The Little Things

   It is so hard to know what to say. I want to write out what I am feeling, my innermost pain and joy but there seems to be something holding me back. Maybe I don't want people to see the bad qualities in me. Maybe I don't want to ruin the good impression some have by admitting to things that would turn people away. I have friends and aquaintences from all walks, from staunchly conservative fundamentalists to far left leaning liberals to, well, all spectrums. Who am I? What mold do I fit into? Is there a mold that I fit into? How will I feel if I pour out the innermost and then see these people not knowing if they are the ones who read my blog and if their opinions of me have changed by what they read? According to the stats page 27 times my previous post has been viewed. It makes me curious as to who has read this and why there is an nterest. I am not an incredibly extraordinary person. I get up for work, Monday thru Friday, run my milk route as best as possible, and then go home and try to enjoy my home and family. Thats not entirely true. I don't always do the best job possible. Sometimes I am just tired. Sometimes I just don't care. Sometimes it is a miracle that I have even gotten out of bed and can stand on my own power and to put anything extra into what I do is, well, it seems like to much to ask. How much can you ask of one person? I used to always say that if I lost a child they would have to put me under the mental ward. Now that is my life, dealing with the lost of the sweetest little girl and my heart. I was not in Shelby's life until she was 6 so I didn't get those first few years with her and always considered it such a fantastic blessing that I got them with Willow. I always worried about how hard it would be on Willow when Shelby graduated and moved out. She would have been about 6, just the time I came into Shelby's life. I was the only father figure that Willow ever knew, but I was a far better father figure than most will ever know. That is not to say I wasn't without fault. I was often guilty of not having enough patience. I was often guilty of sloth. One thing I will never doubt though is that there was not a second of her life that I was not as much in love with her as any man can ever be for a child. I was perusing through some photos from the last year and came across a little video where I am sitting in my arm chair, my right arm off the side, bent at the elbow with my hand near my chest. I was talking with Willow who was standing in front of me in her little nightgown and she seemed to be only slightly larger than said arm. The audio was not good, I don't know what was said, but she climbed up into my lap, sat there for maybe three seconds and, being incredibly busy as she always was had to jump up and get on to the next thing. She brought me her chair, a hand made chair by a nice elderly couple. It is made of PVC pipe, the man's doing, and then a sewed section of LSU fabric to form the seat and back, his wife's doing. She loved that chair. She brought it to me and sat it down like she wanted to sit in her chair like Pawpaw had his chair and maybe talk for a bit. She sat it down on its back and I promptly sat it up right to which she promptly put it back down on its back. That is where the video ended. Who knows what we were talking about or where things went from there. All that mattered was that Willow wanted my attention and she had it. I looked into my face on that video and saw the complete joy that always accompanied her wanting my attention. I craved her attention and to know that she thought enough of me to take time out of her busy schedule, and she was one incredibly busy little girl, and want to learn something about the world from me? Well, hang it up. I was hers and she had me by the heart and whatever in the world I could do to give her what she needed in the moment was hers to take. I am certain that I was guilty of neglecting the rest of my family to give her so much attention, and I am not sure how to feel about that now. I don't regret a second of the time I gave her, but if I had lost one of the others of my family would I be regretting giving time to Willow that should have gone to them? There are so many questions and so few answers. Some things I know for sure. These things are very few, fewer as the years go by, but this one thing outshines all in certainty of truth. I miss my baby girl. I have never shed such bitter tears and I have never felt a pain like this. The loneliness, the emptiness, the lack of everything that she put into my life. Nothing or no one can replace who and what she was. Oh God how it hurts to refer to her in the past tense. Do I really say that I loved her? I still love her but she is gone so is there a her to love now or just a memory of who she was and hence I loved her? Has that love been replaced by pain? Has her presence been replaced by this overwhelming emptiness? It is so hard to see how we are all grieving differently. Shelby does not express emotion outwardly and I have rarely seen her cry. Alice cries, has her moments but then puts up her shields and carries on. Carpenter wants so badly to be a big man about this and be strong. Me, I want to weep like a baby and fall to the ground, tear at the earth and scream at God for taking her away from us. I have never been one to be mad at God for anything, knowing that His ways are ways that I cannot understand. I don't even fathom why He created us. He must have known how badly we would disappoint Him. He must have known what hatred we were capable of and how much we would hurt Him. What was it like for Him before mankind was created? I don't know if emotion is attributable to God but the only thing I can think was that He must have been lonely. I am well acquainted with loneliness. Sadly it has been one of the greatest motivators in my life. Ironic, I think. Loneliness has led me to action more successfully than ambition ever has. That is a sobering thought. I never realized it until just now, writing it out which I guess is why writing is such good therapy for me but perhaps I have just stumbled onto one of the greatest truths of my life. Loneliness has been my greatest motivator. I am not sure if this is a good or bad thing. I was never one to see a goal and reach for it. I was one who saw a problem and strove to overcome it. Either way you move forward I suppose and either way you conquer. It just seems that as the ambitious one you are the aggressor and I was, well, whatever the opposite of aggressor is. I don't specifically create, I respond and in doing so I create. I don't set out to make a better world, I set out to make the world better. Maybe that is a difference only I can understand as I write this and the reader, assuming anyone is reading this and has made it this far, perhaps they do not understand. I am passionately vanilla. I am very happy to be a nameless face in the crowd and at the same time be the face that brings a smile to someone for at least a few moments in their day. Yesterday I was at Highland Coffee with my son and spoke for a while with Amy, a fantastic person in her own right and one of those people that I interact with on a regular basis and whom I am always happy to see and who always seems to have a smile for me when I show up with my burden of milk and my desire for a piping hot chocolate cappuccino. I was proud to introduce my son to her and even prouder when he had his moments where he spoke up and talked. He is getting less and less shy as the days go by and for this 11 year old boy to open up and talk to an older girl was something I could not have done at that age. I was so painfully shy. We talked for a bit and before I left she gave me something that I will probably keep for the rest of my life. It was a card, beautiful in its simplicity, with a flower on the front made of layers of cut out flower petals on a blue back ground and inside said simply, "Thinking Of You" and was signed by all of the dear ones there at the best little coffee shop in the world. There were no attempts at trying to say the right thing, no awkward "Sorry for your loss" statements or "praying for you during this difficult time." Just simply each person taking their time to write their name, some with a little heart attached to the signature, each written out carefully enough to be clearly read. Each saying volumes. Then today at the same coffee shop I was able to pass on a case of Orange Carrot Naked Juice, everyone's favorite at Highland Coffee, and to see the look on Jess's face that was equal parts thankfulness and frustration at what she saw as too much of a gesture and that I "needed to stop doing this," she said with a smile on her face. I explained that I got so much more out of giving them that case of Naked Juice than they did in receiving it. There is a phrase that has come up recently in my life and has been born over and over again. It seems to be a sign to me that there is a clear direction that I need to focus on. About a week before my sweet Willow left this life I wrote her a message. I was on my route, delivering milk to a farmers market and thinking of the joy swelling up within me over the little girl who owned me from the inside out. I wrote to her. "There is nothing I would not do for you, not matter what the price, and would never consider it sacrifice for the joy is in the giving." That last part, the joy is in the giving, has come back to me a few times and from the most random places. It isn't a common phrase but has seemingly become common to me. It means everything to me. It is my connection to my new purpose in life. To make sure that people know that I love them the way that Willow never doubted and that they know that whatever I can do to give them even the slightest smile is a joy to me and worth whatever it may have cost. If you are reading this still at this point, that is your gift to me and I thank you deeply for it. It is your statement that you care about what I am going through right now and want to be familiar with me. That is a great gift and I am very thankful for it. I hope than in some way I will be able to return the gift to you, sevenfold, and if only for a moment to give you a smile and that momentary warmth one feels in their chest when they see an act of kindness. We need each other in this life. People are by nature desperate for one another, some finding it harder to see as life passes due to the ones who have hurt them, and make no mistake I know that I have been the offender on so many more occasions than I care to admit. Today, I am desperate to let it be known that I am, above all men, most blessed. A.A. Milne said it best I think when, as Whinnie the Pooh he said, "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." I say it best when I say to you, there is nothing I would not do for you, no matter what the price, and would never consider it sacrifice for the reward is in the giving.