Did He Take the Time?

By Charles Garcia

My father was a quiet man, but I still learned so much from his unspoken lessons of life. His skills and actions as a gardener taught me life lessons that guide me today. His vegetable garden helped our family grow in love. The elusive hawkmoth that emerged from his garden was a gentle guide to help me through life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387742516

Book preview

Did He Take the Time?

Did He Take the Time?

Charles J. Garcia

Dedication

For Father

A Box of Eight

I love tomatoes. Not all tomatoes fall into my personal opinion of what is tasty and delicious. I try to enjoy most tomatoes, but often bite into a piece of great disappointment. Store-bought tomatoes call to me like beautiful sirens from their neatly displayed bins. The colorful arrays look like a page out of my childhood coloring books: perfectly aligned, uniform in shape, color, and size. The early memories of my youth are colored with a box of eight crayons. Some grocery stores have chosen the one-and-only color possible out of that box for their red tomatoes. With a bit of effort I can smell a slight waxy scent that reminds me crayons wafting from grocery store displays of tomatoes.

I cannot be sure of the exact moment when my encounters with tomatoes became so important. I have lost count of the numerous times when a slice of tomato in a sandwich is nothing more than a mealy-tasteless texture. I have endured a tomato wedge in a salad to be a tooth-chilling bite of nothingness. With so much happening in my personal life and around the world, I am somewhat surprised how the ordinary tomato has occasionally crept into the forefront of my thoughts to mingle with much bigger worries.

My tomato dilemma is perplexing. The solution to this puzzle takes me back to my pleasant eight-crayons-in-a-box days of childhood. At five or six years of age, coloring and drawing was a favorite pastime for just about everyone I knew. My brothers and sisters would gather around the kitchen table with our well-worn coloring books. We would flip through pages, trying to connect with the perfect picture to color. Sometimes we would just draw: dogs, cats, airplanes, landscapes, or whatever crossed our minds. I was most happy whenever my mother or father would join us for a bit of coloring. And, at this happy gathering there were some definite absolutes for me: the sun is yellow, the sky is blue, the grass is green, flowers are violet, tree trunks are brown, night is black, tigers are orange, and tomatoes are red.

The colors assigned to my childhood surroundings were legislated by law. Whenever one of my siblings broke the sacred rules of color a small objection or commotion usually followed. The sun could never be red. The sky is certainly not orange. A cloud must never be black. It is impossible for grass to be brown. Everyone knows that nighttime cannot be yellow. As a child I knew these rules of color existed. The coloring book laws should be posted like traffic signs along the roadside. The rules of Monopoly were complicated, but the laws of coloring made perfect sense.

Actions Speak

My father’s dignity was strong and elegant, very much like a fascinating orb weaver spider web. He was a sturdy man, but he could be moved by a slight breeze of change. The dark concentric pupils of his eyes were the center of our family’s graceful network of relationships. In his deep brown eyes he captured and held so much of the activity spinning around him. Father gently seized and wrapped the realm of his family in swirls of gossamer. Father adored his wife, our mother. His heart and arms spread wide to embrace each one of his eight children. Somehow he managed to equitably share his affection with so many under one roof. To know Father you must watch him closely.

Father was an unassuming man. Most of who met and dealt with him never knew he was a brave World War II and Korean War veteran. Father earned seven Bronze Stars during campaigns overseas. He very rarely reminisced or discussed his time as a soldier. But, I knew the memories of war haunted him whenever horrible nightmares invaded the peace of his sleep.

Father toiled without complaint in the massive steel mill of Pueblo, Colorado. I believed he somehow felt his labor was adequately compensated by the pay he earned. He was never shy about facing challenging and hard work. I cannot recall many times when he missed his work shift at the steel mill.

At home I loved being near Father. I tried not to be a clinging shadow, so often I hovered close enough to keep him in sight. He exuded a peacefulness while sunk deep in his recliner intently perusing the newspaper. A serious tone emanated all around the living room while he watched Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news. Optimism swirled about in white puffs of smoke whenever he enjoyed a cigarette and an ice cold beer. I felt a blanket of contentment and safety spread upon me every night while he tightly wound the mainspring of his alarm clock. The sound of the gears rapidly turning to wind up the clock served as a most soothing lullaby, allowing sleep to easily find me.

Father, like most of the men in our neighborhood, took great pride in his lawn. I called it his lawn, because at the time I had no idea why the grass was so important to deserve so much tender loving care. It wasn’t until I finally earned my first lawn that I truly understood my father’s fascination with a well-tended yard. Father had an ability to make weeding the lawn appear to be a task of great importance. Somehow he got my brothers and me to use our busy hands for the good of the lawn. If the lawn was happy, then Father was happy, and we all wanted to make him proud. Only Father mowed and trimmed the grass. Watching him mow was like viewing the finale of a hard day’s work.

A most favorite and pleasant time for me was sitting with Father on the front porch watching the sprinkler quench the thirsty grass. Father was silent and stared deeply into the spray jetting from the sprinkler head. The shiny green hose trailed and swirled from the sprinkler like the tail of a kite. The rushing water hissed like a teapot gently brewing a soothing and herbal drink. I remained silent, emulating the way of my father. The screen door would creak open and one of my brothers would appear, find an empty spot on the concrete porch, and quietly join us. Again and again the screen door opened and closed. Soon, our entire family was perched serenely in the relief of the evening shade cast by the shadow of our beautiful home surrounded by a most exquisite lawn.

Not one word was spoken. A bell only audible to my family rang, summoning each of us to an idyllic spot on the front porch near our father.