June 18, 1971.
I was 9 years old, standing next to my 6-year-old brother at the front of the little Baptist Church.
The preacher looked at the 35-year-old bachelor school teacher and said, “Repeat after me. With this ring, I thee wed.”
“With this wing, I thee wed,” he replied. And then he laughed and so did everyone else in the room.
The woman he was marrying, whom he had met at the junior high where they both taught, was our mom.
We moved into Jay’s house, the bigger one that he bought when he and mom decided to get married. The one that had three bedrooms. The one where they would start a new life together and where he would have to figure out on the fly how to parent two rambunctious boys.
He grew up in a big family on a farm. There were ten kids, but the other nine were girls, so he had never even gotten to watch any other boys grow up.
After high school and the army, he went to college. He was the only one of the ten who got a college degree. As a school teacher—if you can imagine this—he probably had more money than he had ever had in his life.
He worked hard. In fact, hard work was probably the most important value he carried from his upbringing. Besides teaching school, he drove the school bus, refereed volleyball games, taught driver’s education, kept a garden so we always had plenty of fresh home-grown vegetables and chickens so we always had fresh eggs and fried chicken.
He could fix anything and he tried to teach us some of those skills. I say “tried” because we were not always interested. I told him years later that I wished I had paid more attention, but when you’re young it’s hard to really envision the skills you’ll need as an adult.
When my little sister came along, of course, she was spoiled. But it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was his biological child and we were not. It was because she was a little girl with parents knocking on the door of their 40s and big brothers who were becoming teenagers. How could she not be our little princess? Even though he had to share us with our dad, he could not have loved us any more than he did.
Saying, “I love you” and “I’m proud of you” did not come easy for him. But he proved it every day. He turned any moment that got too serious into a joke. He pulled silly pranks on his friends and his family and endeared himself to anyone who managed to get close.
It took him a while, but he found faith in Jesus at the age of 43. Sometimes it’s hard for someone who is so morally grounded, honest, and self-sufficient to admit that he needs something outside himself. But I watched him love my mom intensely for 48 years and Jesus for 40.
Almost two weeks ago, he took his final struggling breath on this earth and took his first in heaven. He didn’t get to meet his great-grandson (my grandson) that was born two days ago, but I’m ok with that. He taught me well and I’ll make sure all my grands hear lots of stories about their great-grandaddy.
In many ways, I am the man I am today because my mom got a job as a junior high music teacher 50 years ago.
See you later, Jay. Thank you. I love you.
