Dad

The oven is fixed.  I am too giddy to know where to begin.  There is something so inviting about the quiet sheen of a melted chocolate chip in a simple round cookie, however the adventurous spunk in me begs to create something I've never done before.  (It often also begs me to change the oil in my car all by myself without the assistance of Pep Boys.  Fortunately, I have enough sense yet to leave the fate of my car in the hands of an Ehow article.)  Well, regardless of what I decide on baking, I have contentedness in the fact that I will be baking today.

So, back to the oven getting fixed.  Yesterday, the father of the perpetrator of the Great Oven Slaying of 2011 came over with a new, intact piece of glass to install.  While we were waiting for said father, one of my roommates made a comment alluding to the fact that she was not 100% convinced that he would be competent in the proper fixing of our oven.  I kind of laughed it off and naively responded that he had to know what he was doing because his title read "Dad."  She just kind of stared at me, trying to figure out how to kindly convey the concept that men don't suddenly gain knowledge of all things in the universe upon successful insemination.  Logically speaking, I suppose this must be true, but I cannot bring myself to fully buy it because I can confidently say that my father knows everything.  It's true.  One year he had eight candles on his cake and was skillfully scaling coconut trees, the next year his cake was gleaming with forty candles, he was my dad, and he held all the secrets of the universe.

I feel I should note that I am not five years old, nor have I created a place for my father in the Trinity.  It's   hyperbole, people.  Stick with me.

I tried explaining this to an ex-boyfriend one time and he smiled at me much like the way one smiles at a child yammering on about the tooth fairy.  He found the notion that I had not yet fully grown into my adult shoes endearing.  What I don't think he realized at that moment in time was that I was developing that same child-like confidence in him and his ability to do anything.  In the end, I was right.  He did know how to do everything, including how to break my heart into more pieces than an oven door.  And therein lies the difference between him and my father, other than him being a democrat and a monotheist and an unappreciative tool.  That last bit was in reference to my ex-boyfriend, not my father.

I digress.  I do that a lot.  I think I do that when there are too many thoughts bumbling about in my head and I haven't quite figured out how to make them cohesive.  I am going to attempt to squish 'em together and hope that they flow.  I'm not being graded on this after all, right?

The past few weeks at work have been rather busy with the close of the fall semester and preparation for the Spring.  Something about the combination of grades and bills being received so close together does not bode well for me each time the phone rings, especially when academic disqualification letters have been thrown into the mix.  In ways it works out alright for me because parents of those students typically are more frustrated with their underachieving sons and daughters than they are with me, but those are my least favorite phone calls to receive.

I cried with a father on the phone last week.  His daughter had been academically disqualified and he was in more distress than he knew how to deal with.  I was not there for the yelling and door slams that disqualification letter probably brought to into their home.  I was simply an outsider on the phone, there to listen and cry and pray with him (and eventually advise too).  Here was a father who clearly loved his daughter beyond words and strained his bank account to somehow make it possible for her to get the kind of education he had always wanted and she threw it back in his face.  Well, at least that was what it felt like to him.

I should probably mention soon that I was a child straight out of hell.  Somehow my parents stuck through it all, never ceasing to love and support, without the knowledge that morning would ever come.  It came.

Anyway, I was there for the angry words exchanged across my own parents' dinner table and the panicked voicemails of calls I had rejected.  On the phone last week, however, I was only a school employee listening to a grieved father - he spoke to me like a fellow adult, not like the wayward daughter that I often feel like.  Here was a father, a man who knows everything and can fix anything, unable to repair his daughter's mistakes.  It was an interesting conversation to be a part of, hearing all the things my own father tried to get me to understand and I couldn't.  Rather, I wouldn't.

This time, dad, I get it.  And I'm sorry.

In the end, though, my dad did fix it.  As cheesy as this sounds and as much as I hate sounding cheesy, he fixed it by loving me through everything and in turn revealing Someone else who also loves me through all my blunders, a Father who truly can fix everything including my heart and my inclination towards deviance.  I don't think I'll ever understand how a non-Christian father can continually point me in the direction of the Christian God, however somehow he always does and for that I couldn't be more thankful.

This post was a little more revealing than intended.  And a little too disjointed.  I may remove it.

Anyway, off to the store to pick up pears!  Pop tarts it is!  I'll let you know how they turn out.  And they will let you know how competent another father is in repairing oven doors.