Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition (20 page)

“Go, Dad,” I said gently.

He did. Tim and my dad started for Iowa. We kids kept track of their progress, the journey and the weather by talking with them on my brother’s car phone. By now, all my guests had arrived and all were a part of this undertaking. Whenever the phone rang, we put it on the speakerphone so we could hear the latest! It was just past 9:00 when the phone rang and it was Dad on the car phone, “Bobbie, how can I possibly go home without a gift for your mom? It would be the first time in nearly 50 years I didn’t get her perfume for Christmas!” By now my entire dinner party was engineering this plan. We called my sister to get the names of nearby open shopping centers so they could stop for the only gift my dad would consider giving Mom — the same brand of perfume he has given her every year at Christmas.

At 9:52 that evening, my brother and my dad left a little shopping mall in Minnesota for the trip home. At 11:50 they drove into the farmstead. My father, acting like a giggling schoolboy, stepped around the corner of the house and stood out of sight.

“Mom, I visited Dad today and he said to bring you his laundry,” my brother said as he handed my mom the suitcases.

“Oh,” she said softly and sadly, “I miss him so much, I might as well do these now.”

Said my father coming out from hiding, “You won’t have time to do them tonight.”

After my brother called me to relay this touching scene between our parents — these two friends and lovers — I phoned my mother. “Merry Christmas, Mother!”

“Oh, you kids...” she said in a cracking voice, choking back tears. She was unable to continue. My guests cheered. Though I was 2,000 miles away from them, it was one of the most special Christmases I’ve shared with my parents. And, of course, to date my parents have not been apart on Christmas Eve. That’s the strength of children who love and honor their parents and, of course, the committed and marvelous marriage my parents share.

“Good parents,” Jonas Salk once told me, “give their children roots and wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them.” If gaining the skills to lead one’s life purposefully and having a safe nest and being welcomed back to it is the legacy of parents, then I believe I chose my parents well. It was this past Christmas that I most fully understood why it was necessary that these two people be my parents. Though wings have taken me around the globe, eventually to nest in lovely California, the roots my parents gave me will be an indelible foundation forever.

~Bettie B. Youngs

You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note.

~Doug Floyd

O
nce upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of “a new world.” So they organized a school.

They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming, in fact better than his instructor, but he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but had a nervous breakdown because of so much makeup work in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He also developed a “charlie horse” from overexertion and then got a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was a problem child and was disciplined severely. In the climbing class he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but insisted on using his own way to get there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well, and also run, climb and fly a little, had the highest average and was valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to a badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

Does this fable have a moral?

~George H. Reavis

A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.

~Enid Bagnold

S
he is my daughter and is immersed in the turbulence of her 16th year. Following a recent bout with illness, she learned her best friend would soon be moving away. School was not going as well as she had hoped, nor as well as her mother and I had hoped. She exuded sadness through a muffle of blankets as she huddled in bed, searching for comfort. I wanted to reach out to her and wrench away all the miseries that had taken root in her young spirit. Yet, even aware of how much I cared for her and wanted to remove her unhappiness, I knew the importance of proceeding with caution.

As a family therapist I’ve been well educated about inappropriate expressions of intimacy between fathers and daughters, primarily by clients whose lives have been torn apart by sexual abuse. I’m also aware of how easily care and closeness can be sexualized, especially by men who find the emotional field foreign territory and who mistake any expression of affection for sexual invitation. How much easier it was to hold and comfort her when she was two or three or even seven. But now her body, our society and my manhood all seemed to conspire against my comforting my daughter. How could I console her while still respecting the necessary boundaries between a father and a teenage daughter? I settled for offering her a back rub. She consented.

I gently massaged her bony back and knotted shoulders as I apologized for my recent absence. I explained that I had just returned from the international back-rubbing finals, where I had placed fourth. I assured her that it’s hard to beat the back rub of a concerned father, especially if he’s a world-class back-rubbing concerned father. I told her all about the contest and the other contestants as my hands and fingers sought to loosen tightened muscles and unlock the tensions in her young life.

I told her about the shrunken antique Asian man who had placed third in the contest. After studying acupuncture and acupressure his entire life, he could focus all his energy into his fingers, elevating back rubbing to an art. “He poked and prodded with prestidigitatious precision,” I explained, showing my daughter a sample of what I’d learned from the old man. She groaned, though I wasn’t sure whether in response to my alliteration or my touch. Then I told her about the woman who had placed second. She was from Turkey and since her childhood had practiced the art of belly dancing, so she could make muscles move and ripple in fluid motion. With her back rub, her fingers awakened in tired muscles and weary bodies an urge to vibrate and quiver and dance. “She let her fingers do the walking and the muscles tagged along,” I said, demonstrating.

“That’s weird,” emanated faintly from a face muffled by a pillow. Was it my one-liner or my touch?

Then I just rubbed my daughter’s back and we settled into silence. After a time she asked, “So who got first place?”

“You’d never believe it!” I said. “It was a baby!” And I explained how the soft, trusting touches of an infant exploring a world of skin and smells and tastes was like no other touch in the world. Softer than soft. Unpredictable, gentle, searching. Tiny hands saying more than words could ever express. About belonging. About trust. About innocent love. And then I gently and softly touched her as I had learned from the infant. I recalled vividly her own infancy — holding her, rocking her, watching her grope and grow into her world. I realized that she, in fact, was the infant who had taught me about the touch of the infant.

After another period of gentle back rubbing and silence, I said I was glad to have learned so much from the world’s expert back rubbers. I explained how I had become an even better back rubber for a 16-year-old daughter painfully stretching herself into adult shape. I offered a silent prayer of thanks that such life had been placed in my hands and that I was blessed with the miracle of touching even a part of it.

~Victor Nelson