Listen to the Wind

Chapter One:

Dad

Looking Back on Gifts That Can Never Be Repaid

The leader of the band is tired, and his eyes are growing old,

But his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul.

– Dan Fogelberg, “Leader of the Band”

One morning I was standing in the sunshine outside Baptist-St. Anthony’s Hospital.  As I talked  on my cell phone I began to feel pain in the center of my chest, right under the breastbone.  It lasted several minutes.

At that very moment, a few hundred feet away, doctors were operating on my dad. We all knew this was coming and had been preparing or trying to prepare ourselves for it for months.  Knowing it was coming didn’t make it any easier.

Open-heart surgery for an 83-year-old guy is risky.  My siblings and I were not of the same mind about whether it was a good idea.  In the end, Dad made the decision himself, knowing well the dangers–the worst of which was dying on the operating table or soon after–but willing to risk it for the chance of a few more good years.

His life had become close to intolerable.  A faulty heart valve needed repair or replacement.  Nobody thinks much about the hundreds of little bodily mechanisms that must work in near-perfect synchrony for us to live, but when one fails it suddenly gets a lot of attention.  That little valve had become the focus of intense scrutiny lately.

As I stood outside the hospital feeling sympathetic pains for my dad, scenes from my life played in my mind’s eye.  One involved a church picnic years ago.  People had gotten up a father-son softball game, and someone hit a screaming line drive directly at the young shortstop’s head.  The shortstop was me.

A split second before that ball made mush out of my face, a huge glove reached down–seemingly from heaven–and pocketed the line drive with a loud POW.  Everyone laughed but the shortstop.  Inside that glove was my dad’s hand.

In another scene, a young me learned to read music by following his thick finger across the hymn book page.  Neither of us had what could be termed a solo voice, but thanks to innumerable Sunday mornings of watching his finger, I grew to love music.

Another scene was years later.  Our church youth group was returning from a mission trip and one of the vehicles broke down somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma, stranding a half dozen teenagers.  It was also the middle of the night.  My dad was the only parent we could raise by phone, and a few hours later he pulled into the all-night service station to pick us up.  He never said a word about it.

Thank you for the music and your stories of the road,

Thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go.

Somewhere around here I have a cassette tape he made years ago which we dubbed  “Joe Remembers.”  He sent it to me after I got married and moved away.  It’s the story of his life through age twenty-five or so.  In it he describes growing up during t