In a normal month of
June, Amy and I would have driven home from Gettysburg today and I’d already be
missing the place. We did not travel to Gettysburg this year, due to the
world-wide pandemic, but we’ll be back sometime in the future. The entire world
must get healthy before it can happen, but we’ll be back.
When you become
disappointed over something, it is easy to develop tunnel vision. What you see
and feel is limited to how you perceive the world is treating you. Not going to
Gettysburg to attend the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and not
exploring the tremendous history on the battlefield were major disappointments.
We didn’t eat lunch at the Garry Owens Pub or teach the kids at the local Dairy
Queen how to have a good time. My tunnel vision left me unhappy, so I whined,
moaned and complained for a week.
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| With Amy on a dinner date. |
I don’t know why my wife
Amy puts up with me.
But with Father’s Day on
the horizon, the ole tunnel vision started widening again and the resulting
perspective stopped the pity parade. A lot of things have happened since the
last Father’s Day. Through it all, both the good and bad, it was Amy’s
remarkable strength that powered the engine that moved us through the last
year, her intellect that guided us around the potholes we found (they have a
lot of those here in Ohio) and her sparkling wit that made the whole thing
worth doing.
A medical test last
summer resulted in Amy getting a frightening diagnosis. That led to surgery,
recovery, treatment and more recovery. And she just kept plugging away. She had
to do this? Okay. Something else was next? Okay. We had much earlier planned a
birthday party and both of our children visited to celebrate Amy’s special day.
Amy loved it. An old and treasured friend happened to visit in the middle of
all that and it was him, not me, who drove Amy to her first treatment. Amy
cruised through the long treatment protocol as though it was a series of trips
to her hair salon. It was almost as though she was making her way through an
adventure and learning new and interesting things as she went.
Learning is something Amy
does constantly and that makes sense. She taught in the primary grades for 42
years and through all of those years, she never stopped looking for new ways to
help her students learn. She’s retired now but she still hasn’t stopped learning.
New stuff pleases her so she keeps looking for it.
Our kids, Sean and Regan,
learned most of life’s important lessons from Amy. Try not to be too stunned
when you read this: The family teacher did most of the teaching to the family.
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| Sean and Regan |
The kids will call Sunday
to wish a happy Father’s Day and I will joke that I couldn’t have done it
without them, which is true. But I could not have done it without Amy, either.
Would not have wanted to. The fact is that I didn’t lift a hand to help
raise our kids. Amy did it all and she has always done things the right way.
Our kids are walking, talking evidence that their mother did a marvelous job of
creating a warm, loving environment at home. Both kids are smart, strong, warm
and funny like their Mom.
Father’s Day is really
just another way to say, “Thank you, Amy. I love you and cherish our marriage
and everything that has come from it.”
I admire the hell out
of my wife and I’ll spend Father’s Day with her. Gettysburg can wait. Amy’s in
Ohio with me and everything else is fine.
