DAD, a DREAM, a LOVE STORY

POST SCRIPT to DAD, The Man Who Lied to Save the Planet


Families begin with a dream and a love story.

My father’s dream is spelled out in simple eloquence through one hundred loving letters from the World War Two battlefields of North Africa, Italy and military posts thousands of miles from Mom.

Being a “Dad” was going to be a big deal…the written details passed back and forth between Mom and Dad though separated for three of the War years. And, so it was, with the birth of each of nine children. Just as a parent watches his dream develop and the “letting go” of his sons to Vietnam, colleges, his daughters to other men, and his youth to old age, sons and daughters “let go” with great reluctance. This column shares some of that with you… But first the changes and the “passing of the baton” from one generation to another.

Dad died on April 2, 1994. It still seems like yesterday. He had earnestly looked into my eyes and tried to tell me something important. I can only say how grateful I am that the words were finally given him for me to hear and relay to family.

The world has changed much in 15 years. Of course the human turmoil, wars, plagues, diverse earthquakes, storms and floods that have so often beset mankind for millennia have carried on with tragic and historic consequences. Both momentous and insidious changes of foreboding and potential blessing for world societies have occurred since Dad left me with the words we all long to hear spoken to us.

The speed of light communications literally available to all, mesmerize us and enhance life; but also have attached the burden and legacy of new vices and addictions. Unheard of instantaneous gratifications are elicited from messages at the touch of “click” on the key board. People that wish us well and harm literally reach inside our homes to offer messages of love but also to tempt and try; the good we can do with these tools is equal to the power in our hearts to do so, but we must beware.

In a mere 15 years since Dad’s passing, 24/7 connectivity offers us a two-edged sword.

Parents today need more wisdom, care, and vigilance than ever before to protect and nurture the innocent minds of the news ones just arrived to our modern world. And, to have innocence is a treasure beyond most minds to comprehend. We need to get it back. We need to try to rescue those who have lost it. We need the simple ways of a generation gone by to mingle with the madness of life-at-light speed so that we might remember, and cope with all that comes at us each day.

The gentle and kind admonitions of a generation almost gone now; that generation whose parents, my grandparents, literally traveled at the speed of one horse power buggy – this generation still calls to us. I think that Dad’s words and those of men and women from his generation will call to us forever. I can only thank God I have the age to look back upon many decades to understand the qualities of life that existed in the slower ways, the wise ways of thoughtfulness before action.

Then… When a boy or girl could ride a bike or one of those new skate board things to visit a friend without any thought of harm. Hanging out in a tree house to read a book, or play a board game, or fight off the imaginary bad guys with sling shots. A man or woman took things not much faster than the top speed of 1956 Chevy, of 1965 Mustang. It was fast enough to get what really mattered done, and slow enough to say, “Let’s give that a second thought.”

KEEPING FAITH: Those days are gone, but not the all the people. It is up to us now; 70 million of us in America called the “baby boomers” to recall and glean from those still living and the memories of the dead, the attributes of what really makes life “great.”

NOW FOR THE REST OF THE STORY… With all this in mind, it is still hard letting go of Dad… and Mom who recently joined him.


A DREAM and A LOVE STORY

As a “Post Script” to DAD, The Man Who Lied to Save the Planet, (coming out in a version to be released in 2010) I’d like to share a story worth noting, and perhaps an “insight” to how we are still connected to loved ones who have gone on before us, was offered to me by my Mom. Readers of MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs may recall Mom was deaf from a surgery gone awry in 1967.

She had told me she didn’t dream often, but when she did it was vivid and seems to be a message of some kind.

About one week before Dad passed away she dreamt she got a phone call. Mom couldn’t talk on the phone to us because of the near complete deafness, but in this dream she said she saw who was calling, and so she answered the phone. It went like this:

“Hello, Virginia?” the pleasant man said.
“Why Linford. Is that you? Aren’t you dead?” she asked a dear church friend she and Dad dearly loved.
“Yes,” he answered, then added: “Virginia, I have called to ask you if we can come and get Grant?” Beside him, Mom saw Linford’s wife, who had just passed on not long before, and a daughter she had never met. (She did not know of a deceased daughter at that time.)
“Well, I guess that will be alright,” she recalled answering.
“Will it be alright if we come for him on April 2nd?” he asked.
“I suppose so,” she remembered saying, and the dream was over.

LETTING GO

See, it was Mom’s child-like innocence that she carried in her heart that allowed such a dream; such spiritual awareness to take place. To others it might have meant nothing. But to Mom, God had answered a prayer to help calm her and prepare the “letting go of Dad”

I was there. It was just after 2:00 pm on the afternoon of April 2nd 1994 when Mom stroked his tired brow and kissing it said, “You can go now Grant darling.” And it was then after a half hour of struggle to try to tell me something important that he left for me, the rest of the family, and you my reader-friend, a final lesson found in those three cherished words, “I love you.”

I suppose Linford came. I suppose other friends, but also his brothers, and father and mother came to that tiny room in the farm house of Heyburn, Idaho to take him safely to another glorious home.

There were final lessons for me and I share them with you. The lesson of love, and of friends, and of family, and of connections that seem gone, but are just out of reach; yet still really there. These all occurred in a humble setting with a deaf woman, a dying man, and a son on April 2nd 1994.

MOM’S PASSING: Another Dream:

It was February 5, 2008 in the political world it is known as “Super Tuesday.” A little after 6:00 pm Janean, my older sister, called and said, “Jim, Mom just died.”

Just the day before, Mom had emailed me about another dream she had. It was a dream about her departure, meeting Dad, and a question she had been trying to make sense of. It went like this:

“I dreamed I was trying to catch a bus Dad had just left on, and was so disappointed that I missed it. I asked the bus driver when the next bus would be leaving so I could be with Dad. The bus driver the said, ‘5-12.’ Jim what do you think 5-12 means?”

I answered in an email that it probably meant the month and year the Mayan calendar ended and that she’d see Dad pulling up in that bus to get her in May 2012.

“Janean," I asked, as I tried to absorb the information about Mom’s passing I was receiving. “Do you know what time Mom died?” I questioned.

“Oh yes! I recall looking down at my watch. It was 5:12 pm.”

I invite you to read, DAD, The Made Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs and MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs to learn more about love and timeless values we all must keep faith with during these troubling times…

Go to www.jmpratt.com, order either one for $4.95 and I’ll simply send the other free.

"MOM, I'M HOME!"

MOM Passed Away Today... Super Tuesday Feb. 5, 2008.

I've been a bit worried about Mom. She's been lonely without Dad. Been 14 years now. Readers of my books heralding their teachings and strengths know I owe DAD's final words to me, and MOM's final words to him for creating the writer.

The winter has been cold and brutal in Idaho. Thankfully my older sister, Karen lives next door and checks on her. We also email quite abit. She's been deaf for forty years, so emailing has been like a blessing from heaven. We talked about "passing on" twice this week. She was turning 86, and yet didn't seem to comprehend it. She was as much the girl and Mom with all the cares, insecurities, and yet faith, love, and mix of baggage that she'd shouldered her entire life. But she expressed saddness that others she knew were leaving, and that she was stuck in a painfilled body; and though grateful for adult children and their children who kept in touch, felt she was missing another kind of "home" - the kind one finds in the care and comfort of familiar love of husband and others of her generation.

The morning of her death I opened my email and read about her confusion of a dream she had where she had missed a bus that Dad was on. The bus station attendant had told her, "The next bus arrives at 5-12," he said.

"What do you think 5-12 means, Jim?" I replied with a tease, "I guess the bus is coming in 2012, when the Mayan calendar ends." She replied, "Oh well, I guess I can wait that long."

"Time Tested Values -- Oatmeal It Sticks to Your Ribs" -- my post of Jan. 21st, 2008 means more to me now. I hope you will read it and share with others, who, through my words, knew MOM and loved her. It's hard to pay tribute more than I have in the book I dedicated to her while she lived: MOM, The Woman Who Made Oatmeal Stick to My Ribs, so I think I'll live the rest of my life like she wanted me to; like she trusted me to, right up to the last time we shared "I love yous" in our last emails.

Back to the email. I'd like to share her last one with you. See what you read, between the lines:

Dear Jim and Jeanne:
Did i sound sad in my letter? i suppose maybe a little, when we are here and able to still do--------it is hard to give up and let go, so i sense this bit of sadness, but i do not feel a regret at all about going when it is truly, my time. Honestly, I think I can see the handwriting on the wall, already. My children are all going to make it, i will go when the lord says, it's enough.

Jim, did you think I don't believe in the resurrection? Of course, I do. If Dad had not had the promise of choosing his time to go, and had gone that same weekend, I would have known somehow that he had chosen, simply because it became such an overpowering experience for me.

For myself, i still think that dream I had a couple weeks after Dad died could be valid as for when I might go. "The next bus from the Genealogy library would not be back until 5-12????I don't think about that a whole lot and I don't dream such explicite dates either or times.

Then she ended with some personal words and "Love you lots, MOM."

I got a call on my cell from my older sister Janean around 6:00 pm, while waiting for an ordered pizza, (taking it to share with friends who are rather political -- Super Tuesday in full swing, like a good football game, you know.) Janean had just gotten a call from Karen in Idaho. She had found Mom, on the floor, barely breathing. She lifted her into the bed and she took a few more breaths and then passed on.

The next day I talked again to Janean. I asked her, "Do you remember the time Mom passed away?" She answered, "Oh yes. Karen called me at 5:12 pm."

I guess Mom was right in the beginning when she counseled me about the "oatmeal sticking to my ribs" and in the end about timing when she said that she had, "no regret at all about going when it is truly, my time."

Good bye Mom. I love you. And wherever I am, there you are in my heart. Just like I used to say as a kid busting though the front door on Christine Ave. in Simi Valley, I know, with you I can still say, "Mom! I'm home!"