Graduation

Once upon a time there was a little boy. When he started to school, he wrote with his left hand. The year was sometime around 1924. Every child was taught to write with their right hand. When that little boy would write, the teacher would bang his left hand with a ruler. He naturally wrote left handed and the teacher had to hit him so often that when he got home from school his knuckles would be bloody. He learned to write right-handed. He also, from that point on, developed a horrible stutter. He grew up, stayed right-handed and kept the stutter. It was embarrassing, and under stress, debilitating. In high school, he had to take a speech class. He decided to do his big speech on Nestle Chocolate and wrote to Nestle to get information. He was armed with candy bars, pages of facts and his own writing. He was in the twelfth grade. When he got up to speak, he couldn't. He started to stutter. He couldn't say a clear word. His teacher told him to sit down. He tried again, and couldn't do it. He left class. His teacher didn't pass him. He did not graduate from high school.

That was my dad. He went on to get a job at Dillon's Grocery Store and worked for them for 42 years. He was, as he called it, a career groceryman. He was an honest, good, kind, regular guy. He was a good father, a good husband to my mom, and a good friend. He could yell really loud sometimes but he was supportive and brave and a great teacher. He was curious about everything his whole life - he never, ever stopped learning about people and the world.

For the last few years of my dad's life, my son and I would drive to Phoenix every other weekend to stay with my parents at their assisted living facility, Fountain View Village. When my mom and my son went to sleep, my dad and I would talk, or watch Jay Leno. I asked him, when he was 86, if there was anything he wished he would have done that he didn't. He said that the only regret he had was that he didn't graduate from high school. He'd always felt bad about it.

I called his high school, my brother called the Superintendent, and my dad got a letter in the mail saying Hutchinson High School wanted to give him his well-deserved, slightly late high school diploma. He cried when he got the letter. It said that they could either mail him the diploma, he could walk with the class in May, or he could come to a special school board meeting and pick it up, there in Hutchinson. At that point, my dad used a cane or a scooter, he had hip and knee problems, he had a faulty heart. But in September of 2003, we went back to Kansas, so my dad could finally go to his high school graduation. He sat in the front row at the meeting, hoisted himself up with his cane, and walked to the front of the room. He cried during the entire meeting he was so happy. He was very proud of that diploma. Here he is on that night, a high school graduate, with his grandson, little Jay. He died two months later on November 1st. I'm so glad he got his wish.

And the stuttering....well, after that year he met a guy named Harold Faldtz. They became best buddies and Harold would punch him solid in the arm every time he'd stutter. It's certainly not the way we'd cure that kind of thing today, but my dad stopped stuttering quite soon, being buddies with Harold. He was friends with Harold all his life.

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was,
'thank you,' that would suffice.
- Meister Eckhart