Tales from the West Texas Dust - Special

Each time I go into a unit for a prison church service, I notice something interesting about the inmates I meet and greet. Each one of the inmates (or clients or however the prison system prefers to call them) is usually required to wear some sort of identification badge for the benefit of the guards. On some of these prisoners' badges are pictures of their wives and/or their children. Due to the fact that these prisoners are only allowed what to some may seem like sporadic and rare contact with their own families on the outside, sometimes that very picture of their family is the only link they have to the outside world.

When our editor-in-chief let us know about the opportunity to contribute for this Father's Day special page, I felt that I had to chip in my two cents because there's a perspective that some people might forget to remember as they give presents to the central figure in the home who is supposed to be the breadwinner of the household, fixer-upper of broken bicycles, etc. I wish today to represent a small silent minority whose puny voice might not have been heard often enough in the past and is now probably drowned out by the banging, clanging, competing sounds of this modern world. Why would I do so? Because I was one who was classified as fatherless myself.

You see, shortly before I was born, the person who was supposed to be my father abandoned my mother in her time of need and abdicated what could have been an opportunity to mold and shape my life. The only things I received from his time with my mother were an old busted-up, frequently-used briefcase and the middle name that I now use as part of my signature. I hardly knew much else about him (and really didn't care to, anyway) until my mother informed me of his death shortly before Christmas this past year. Not much knowledge of who he was, what he did, or what his family was like - in other words, he left me a legacy of almost nothing. Nothing to lean on in times of trouble, no sense of faithfulness and commitment - nothing. Oh, sure, I at least had a few male mentors that I had the opportunity to look up to, but when your mother has to take up the slack and extra responsibility for the role her spouse was unable or unwilling to fulfill, it makes growing up normally (even in the most stable of situations) quite a challenge.

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