Celebrate Me Home

When he was twelve, my husbands father left his family. Both his parents were alcoholics.  His mother
stopped drinking. His father didn't. Eventually he moved into the  garage, police were called on more than one occasion. They divorced, and his father in time moved to New York.
My husband never saw him again. Many scars to heal. This trip was one of those. The Ohio trip.
As we drove into Columbus, Ohio from a very quaint town in Pennsylvania-[ we had been staying for
a brief business trip]the landscape changed dramatically. The rolling plush greenery of the hillsides,
now became abandoned  old  rusty steel mills.  Not too much on the horizon as we drove on.
We soon came to  the home his father had grown up in as a child.  Decay, half burnt down in the back,
[  someone was bored] it had been abandoned a few years ago.

I watched my sweet husbands face, such mixed emotions- the father who left never saying goodbye.
His brother and him learning of his death only in the past decade or so. A homeless man, their father....
living in Central Park  near the Zoo.This proud and amazing man, my husband, standing in front of
this house where his father once too stood. A boy filled with the same dreams he passed on to his sons.
A practical father who raised him, a railroad man, wanted his son to be a baseball player.
His mother had died when he was a young boy.... he had been shuffled around.
This boy with dreams...... silly things like ART.  Not practical for  Columbus, Ohio.
I looked up at the tiny second story... and pictured him sitting in his room upstairs alone.
DREAMING. He dreamt his way to California and met my husbands mother.

Unfortunately  that was not a wonderful union. But what was wonderful, the sons that came from it.
His mother stopped drinking, but that hopelessness crept up on her.  Pills and many other things took over. She loved her children, but had issues of her own.
The welfare check became her focus when  her husband was gone. What was inspired  from his father,
ART. His father had become a successful artist before alcohol consumed all their lives.
The two boys were on remote control, raising themselves.  These boys had the greatest gift that money could never buy. DREAMS. On they went their separate ways- very different men, these two brothers.
 The older brother kept his dreams alive. He became an Olympic Athlete.
My husband  kept his dreams  alive as well. He chose entertainment and art, became an Art Director for a studio.  I couldn't be prouder. I have watched him  through the years of many struggles and triumphs.

I watch this man rise in the end, on every occasion. Watching him stand in front of this home that was no more than a shack now, in a drug infested neighborhood,  facing his past with such grace.
Seeing where his father came from- starting to let go of the pain that has kept him shackled to his past.
I have admired him for so many reasons, but my love goes even deeper.
After twenty six years of marriage, our two beautiful children..... standing in front of HIS HISTORY.
Laying down the gauntlet, seeing- NOW- he was always worth loving. His father never felt he was worthy of love. The greatest gift his father passed on to him-DREAMS- He could not fulfill. The next generations turn. We leave the past..... in the past. Start over. See things for what they were. Mourn our loss. Let it out. Let the sunshine in. It's waiting for us. BIG, BRIGHT-BOLD-SUNNY.
Sometimes that's just how it works. We take the acorn from the giant oak. Start over.
We celebrate ourselves  home.