Give Thanks...For A Father's Small Act

 Since I can't ask my dad personally, I must surmise his thought process. It's 1972. He's away on a business trip, out of state, dealing with flights, hotels, late schedules, and yes...lost luggage. Somehow, the man with three children under ten years old found time to pick out a postcard, write a message, stamp it, and send it in the mail.

Such a small act...

Remembered over fifty years later.

In a box in my basement you'll find a postcard from 1972, a card I'm guessing my dad picked it up in the airport or the hotel. For some reason, he picked that card for me. 

See those lines? If I'm not mistaken, they exist because a spoiled six-year old child saw the postcard and got mad because the photo on the card was a stinky old building behind a gate, not something cool like a car or a plane or anything else. I don't have a lot of memories of when I was six, but I definitely remember getting mad that my card stunk. It's highly possibly my dad sent my older brother a much cooler card than mine, hence the immature rage.

I can imagine my mother watching her son get mad at her husband's incredibly kind gesture. He didn't need to buy the cards, fill them out and send them, especially when he didn't have to. 

Somehow, this piece of card stock survived. It was stored somewhere during my pre-teen and teenage years. After I grew up, physically and emotionally and understood the significance of the card and what it meant, I kept it safe. 

No one knew back in January 1972 that my father would only live another twenty-five months, then he'd be gone. I have very few items that he gave to me. It's the nature of all things to go away, disappear, cease to exist. This little card could have been tossed. Heck, I could have shredded it right then and there...

But I didn't.

I'm thankful I didn't.

I'm thankful for my father who, in what had to be a crap trip, picked out a postcard for me and sent it in the mail. In a million years there's no way he could have known that his son (who turns sixty-years old next year...) would have kept that card and that it would affect him these years and decades later. Like ripples in water, that small act extends still today.

Thanks, Dad for the card and for calling me master. Even though I hated it at the time, it's a wonderful treasure today.