My Dad would be 70 Today
(Nov. 7, 2009)
Today my Dad would be 70. He died in 1993, having just turned 54.
I miss my Dad – so hard to believe he has been gone so long. Today as I hurt for our friend, Tom McCall, who just lost his own Dad, I feel the deep inner pain, the sense of loss that just will not go away. Death is so final, and efforts to write about it always seem futile.
I remember my Dad as one who worked hard and gave his best along the years of life. He and my Mom had seven children, losing their first at the age of 3 months. Dad was a woodsman all of his life, proving the adage that you ‘can take the man out of the woods but you can’t take the woods out of the man’. Even when we lived on the plains of southwest Kansas he did a little bit of tree work. Later, in North Central Kansas, he found a happy niche as a local tree surgeon, felling trees around town on his days off, hauling the firewood home to heat our big house on the edge of town.
Of course Dad’s real job was as a Highway Patrolman and he served Kansans in this capacity for 23 years. I always enjoyed seeing him in uniform and hearing him check in on the radio: “334 Garden City” or “334 Salina” as the case may be. I’ll never forget his early morning return from a tragic wreck in which three had perished. I was up at about 5:00 AM or so and as he came by my room he just held up three fingers, sober and dutiful.
He was 43 at the time, younger than me as I write today. As I pass these years I often wonder, “What were those years like for my Dad? Did he have the same feelings I have now? Who was he really? Can I understand him now that I am passing through life as he did?” Maybe I can. I know this. For years now I’ve found myself asking, “How did Dad handle this?” And I try to answer so I can get a good idea for how I should handle whatever it is. Always I remember a man who loved me and showed it by steady faithfulness. After I moved out and started my own home he really worked to keep channels open. He loved my wife, Jane, and by word and example supported our marriage.
This summer we visited my Dad’s boyhood home in Emily, Minnesota, and spent most of a week with his seven wonderful siblings and their families. Wow! Once again I was reminded of one of my Dad’s best qualities, exhibited so well in the Huff clan of the North. He knew how to love – love in a way that was real; no airs, no ‘delusions of grandeur’ as he liked to say, no mean spiritedness about people. I didn’t always understand this kind of love, being a more emotional type, and in my teenage years I was annoying enough (and beyond “annoying”) to make for some real difficulty. But in it all he was steady and true, living a life of trust and dependence on God. His life and guidance, along with my Mom, of course, took me on a path in which I often encountered the living God. And much to my Dad’s joy, one day I surrendered my life to Jesus and He has made all the difference.
Those are my thoughts today on my Dad’s 70th birthday. I so wish he were still with us. How I would love to talk about life with him, making amends, listening, listening, listening. For now I just want to be more like him, which will be less than he wanted, but as much as I can hope for. And I say that with a happy smile. Larry Huff was a good man and today I gladly honor him as my Dad.
