A Purple Umbrella

By Kevin Olson

In a trip that took twenty-five years to complete, Kevin Olson finds Jesus and gets sober. In 1981, freshly married and contemplating his future kid's names with his new wife, twenty-four-year-old Kevin is involved in a severe electrical explosion while working on an industrial air conditioning unit.

Badly burned and going thro

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aspire Publishing Hub, LLC
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781958692981

Book preview

cover.jpg

KEVIN OLSON

A Purple Umbrella

Copyright © 2022 by Kevin Olson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN

978-1-958692-97-4 (Paperback)

978-1-958692-98-1 (eBook)

PREFACE

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

PART 2

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

PREFACE

The day I started to write this book was over eight years ago on May the 27th, 2004. I wasn’t sure about the exact day until I got into it a bit. I was curious about it, because that particular date and number is quite familiar to my psyche. Could it have been the same actual exact date? The 27th?… Of May?... Nahhh, it couldn’t be. But I looked it up—Googled it—and compared my own mental notes to certain extraordinary regional weather events that were occurring in that last week of May of that year and found, sure enough—it was the exact day. The 23rd anniversary of my near-death day. (How lovely.)

This was not only the day I sat down to write this, (in a roundabout way), but also the very same day the Purple Man came to see me. It was the same guy I first heard with the disembodied voice who talked to me the day after I was married (also when I was 23) on the 27th of October in 1980. (I assume the same one—you’ll see what I mean later on.) If it was him, he came to talk to me to warn me of impending doom, of which I quickly brushed aside… I was a newlywed, and I had setting up housekeeping on my mind and other things.

It was darn sure a voice, but what could it mean? It scared me for a few minutes, but I quickly forgot about it because I really didn’t believe in anything supernatural at all back then. It perplexed me, but it was something that a healthy young man with a beautiful bouncing bride could quickly and easily brush aside. You feel like you’re gonna live forever at that age.

Let me explain further, so you can more easily see what I’m getting at. Actually, my life is divided into two phases. The nonspiritual phase, that I lived in up until the day I got married, in 1980 (on October 27th) and the spiritual—my life after that. I heard that voice somehow—it was like someone shouting at me (there is a God!), but with no decibels. Seven months later I got fried like a rotisserie chicken by a rather freak accident by the hand of a 480-volt electrical explosion on May 27, 1981.

I had intended to sit down and try to write a mystery story that I’d gotten the idea for the day before. No… this thing showed up, the Purple Man, (a ghost or an angel), scared me out of that room that rainy day, and I didn’t go back to writing anything until about a year and a half later when I saw another ghost, and this one was holy, and His name was Jesus! What evolved from that is what you’re now reading—a story about an air conditioning guy who got married when he was twenty-three, then seven months to the day later got fried with an accompanying near-death experience, and then kept on having the visions that are common to people that have had NDEs for decades afterward. They say that you’re supposed to write what you know, and I guess that they knew better than I.

Please bear with me as I stumble along. Jesus can read your mind—you’ll see later how he tricked me into writing this. He’s shown me how to see my life in a perspective that—if recorded—might show other people how He (and his little helpers) can work in their lives. Also, when someone (or thing) dares me to do something, it’s hard for me to ignore. You’ll see what I’m saying also about that later on too. He’s a tricky ol’ boy, I can tell you that much!

CHAPTER 1

Hi, my name’s Doug. I saw Jesus. It was late 2005, about a year before my dad passed away. I was living in a little two bedroom house in Hurst, Texas, close to where I live now—by Hurst Junior High. I saw Him, and I felt strongly inclined to write about that fact afterward. In fact, that’s immediately what I did. You’re supposed to write it down when you see Jesus aren’t you? There’s a levy waiting to break in all of us, and if that little Dutch boy who’s supposed to stick his finger in that proverbial hole to prevent a deluge ain’t around, the flood waters will come. Maybe he was stuck in a rabbit hole somewhere when I started to write this, so the floods came. But is it fact or is it fiction? The real question for all such books or accounts. I mean—who really sees Jesus?

It all started a long time ago, back in the early fifties, when my parents got married. They had met at a bus stop one day. When Mom used to think back on those days, she’d tell us kids that one look was all it took and bam! She fell instantly head over heels in love with him. They lived at Grandma Baty’s house—Mom’s mom—in a place called Oak Cliff, Texas, just south of downtown Dallas.

Dad got drafted into the army right away, before any of us kids came along, and took the big ship to Korea. He never seemed like he wanted to talk too much about what all went on over there—as I was growing up—but he appeared to be pretty happy most of the time, judging from the look on his face in all the pictures that he had sent home to Mom—which are now pasted into the family photo album that my little sister Jana controls. He and his buddies, all tanned and uniformed, sitting around in jeeps, smiling and smoking cigarettes.

Looked happy, but I know that there were things going on north and south of that 38th parallel in Korea that he wasn’t too proud of that he never mentioned too much. The main stories he told me about were of his adventures about the stuff he did as a mechanic in an ammo dump. He was a private for the torn and tattered eighth army. This was right around towards the end of the war, when North Korea, China and the United States were working on the armistice in the summer of 1953.

After we’d gotten the air conditioning and heating service business (that I’ll be bringing up later) started way later in my life when I was around thirteen—when he officially became my boss—I’d began to hear those re-hashed stories again… stories of horrible conditions and having to do brake jobs and other mechanical repairs in the sub-arctic air with the wind blowing out of Siberia like a banshee. This was his off-hand way of shedding light on my pitiful shortcomings—a soft, spoiled city boy. Although he never came out with the words, I’d get the drift. It seemed like I could never be fast enough or tough enough to measure up to his hard standards.

One time in the middle of winter, I remember when he did it the first time. We were working on heaters during a cold snap and we were really busy, working twelve hours a days and the like. On this one particular day, on our last call, we had to change out a bad gas valve on an old furnace. We were worn out, and it had really been a long hard day. He was standing behind me, holding the flashlight while I worked. The sun had been down for a while.

There’s this quarter-inch pilot tube that goes to the back of these valves that’s really difficult to get to. It has to be disconnected and re-hooked up in the change-out process, along with all the other stuff, like the electrical wires, main gas connections, and the thermocouple. It’s a little bitty quarter-inch brass combo-compression fitting that has to be started with your fingers, because if you aren’t careful, you’ll strip it out. The valve body is made of aluminum, which is a very soft metal and this can easily happen. It’s got to be perfectly perpendicular, and if your fingers are frozen, it really is a drag. You strip one of those babies out, and that was about twelve dollars down the drain back then. With him behind me making me nervous, I was just having the devil of a time.

After a long while, feeling him there beginning to squirm and fidget, I could tell that he was beginning to lose his cool. I had the valve almost totally changed out, and the pilot line that I was talking about that’s so difficult was practically the last thing—then we would have been finished. We were both getting tired, and the flashlight was getting weak, and he wasn’t really holding it so steady, and my hands were getting colder and colder, and I kept fumbling with that little line. I felt one of his stories coming on. One of his Boy you’re slow as crap stories. The one where he nearly lost his thumb:

His had gotten his thumb caught inside the adjusting mechanism of a 2 1/2 ton dual axle truck while in the middle of trying to do one of these brake rebuilding jobs. They had the truck up on jack stands and the wheels pulled off. He said he was real tired and about half-asleep, and his buddy, who was helping him at the time, was up in the cab, pumping the brake pedal, trying to get the system adjusted. Dad was standing next to one of the freshly rebuilt wheel housings. That’s how you have to do it… every time the brakes are pumped, the pinion lever inside the housing closes and turns the star-shaped adjuster wheel one notch closer to the required operating clearance for the brake shoes. You have to do them this way—otherwise you run the risk of not having any brakes at all when you first take the truck off the jacks. They eventually adjust themselves out, but it’s best to bench adjust them first for safety sakes, in case you have to brake real hard right off the bat—and those trucks are heavy and hold a lot of weight.

Dad said that his hands were freezing because gloves made the job too cumbersome. If you wore them, it’d take about three times longer to do it. He said your hands would get so cold that you couldn’t feel anything.

He said that while he was standing there, he must have dozed off, but then something woke him up, and he just happened to look down and noticed that his thumb was jammed in between the pinion lever and the adjuster wheel inside one of the brake housings and every time the hydraulic system was getting activated by his buddy pumping that brake pedal, his thumb was getting sucked further and further into the hardware, and at the same time, getting the heck sliced out of it. Dad began to scream for the guy to stop pumping, but his buddy couldn’t hear him over the howling wind, and he just kept going. Finally, he said that he just yanked out his thumb, threw some electrical tape on it to stop the bleeding, finished that job, and rebuilt two or three more trucks before the sun went down.

He’d be telling me stories like these and it wouldn’t help, but it seemed to make him feel better. Then he’d start with these comments about how some people were just plain slow not that they were that way on purpose—not purposely slow or anything, but like they were just born that way. Like they couldn’t help it. He’d say all this like he figured that I didn’t have the capacity to grasp his meaning. Usually, I’d just let stuff like that go in one ear and out the other, and it really didn’t bother me that much. But other times—depending on the situation—I’d just exacerbate the whole thing by playing the part: You want stupid? I’ll show you stupid!

Anyway, after his two years were up, and he was discharged, (honorably, so I was told), he came home and landed a job at the Baker Hotel as a bellhop. Grandma Baty worked for a movie editing outfit. She was involved in the splicing and pasting of different scenes in movie reels of certain motion pictures before they were duplicated and distributed to the national movie houses. It was a job she had for quite some time and kept for a long time afterward. Mom was busy trying to have some babies and taking care of the house while they worked.

CHAPTER 2

Time went on and the babies started to come. Debbie, my older sister was born early in the year of 1956 and I came along right after the big Texas/Oklahoma tornado outbreak a little over a year later. One of those bad boys (an F3) just barely missed my grandmother’s house with my pregnant mother in it as it came ripping through