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After 30 months of agonizing preparation, countless prayers and the support of many who stood by me and helped me, I am now in a new house. I am thrilled for the fresh start in a place untainted by difficult memories, many brought on by the death of my mate and companion of 40 years. Unlike [...] This article was originally published in the October 1982 issue of Moody Monthly magazine. Jenny lived for 13 more years after the article was written. You will see just the first page of the article below, but there’s also link where you can read it all. Read the entire article here This is the fifth anniversary of my retirement party, and I have just come across the letter my wife read on that occasion. I’d like to share it with you:—–I know something about James that you don’t know. To explain, I’m going to quote from one of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. These are detective [...] “I walk on an isolated, lonely beach, and her absence is a vast and angry sea that breaks over me repeatedly–one black and terrible surge after another. Each batters me relentlessly, and I am powerless to resist, stand, endure. And I go down under their weight and intensity.” Thus reads my journal a scant six [...] I write this on the eve of Father’s Day–my first as a grandfather and my son’s first as a father. Thus I evaluate fatherhood by my own experience, both failure and success, and offer a few characteristics of the ideal father I wish I had better exhibited: Fathers go to work when they don’t want to, [...] I was strong during her rapid physical decline. I was strong during her painful suffering and death. I was strong at her funeral and at the graveside. But today the tears came. They came in simple, trivial ways. Shutting off her cell phone. Cancelling reservations in Branson. Closing a department store account. Returning books received but [...] “Now you know that Saturday morning is when we go to the lumber company, don’t you? They have gum and candy machines, so we’ll need to take our money.” Thus spoke the young man to his tiny three-day-old son–and our first grandchild. In bygone years, whenever I’d yell, “Let’s go to the lumber company,” Barrett’s response [...] |
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Copyright 2012 James McAlister - All Rights Reserved |
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