Blog 493 – 12.12.2016

A Christmas Gift For My Grand Son

Most people that think they know me even those who know my daughter Emily passed four years ago and that I have a son named Jonathan are unaware that I have grown grand children. I was not a part of their young lives and have only seen them rarely in the last eight years. They are the children of my oldest step-son David and his first wife Anna. David passed last Spring. His children David, Caleb, Jacob, Kristina, and Hannah are wonderful young adults that are a big part of their daddy’s true legacy to this world.

I never planned on being much of a “hands on” grandpa. My one grandpa that was still living when I was born was not. He let his children raise their own children without interference or with much participation really. Kind of odd since my brother and I lived next door to him much of my childhood and seldom more than a few blocks away.

If you are wondering why the reference to a grand son in the title, I am getting there. First let me mention my other step-son Ben. He is one of the finest men I have ever known. I was David and Ben’s dad for the seven years that I was married to their mother and the mother of my daughter Emily. They were both almost grown when their mother and I separated. (Note: Separation is and has always been an illusion. Atonement is the True reality.)

One of the reason most people do not want to become writers is because writers write from their own experience, even novelist and science fiction writers. And most people are way too private to share that much of themselves. I am not and so I write hoping that my stories and my words will somehow be entertaining, thoughtful, and uplifting.

I was but nineteen the first time I married. Far too young to get married. But like most young people who marry young I hoped it would work. It did not. I dreamed of having a son one day and wrote my little wife daily from South Vietnam always putting P.F.O.B. at the end of the letters or on the flap. It stood for Pray For Our Baby. It would be twenty years and two more wives later before I got the answer to those prayers. I spoke with my first wife a few years before her death and she said she was glad that I finally got my Jonathan David. I picked that name for him at nineteen.

By the time he arrived I was almost forty and I always thought of him as more of a Grand Son than a son. And he is a grand son. I gave as much of myself as I could to the brothers he never really knew and to his sister Emily that he did get to know. With the three older children I shared the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis and also with Jon. But the Harry Potter series was our point of reference. His mother and I read them to him till he could read and then with him as he grew older, all of them. We saw most of the movies together as they came out.

I came up with the idea of watching all the movies again last week. I had found an early special DVD and Blueray copy of the original first movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, at a flea market near were I am staying. Today I bought the last two episodes. After I have watched them all I plan to package them up and mail them to my Grand Son. If he ever has children I hope he will read the books to them and share the movies, as David did the Narnia books with his children. It was a gift I gave them through there dad. Pretty sneaky, Grandpa. That’s how I got the best gifts that my Granpas ever gave me through my mom and dad.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White