Reposting of Father's Day

DSC_0378, originally uploaded by jshannon331.

In light of Father's Day, I thought I would honor my Dad by making him the topic of my latest blog. Before I receive any phone calls from concerned readers who think I have finally let high school students get to me and have gone off the deep end, I don't think my Dad is really Jesus. Not technically, anyway.


My Dad is a truck driver. Last time I checked Jesus was a carpenter, but it's close enough to the burly-blue collar male persona every man wants to emulate. Except, honestly, there really isn't anything burly or even blue collar about him. He's very tall and very skinny, for one thing. Just by looking at him, you couldn't tell he could lift very much. He doesn't have any tattoos. (oops-now he does!) He doesn't smoke. He HATES beer. To the chagrin of his four daughters, he uses the phrase," you, dog" in place of obscenities. My Dad may possibly be the most alien truck driver you have ever met. I went to work with him several months ago, actually, and got to witness first-hand how weird my Dad actually is.
My Dad takes monthly drives to Boston where his company is based and is forever looking for a passenger to accompany him to make the all-inclusive 8-12 hour ride with the bribe of the open road and a Friendly's sundae. I'm usually the sucker who says yes. Granted, my other sisters generally fall asleep in the first hour and don't make very good company. I, on the other hand, cannot sleep in the car let alone the rig of a tractor trailer and tend to chat incessantly the whole way until my throat hurts and we have to stop to get some coffee. Which, truthfully, serves the both of us- I get to talk uninterrupted all about my grand ideas for my next novel or my philosophies on life or about the genre my album would be placed under, if I, in fact, ever record one and he gets to pay attention to something other than road kill and not fall asleep at the wheel.

It's in the rig where my Dad seems most normal to me. Shifting the ten-speed, complaining about the traffic that was inevitable on Rt. 84 by Hartford, drinking old coffee out of a styrofoam cup, dreaming about plots of land in Florida and pointing out motorcycles. In the rig, being a truck driver fits my Dad who hasn't purchased a tie since bolos were cool, gets uncomfortable when he sits in one room for too long and whose hands look like they could palm hot coals and not feel a thing. It's when we get to Boston when I realize what an anomaly my Father truly is.

Surrounded by men less than half his size (but double in girth) donning filthy Red Sox caps and greasy tee shirts, my Dad sticks out like a sore thumb. They all smile congenially when we show up, gap-toothed and broken bridges stained with years of strongly brewed coffee during the day, strongly brewed something else after hours, I'm sure. They all seem to have ruddy cheeks like they've been standing firm in a wind storm at the Patriot's game just before we got there. They have hearty belly laughs coming from hearty bellies that make me wonder how they get in and out of their trucks and if they rest their coffee cups on them while shifting gears. They call my Dad all kinds of names that make my cheeks burn- apparently they haven't picked up on the "you,dog" quite yet-but he just laughs it off and playfully punches one of them in the arm. The whole warehouse smells like days old coffee, Brut aftershave, the chemicals they were loading into my Dad's truck, and, well, man dirt. Yes, man dirt is what I said. You know what I mean. Running to the bathroom, I nearly knocked off a sign hanging on the door made out of a flap of an old cardboard box declaring," If you just have to piss, please use the urinal" and I wonder as I contemplated whether I should attempt the urinal or not (just for kicks) how my Dad who counts "piss" as a vial four-letter word works here with these people and seems to whole-heartedly enjoy it.

And then, I get it. I'm working on this concept on how everybody has a little bit of Jesus in them. I'm not talking about how "Jesus lives in your heart," and all that sunday school stuff, but how we as Christ-followers exhibit certain qualities that Jesus walked around with. All of us. So, my Dad's kinda like Jesus.

He loves to be surrounded by people that other's have deemed "a little rough around the edges." The jokes we would have gotten a serious lecture for if he heard any one of us kids tell them, he uses as an in to ask his co-workers other personal questions about their lives. You know that my Dad knows each and everyone of those truck driver's wives names? And their kids? And if they had mistresses, I bet he knows them too. He knows where they live. He knows where they went to college, or if they never did he knows the reason why. He knows whose going through a divorce, who just lost a child, who's struggling financially, who's kid just got accepted into Boston University and who got season tickets to the Sox-then teases them about it.

My Dad never judges them. The way they dress, the way they talk, the way they live. He just happens to met them where they are and really love them. The dirt, the warehouse chemicals and all. That's Jesus. That's the kind of Jesus I'd like to be.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

“I think what we have here, is a failure to communicate…

Bzzzzzzzz.   Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz.  Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

My students think their texting is less conspicuous if they keep their cell-phones on vibrate.  Unfortunately, due to the size of our desks that seem to be leftovers of the finger-painting first grade variety, my high school students pockets are shoved flush up against the wooden desk top, further incriminating their outlawed behavior by their self-centered, vocal devices who will not be ignored.

Bzzzzzzzzzz.

I can’t blame them, really.  I’m just as bad.  There’s an iphone shaped pillow in the front drawer of my desk just in case of “ an emergency”.  I have checked and re-checked my e-mail more often than my more narcissistic students check their pocket mirrors.  Facebook updates of people whose lives honestly haven’t affected mine in decades-or ever- occasionally take precedence over a phone call to a friend I actually care about- and know first hand the happenings of their day to day life because I see them in person; not just in doctored pictures of their latest trip to some tropical locale where they look strikingly thinner and tanner than I remember.  With all of the modes of communication that have cropped up in the last few years, you would think our communication as a people would be greatly improved.  Instead, I’ve found myself more jittery, more exposed and less understood than ever before.

What’s the problem?

I don’t like when people speak on other’s behalf, so I’m not going to be so presumptuous as to pontificate on the root of the problem in society as a whole, just for me.  And me, myself, am on communication overload which disables my ability to communicate effectively at all.  In any medium.  Written, verbal, in person or otherwise. 

What must be done?

As someone who insists that the word “detox” must be loosely translated in other, ancient, more credible languages as “torturous withholding”, I’m forced to take a second look at what that might mean. 

In the last week, my husband and I have stopped using all electronic devices upon arriving home from work. It wasn’t a discussion we had, or something we felt particularly convicted about.  I think, both of us just knew instinctively that it was time to distance ourselves a bit from things that hold little importance. No carrying cell-phones waiting for an “important” call, no humming, buzzing background ESPN noise emitting from the television, no gentle glow of the laptop highlighting my favorite food blogs or summer concert series.  And, you know something? We had dinner together.  At the table.  With dinnerware.  And wine.  And laughed about real life things- not our favorite clips on youtube.  We sat on our front porch and read books and watched our neighbor pick up litter from the sidewalk and practiced a song on the guitar.  Then, later on, we purposefully chose a movie to watch together.  Because we wanted to see it, not just to have it on.  And you know what? Nobody called me.   When I checked Facebook the following morning, the same people I don’t really know were complaining about the same things that are completely and utterly irrelevant to my life, mainly with irritating spelling errors and abbreviations I still don’t know the meanings of.  I had no e-mails save ones that remind me to use my frequent flier miles. And thus I have come to the following conclusion:

Communication can only be considered as such if it is meaningful and executed with purpose on both ends.