A winter visit with Dad

With Christmas put away and the season of Lent looming (a pocket of calm between two busy seasons), I knew I needed to get up to Springfield, VA to visit my dad whom I haven’t seen since since last spring, when I helped clean out his old house in Ridley Park. Poking around on Expedia, I discovered a round-trip flight out of Jacksonville for $100. That’s crazy. That can’t be right. It was. I booked it.

Early Wednesday morning I cruised up to the Jacksonville airport through minimal traffic, breezed through security with no wait, had a nice aisle seat on a 3/4-full plane, taking off on a beautiful clear day in Florida. I would get to see a high-school production of Hairspray, for which my neice Sarah was playing violin in the pit. And as I waited for the Metro, snow flurries began to fall. All blessings for which I was very thankful.

Dad turns 91 this spring and isn’t moving around too quickly these days. A sore hip slows him down (along with the refusal to use a cane or walker), and it’s both scary and painful to watch him walk. A visit with dad is mostly sitting, talking, eating, napping and working on crossword puzzles. I’m thankful for this, too, for I know the day will come when I won’t be able to do these things with him anymore.

Yesterday was out of the ordinary, though. In just a few hours time, we Face-timed with Eden (the first greatgrandchild, just six months old, who lives in Dallas) and we looked at his slides from the early 1950’s. Talk about a contrast of technologies! I wonder what percentage of people alive today even know what slides are? Dad still has his Kodak Carosel projector which cost him $150 in 1978. If I figure correctly, that was expensive! And fifty years ago we only dreamed about video conversations.

The projector work carousel 2 ed fine for about an hour, but then something happened to the mechanism that advanced the slides, so after five or six trays, we had to call it a night. But in those five or six trays, I discovered some pictures I didn’t even know he had. Like me about one-year old with all four of my grandparents. (Both my grandfathers died when I was young, so I have little memory of them.) Me as a toddler with a head of blonde hair. (As I grew, it turned dark brown, but is now mostly gray.) A picture of my mom when she was a twenty-year old nursing student, dating my dad who was ten years older. (My youngest daughter is just about that age.) A few pictures from my ordination and installation at my first church in Coventry, CT. I don’t have many pictures from that day. Dad did. I grabbed a bunch of these to digitize.