My Dad, Excerpt from Arranging a Dream

 

My dad

Hello and welcome to the Focused on Story blog! I am so glad you are here today.

 This week is my father's birthday. Dad would be 104 years old. He's been gone for 45 years, but I still miss him.

My memoir, Arranging a Dream: A Memoir, is about our life-changing year when my husband, my one-year-old daughter and I moved from family and friends and the security of two paychecks to West Michigan to become owners of a flower shop and greenhouses. In March of that year, 1976, my dad passed away. His passing turned my world sideways. Not only life-changing but also life-challenging. Dads and daughters have a special bond, and we certainly did.

I did not think I could move on from that horrible grief and despair that comes with losing a loved one. Those who have lost their family and friends to COVID come to mind as I write this. Believe me, you will conquer the grief and leave it behind, but the love and memories of your loved one will remain forever.

This excerpt from the memoir recounts how I shook off the sadness and found the strength to move on. 

Here is an excerpt from that chapter, My Dad.

Arranging a Dream: A Memoir

Arranging a Dream: A Memoir, Excerpt Chapter 16, My Dad

After we returned to Fremont, I went through the motions as a wife, mom, and shopkeeper, but I was in a daze. I was still in shock as I worked through the grieving process. Because we were newcomers to Fremont, we weren’t close to anyone. Ted and I only had each other for support, binding us closer together. 

At the craziest times, I would find myself bursting into tears standing in the grocery store aisle, working at the design table or fixing lunch for Sara. Often, I would go to the phone to call Dad to share something about my day, only to realize he would never be on the other end of the phone again. 

Anger filled my life. Anger with God for not saving Dad. With my dad for leaving us. He didn’t even have the chance to come up to Michigan to see our new place or learn about our floral business or play with Sara. 

He was gone. 

Forever. 

A month later, I was in the kitchen sipping coffee and finding it difficult to make myself get going. Instead, I wallowed in my sorrow. I heard Sara singing in her crib in her room off the kitchen. The refrain of one of her self-composed songs filled with gibberish carried through to the kitchen as her voice sang louder and louder with every note. I heard her stand up, so I snuck over to the doorway and peeked in. She was hanging onto the rail of her crib, dancing. When she spotted me watching her, she thrust her arms up in the air and yelled, “Mom, mom, mom” and flashed that dazzling smile. My heart filled with joy knowing, in her own one-year-old style, she was celebrating the morning and anticipating a new day ahead. 

Our daughter, Sara

Looking into her happy blue eyes, I realized I had to move on, if not for my sake, at least for Sara and Ted. I decided I would make it through one year without Dad; and then I’d be okay.

 **** 

The best way to keep my dad’s memory alive and to honor him is to remember all he had instilled in me while growing up and to practice those lessons. He always pointed out the beautiful things surrounding us in nature like a wide-open prairie sunset, the glitter of the sun on a spider web, and the way the leaves on the trees flipped over before a storm. 

He never gossiped about anyone or badmouthed a person. He never swore, well, except the time when my brother’s class ring was not correct, and the shopkeeper would not do anything to make it right. 

A sense of mischief popped out in his odd sense of humor. He’d go for coffee at Turner’s, the local greasy spoon located on Route 66, where they called him Digger. He carried a measuring tape in his pocket to measure up anyone who gave him a hard time, being sure he would order the right sized casket for the jokester. He cared about people and appreciated the simple things in life. I wanted to be just like him as a business person, friend, and parent. But most of all, I wanted to teach Sara the same lessons by example.

Virtual Book Tour 2020-21

 The Virtual Book Tour Continues: I visited with multi-genre author and generous supporter of authors, Janet Lane Walters, over the weekend. Click her name below to stop over at her blog, The Eclectic Writer.

 Janet Lane Walters 

Upcoming stops are scheduled with Helen Henderson, Ellen Jacobson and Pat Garcia. I'll have their links next week so you can pop-over and visit!

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Thank you!!

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day, Dad.
Photo courtesy of freedigitalphotos,.net
by debspoons

Wishing all the Dads and folks who are father figures to children, 

Happy Father's Day!!

Father's Day always brings back memories of my dad, a tall thin gentleman in every way. We were alike in temperament. Not an extrovert, but comfortable with people. He loved everyone and could be friends with everyone no matter if they had no education or if they were a professor. 

My Dad

Dad taught me to love music. He could play the piano sitting backwards under the keyboard and still bang out a tune. In fact, just hum the melody of a song to him and he could play it. He never read music. Piano was a natural talent. I learned to play the piano because of him.

Because I was the youngest of three, and the only girl in the family, I may have been a bit spoiled. (Just ask my two older brothers!) We had a special relationship like most fathers and daughters do. We were a team. 

How about you? Do you have a dad or father figure in your life who always had your back? Please take time to share something you loved about your dad. Thanks.

If you'd like to know more about my dad, please visit the 2015 Father's Day post here.

Happy Father's Day: Remembering My Dad

Happy Father's Day
Image courtesy of Freedigitalimages.net by Sira Anamwong

Wishing all you Dads and those who have stepped into the role of dads, a Happy Father's Day!

Join us for the Travelogues this summer on the J.Q. Rose blog

This summer the J.Q. Rose blog is featuring a Travelogue on Thursdays, basically because I love to travel. So I thought I'd take you on trips we can enjoy from our desk chairs. Not quite the same thing as the actual tour, but at least we can get a taste of a place through the author's eyes. Guest authors and I will host a travelogue this summer. (We've had two guest authors already--Heather Fraser Brainerd's Old San Juan and Rachael Kosinski's Peru) Perhaps the trips may nudge you into actually visiting the place in the future.

Today I am suspending the travelogue in order to pay tribute to dads and especially to my dad.

My Dad
Copyright J.Q. Rose

Remembering My Dad by J.Q. Rose

I believe I got the traveling bug from my dad. He loved to go to new places and introduce us kids to a wider world than what we experienced every day in our small town in the center of Illinois.

Taking a road trip when I was a kid was very different from these days. My two brothers and I would pack in the back seat of the old Packard and take off with our parents. The four-lane expressways were just being built, so most travel was on two lane highways.

Fast food was unknown. My dad cautioned, "Don't ever order a hamburger at the restaurant." He was worried about food poisoning in the Mom and Pop restaurants along the way, I believed him too because many times my favorite drink, chocolate milk, was sour. I wonder if there were food inspectors in the '60's. If so, they weren't doing their jobs!

Rest areas were non-existent. GPS? Never even imagined such a thing. Road maps were our means of navigation. One time my dad asked Mom how much farther we had to go to our destination and she held up her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart and said, "About this far." We all laughed at her. "Miles, Mom, not inches."

The road trips were very special times for us to be with our dad because he worked all the time. He was a funeral director on call twenty-four hours a day. He worked all night and all day when he had funerals. (And they always seemed to come in batches of three!) His dedication to helping grieving families and treating embalming as an art garnered great respect and admiration from our community. When he wasn't working at the funeral chapel, he worked at our local bank.

While Dad was the smartest man I ever met, he was not a business man. People owed him for funerals, but he never took anyone to court to collect. He was happy to take chickens, eggs, etc in payment for the funeral especially when he knew the family didn't have money to pay their debt.

He loved and appreciated people. Our small community was not diverse in its ethnicity, but we did have one sweet African-American couple, one Jewish gentleman, and some residents whose names were not German. But because Dad was not prejudiced, I didn't even realize there was a stereotype for any one different from me until after I graduated high school.

He passed too soon at age fifty-nine. I still miss him. Thank goodness I have those memories of road trips and  his kindness to everyone to treasure.

Please take a minute to share a comment about your dad or that special man who played a big part in your life.. What do you remember? 

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My Dad's Birthday, Self-publishing with Smashwords

January 26 is my dad's birthday. I always think of him on this day. The weather on or around his birthday was almost always not so nice.( Even in Florida! Yes, don't let the Florida Chamber of Commerce fool you, there are cold days and rainy days during the Florida winter.) He is pictured here with his first grandchild, Staci, who is now a mother of a college-age student.

Time passes so quickly. I lost my dad when I was 28 years old. I didn't think I would ever get through that first year without him. The deep grief that gripped my life that first year has been replaced by good memories and stories about him when the family gets together. He still lives in our hearts.

Dad was an undertaker, yes, a funeral director. He loved people. He didn't care if they had nothing or lived in a mansion. He was always good to every one of the people in our small town. He taught me to treat every person with respect and appreciate the small things in life like the intricate snowflakes or spider webs. He was a brilliant piano player and could play anything by ear, never needing to look at a sheet of music. And he was a night owl. But being in the funeral business he was on-call 24 hours a day and a lot of the calls were in the middle of the dark Illinois nights. 

You can probably understand then when I tell you I am writing my third mystery, and it will take place in a funeral home. Yes, really! Of course the family who runs that funeral home will have the same attention to detail and caring that were so important to my dad. 

I thought it would be easy to write because I know the characters so well.  I don't know if it's because it is my third book or because the subject is so close to me that I'm having a difficult time putting the story together. It's not writer's block, it's just my own tendency to get the words right the first time and this is an especially close-to-my-heart project. Stay tuned!

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I recently updated a previous version of my non-fiction book for girls, Girls Succeed! so I easily uploaded the revised manuscript and new book cover to Amazon and it went live the next day. I dreaded loading it on Smashwords because of my first experience with them. They are picky! LOL..I like that though. If there are problems, they tell you so you can fix them and put up the best e-book you can for your readers. Originally I had to upload my book about 19 times in order for them to allow it to be distributed to all their outlets like Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Sony. So you can understand how I dreaded the possible hassle ahead with uploading the recent files. 

Image on the cover by majesticimagery.com

After uploading the new file, I checked it in the free e-reader for e-pub formats and found a couple of errors. It's so much easier to find them when you actually see them as an e-book on the Adobe Digital Editions instead of a Word file for some reason. So I quickly fixed those errors and re-submitted. The file was okayed to be put up on the Smashwords site and was fast-tracked to be checked for re-placing the e-book in the Premium Catalog for their distributors. Hallelujah! It was included in the catalog in only four days with no notes about any problems. 

So can you picture me jumping in the air like the happy jumping girl on the new cover of my book? Yes, I was a happy girl too when the e-book passed the muster for the premium catalog! Now I'm ready to get this revised book into the hands of girls to inspire them to dream big.