the boy in the bar

I heard this story from a friend of mine.

Keith grew up in the same small town that I did. Unlike me, his family had lived there for generations. North East has its old time families stretching back to 1700s, when the community first began, and those families have divided themselves evenly between the gentry and the scrabblers. Keith's family belonged to the long-established North East poor.

They lived in a run-down gray cement-block house next to the ruins of the old woolen mill, covered with ivy, that had once supplied thousands of blankets to the Union troops during the Civil War. The back yard was full of clotheslines and abandoned pieces of broken machinery and flung bicycles and toys. It had an air of carelessness about it. We passed by the house often on our way to the beach.

I didn't know Keith much until youth group -- he was a few years a head of me in school. His younger brother was in my grade, and always getting detentions. We didn't have classes together. He didn't come to youth group often, but Keith did. He was a new Christian, tall, earnest, a little awkward. He didn't come from a good home. His favorite song was Psalm 51. I avoided him when I could -- he was always a little too intensely interested in me, and some of the things he said were inappropriate, but looking back I don't think he knew it. He was always trying to do, and to be, better.

His driving ambition was to be a cop. A few years after I graduated high school, I found out through the grapevine that he'd achieved the first part of his goal, and entered the local police academy. I could imagine his pride. I got to see his pride a couple of times, on my visits home. He loved to talk to me in church. He had that same wide smile full of crooked teeth, same buzzed haircut, same air of excitement, same earnestness, same hard handshake. He was always asking my dad questions about police work.

I learned, just a couple of months ago, what drove him. Late one night, when he was a very small child, his alcoholic parents took him and his little brother to the bar with them. While they were there, someone noticed a five-year-old and a toddler at the bar and called the police. When the cops arrived, Keith said he was terrified. He was confused; he had no idea what was going on, or even what was wrong; just that there was trouble, and he was in it, and he thought he had done something wrong. Everyone was angry and upset.

But one of the cops, a huge man, stooped down to him and explained to him what was happening, and told him that it wasn't his fault, and that it was going to be okay. Standing there in the dark of the bar, surrounded by drunken grown-ups and policemen and cigarette smoke, Keith suddenly felt secure, and safe. He knew he wasn't in trouble. He knew that there were good people in the world. This cop, who was here to bust his parents, somehow made everything all right.

That moment changed this little boy's life. Keith said from then on, he wanted to be a cop himself, so that he could do the same thing. Make the scared and vulnerable of that small town feel safer. That moment made all the difference in the world to this kid. Instead of growing up to follow his family pattern and become a deadbeat alcoholic, he decided to make something of himself. He decided to go to school. He decided to go to church. He still has his problems, but like the best of us, he's still trying, still plugging away.

That cop was my dad. When I heard this story, I started crying. I'm proud of my father for a lot of reasons, but I don't think I've ever been as proud of him as I was in that moment. I've been to the bars in North East; I know what they're like. I can imagine the atmosphere, and the child's fear, and my father bending down to a scared little boy and putting a hand on his shoulder and calming him with just a couple of words. My dad's had a lot of rough stuff to deal with through his job, most of it thankless and joyless, but he's maintained a heart for the small and the helpless. And I understood, finally, why Keith was always following us around in my growing up years. And I never knew. And neither, I think, did my dad.

I love how God takes the small moments, and makes them great. I love how he puts us in the right place, at just exactly the right time. I love how nothing is wasted, and I love how always, wherever you turn, there is love. Channeled, flowing, and unceasing. And I love that that night, twenty-odd years ago, the conduit of that love was my father.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy. I'm glad you're mine.