My father, 75, is many moons away from resumes, but if he had a resume, it would include the following:
Pastor of a small, Methodist church in South Bend, Ind., at the age of 20
Doctorate of theology from Yale University
Professor at School of Theology in Claremont from 1968 to 1999
Author of countless essays and articles on Christian ethics and the role of the church in social issues of the day.
And that would be a half-truth at best; a distortion at worst.
Because the father I know — that brilliant academician — is all heart.
To me, he’s the guy who weaved through a dozen or so looky-loos and jumped 12 feet from a rock jetty into a roiling Newport Beach sea to save a swimmer in trouble.
He’s the guy who spent months reviving a pea-green, 1960s-something Mustang that we, his wife and three kids, had given up on. You couldn’t blame us.
That beast had been driven cross country too many times; the engine choked with emphysema.
But there he was in the garage, night after summer night, cursing, breathless, his face striped in grease, his hands bloody.
Then one afternoon he said, “Come on, let’s take a spin” and sure enough, she drove, and drove pretty well.
He’s the guy who, after a conversation in the wee hours, drove 120 miles to slip an envelope full of $20 bills under my apartment door, because he sensed that I, a college student working part-time at a warehouse, was broke, which I was, and he was crafty enough not to knock because he knew, face-to-face, my pride would block me from taking the dough.
My dad has been rooting and toiling for the underdog his entire life.
I remember more than once the empty chair at the dinner table of my youth, and asking my mother where he was, and hearing that he was in jail for demonstrating for civil rights. I remember him rooting for the hapless Denver Broncos — they went 1-13 one year — in the early 1970s. I remember him picking a fight with my older sister’s then-husband, who was half his age and twice his size, because the SOB, intent not just on divorce but revenge, was pillaging the house the two had lived in for three years.
His empathy for the underdog is almost Pavlovian, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
