Prologue

“The Steps of a Good Man” 
Why this title, and whose story shall this be? 

It is a chronicle of a family’s “pursuit of happiness“, sometimes masquerading simply as survival, and the happiness they did find, in spite of pending twists and turns, unknown and unforeseen pitfalls and misfortunes, circumstances that make one turn for refuge, in trust, by faith in God, to the guidance of the Unseen Hand, and the Providential outcomes that validate that very faith and trust.

Narrated from the perspective of a child, described from my memory as I began to be old enough to be a sometime observer, and oftentimes a player in the action, and from my heart as I reacted emotionally to circumstances and situations, and registered pleasure or displeasure, but through it all, my father, as head of the family and provider for the same, was the center of our universe. Through sickness and in health, through lean times and good times, we depended upon the anchor of his loving superintendence and continued as he led. 

Through the facility of hindsight, observing the last forty years of  Dad’s life, from his recovery from, and remission of the cancer that very nearly, and by all the expert prognosis should have ended his life at age twenty-seven, to the exactness of the answer to his Hezekiah-like death-bed prayer, it is a very convincing argument for the presence of  a Providential Hand, opening doors and going before our family, with a strong arm, providing a path for Dad to follow by faith, hence the title for this narrative; Psalm 37:23 states, ”The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.” 

Preface

Working with words compares, to a favorable extent, with working with clay; adding to, taking from, until what you see, is what you had in mind to be shown. Care must be taken when choosing, and using a word, that a flawed impression not be conveyed. 

“Capture” is a potentially busy little word. When you hear it or read it,  though tiny, it becomes an ambitious, industrious illustrator, transforming our thoughts into scenes; murals, or tagging them into graffiti. It can suggest, it can intimate, it can imply. It conjures up images of cages and bars, walls and chains, locks and keys. In that way it can be a misleading word, even a deceptive word. Rather than describing circumstances where someone or some thing has been confined, and painfully deprived of freedom, it could denote a situation where no liberty was lost or freedom forfeited. such as “capturing” the moment, or the mood, or a memory. I endeavor to collect words and arrange them in such a fashion that they compliment one another and increase the worth of the compilation, preferable to capturing butterflies in glass jars and cases, or impaling them on pins to put them on display. And more elusive than butterflies in a brisk breeze, when it comes to successful capturing, are the nebulous, description-defying, gossamer qualities that give nostalgia its appeal. Try sticking a pin in that!

We are dealing here, to a great extent, with nostalgia, and borrowing no definition of it,  I’m inclined to think of it as a unique filing system that can produce, on a whim, the glow of a sunrise or sunset, the fragrance of a lilac bush in bloom, and the caress of the spring breeze, whose breath drifted it in your direction. What other system can preserve intact the comforting glimmer of the coal-oil lamp to a frightened child.during the power outage, or the threats hurled by the storm that caused it, or the therapeutic silvery-song of the gentle rain on the roof that followed it. The feeling of safety and security to the child snuggling beneath the homemade quilt, except for nostalgia, would be gone, along with the elation of greeting the newness of the weather-washed morning air. Putting together these words, though only marginally adequate at best, to provide a “You-Were-There” ownership of individuals and incidents, a memory-evoking  atmosphere to settings and surroundings, are still the best we have for preserving memories for the printed page, but for some scenes, “magical” moods and “musical” moments, as the expression acknowledges, you actually “had to be there”.. The fact that this narrative exists only in my mind, in my memory, and to some extent, my imagination, does not make it any less real. The task before me is to bring it all back to life to be experienced, mostly enjoyed, some dreaded, or deplored as it affected me in the formative years of my young life, and into my adolescent and teen aged years. 

Time has obliterated many of the landmarks; much that was once recognizable, and once familiar no longer is. Skylines have changed and gravel roads have become multi-lane  highways. Favorite riverbank fishing spots are now at the bottom of huge lake impoundments with steel transmission towers replacing the aromatic creosote poles that used to carry the electrical power away from the hydroelectric facilities. At almost the moment I was being brought into the world, the late Mr, Wolfe was declaring, posthumously, that you can’t go home again. It seems as though that statement was never more true than today, and yet, I go there almost daily, and sometimes at night, in dreams that seem so real, I can almost count the scales on the fish we catch. Though my dreams can not be accessed, I offer an invitation, through these pages, to join me on a trip back home, in fact, forty-some homes and the places in between, as figurative pairs of my tiny shoes put down myriad figurative tracks, from the Mexican border to Alberta, and the Pacific coast, the Gulf coast, and most of everything in between.