2010 Resolution

I recently returned from spending a week with my Dad as he moved from hospital to hospital, ending up in a long term care facility. He has been avoiding moving out of his apartment and into a place that has a higher level of care. He is an independent old cuss and has stayed on his own a thousand miles from his closest child for the last 10 years.
 
His is an amazing story. He was born in Smackover, Arkansas in 1925. This was the depression era and they were a poor farming family, with some Cherokee on both sides. Dad doesn’t speak that much about his childhood. I remember a story about his brothers hanging him up on a coat hook when they were supposed to be taking care of him. There was also the one we heard when the “Christmas oranges’ came out each year about how happy he was to have the paper from the oranges because it was much better in the outhouse that the Sears Roebuck catalogue.
 
Grandma died when Dad was young. His Father remarried and he was sent on a train with a baggage tag through a button hole to join the new family. He became the family servant, which he put up with until he was 15. That’s when he lied about his age and joined the US Navy. He served in the South Pacific and saw many horrors he rarely speaks of. He has a stack of medals that he doesn’t talk about because some of his friends that died at Pearl Harbor only got one. Who is he to receive more awards than they did?
 
After the war he was a car racer and a gold miner and then he began working in construction. After he fell off a building breaking many bones and in the process meeting my Mom, who was a nurse, he started working building bridges. He is a smart man, and very creatively ingenious, so he moved up quickly in the company. He invented the safety nets they began to hang under the bridges as they build them. These nets caught many steelworkers on their way to a swim or worse.
 
He was still a young man when he began to see people coming into the company with university degrees and they began to be advanced above him. He saw the writing on the wall and at age 39 he moved us to Saskatchewan, Canada; where my Mom was from. My Mom nursed and my Dad farmed. Well, I guess we all farmed. I can remember driving a tractor when I was probably less than 10 years old. My Mom was combining and hauling grain when she was pregnant. I do remember my parents having difficulty paying our tab at the grocery store and worrying about how large it was getting. Times were tough, financially, but I don’t remember feeling poor. That, I guess is the crux of it.
 
Even though we had next to nothing, my parents managed to purchase a lot in the hills behind Oliver, British Columbia and by the time they were in their mid fifties they had built a house on that lot and moved to the place they had chosen to live the rest of their lives, mostly in retirement. They had very little money, yet they didn’t act like they were poor. I’ve had so many more opportunities and yet here I am in my early 50’s acting poor.
 
I look at myself and see my potential that is mostly unrealized. It seems I am waiting for some kind of permission before I can do the things I want to in my life. My 2010 resolution is to really look at my life and uncover the places I feel poor and give myself permission to do something about it. This could be one of the most important lessons from my parents, and I don’t want to miss it!