hard to notice a transformation taking place in my thought process.  I began sharing with you at a moment in which things were terribly confusing and I desperately needed to make sense of it all.  One post after the other gave me the opportunity to not only share my story, but also to take the time to re-think what had gone on in the earlier years, and re-process the events that led to me writing these stories in the first place.  Amazingly, some of the things that seemed so frustrating and difficult to understand at the moment that they were happening, became much more clearer as I recounted and shared them with you.  What began as my own personal way of venting, sorting, and sharing, eventually became my own personal way of understanding, accepting, and healing.  I do however do something much more often than I share with you here.  Even though I am admittedly very much a man of science, I am conflictingly also a man of faith.  You need to know that this realization comes even more difficultly to me than it does to you since I am constantly seeing the world with a great deal of scepticism.  However, if there is something that I am certain of and can give testimony to, that would be the fact that God has always blessed me with whatever I  need in order to be able to go on trying to be a good parent.  I find very little coincidence that a musical instrument calendar hanging on the wall of a fellow engineer which has year after year shared with me every discovery in quantum physics that he has read about, suddenly serves as the prelude for him to open up to me and starts to tell me his wild teenage life story.  I know in my heart that these moments of refueling are God's gift to me when I am in need of hope.  To a non-believer these moments are just coincidences, happenstances, and moments with very little special meaning.  To me, it is God's way of lifting up my spirits when I am lonely and dragging my feet.  So in my own simple way I am here sharing this story with you while I quietly whisper "Thank you God," and type away.

Dad