Chasing My Father’s Dreams

Chasing My Father’s Dreams

When I was three, my family moved from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to Nashville, Tennessee, so my parents could be missionaries and so my father could find a home for the country gospel he’d jot down on scrap lumber with his carpenter’s pencil. Not only were we leaving behind all of our extended family, but we were also leaving behind the security of my father’s four older brothers who had all “made it” financially and were trying to ensure that our family did as well.

Three years after our pilgrimage to Tennessee and three years after no country gospel songs were cut, my family moved onto a Christian camp set on a 365 acre Civil War-era farm. While my father built a house out of T1-11 siding that overlooked the creek and pond, we lived in a 500 square foot old slave quarters that was rife with brown recluse spiders and creatures that would scurry inside the ceiling while my brother and I tried to sleep. My father’s brothers cautioned him against investing his inheritance in a house that would then be donated to the camp, but he still felt compelled. When Utopia came crumbling down four years later and my family was asked to leave while leaving our assets behind, we didn’t. For four more years we remained on the camp, and for four more years I watched my father struggle to build and sell storage barns that would sustain us financially, maintain the camp, build a new house for us on another property my parents had purchased on credit, and be a husband and father.

It was a trying time for all of us, but especially for him. I remember how he would come home around nine each night and collapse into a chair at the kitchen table. There would be sawdust draping his shoulders; his blazing hazel eyes would be closed and black hair threaded with more silver than the day before. He would mulch his food on autopilot, then stumble off to bed, but night after night he could not sleep.

Soon after the camp gates clinked shut behind us and our family moved into the new home my father had built, his dream to ride a horse from New England to Tennessee while dressed as Paul Revere took hold. As self-absorbed as a sponge and now in high school, this dream terrified me more than any my father had ever had. What would my friends say? What would they think…of my father, yes, but also of me? 

Years passed and to my relief I thought my father’s dream would remain only that. It didn’t. In the summer of 2008, he rode a horse from New York to Tennessee while dressed as Paul Revere.

I remember how my family and I had met him at the halfway point in Ohio. Because the horse had tried tossing my father in front of a few semis, most of the journey had been walked, not ridden, and the shoes he wore, which coordinated with the Paul Revere getup, were calf-high leather boots that baked onto my father’s feet. My mother cried when my father finally sat down in the cabin we had rented and began peeling off the leather boots. The soles of each were worn as smooth and thin as wax paper, and one had even begun grinding away at the thick rubber heel. Taking my father’s bruised feet in her hands, my mother soaked them in a tub of Epson salts, then slathered them with lotion and rubbed and rubbed as if her touch could take the soreness away.

Standing in the corner, watching my haggard Father through tear-filled eyes, not only was I confused about his reasons for making the trip, but I was embarrassed by the trip itself. I mean, I knew he wanted to speak in churches, and I knew that he had felt called to retrace the trail that revivalist Charles Finney had blazed, but why the Paul Revere getup? Why the horse?

Just last week, my father asked me to type up a query letter and lyrics for him. One of the songs he had written with a friend over a decade ago was recently a runner-up in a national songwriting contest, and he wanted to pitch it to a country gospel quartet. Sitting down in front of the computer with my father by my side, he read off the lyrics to me, but I already knew them by heart. My fingers flew over the keys, and the song began to take shape. As it did, I began recalling all those times during childhood when my father would continue to sit at the kitchen table long after the supper dishes had been cleared and scratch on his yellow notepad with a carpenter’s pencil. Often, he would be scheduling clients or writing down his list of supplies, but sometimes he would be transcribing the lyrics he had written that day on scrap 2’ x 4’s onto a yellow notepad similar to the one he used for his storage barn business.

Having finished typing up the song, I asked, “Is this good, Dad?”

My father hunched toward the computer screen and put on his glasses. “Yep, that’s good.”

Printing out the query letter and lyrics, I said, “Ya know…I got two rejection letters last week.”

“For your book?”

“No, for a short story I wrote.”

“You’re gonna keep submitting, though?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded. “Good.”

As he took the query letter and lyrics from me, I looked at his hands. The ones that have been knotted with calluses and the consistency of sandpaper long before I was born. He wouldn’t have had to work so hard all these years. His eldest brother had offered him a promotion in his company if he promised to remain in Pennsylvania and leave his dream of moving to Tennessee behind.

When the Christian camp crumbled, taking our home along with it, we could’ve just walked away; my father wouldn’t have had to remain and work for four more years to see if the fractured relationships could be rebuilt.

Three years ago my father didn’t have to made that arduous journey from New York to Tennessee on horseback and on foot. No one was forcing him to, but he felt compelled, so he did.

There are so many things my father’s done that no one has understood–sometimes, even myself. But this past week, as I stared down at my father’s huge, work hardened hands, I realized that sometimes the easiest journey is not always the one you should choose.

For it isn’t the attainment of your dreams that matters; it’s your pursuit of them, even when you’re making the long, arduous journey alone.

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