A Glance Back – Winner!
This week we received one of those flashy ads that include a glued-on fake car key and the promise that if you scratch off the gray on the 3 scratch-off pads and they match, you’re a winner!!
Guess what? My 3 pads matched. As did everyone’s, I’m sure. Now if I needed to buy a new car, I just might take my 3 matching $25,000 scratch-off pads to the dealer and see what I did win. Maybe a little discount on a car or if I’m really lucky a gas card, and those are good prizes. But nonetheless, every time we receive one of these car-key come-ons, my heart thumps in a little sad ache.
About ten years ago, my dad-in-law, then in his middle eighties came running over (Yes running, and at age 94 he can still run.) with one of those ads clutched in his hands and a huge smile on his face. “I’m going to give you a brand new car,” he told me.
My heart dropped to my toes.
My dad-in-law trusts everyone and everything, because he is very trustworthy. That advertisement had just told him he was a winner, and he really thought that he had won a car, and even more heartbreaking is that he planned to give that car to my husband and me. You see, when you’re “getting up there” as my dad-in-law describes it, you have to rely on other people to take care of you and of your wife and of your house and of your lawn, and even some of your bills, and pretty soon the debt gets pretty heavy. I don’t mean the financial debt. We don’t “charge” my dad-in-law for the time we spend taking care of him, but after a long life pulling your own weight, it’s really hard to know that you can’t do that anymore. And if you could just give those people who help you so much a brand new car…. Wow, wouldn’t that be something?
It took us two days to convince him there was no car in the works. In fact, not until we received the same ad that had the same “winning” number, did he concede that we were right and he was mistaken.
My dad-in-law raised a good family. His four boys are salt-of-the-earth kind of people. He was the co-owner of a company that employed and trained a lot of young men and women over the years. He went off and fought in World War II, survived in an unsurvivable situation — machine gunner in the front lines. He goes to church, and he loves the Lord. He still likes to attend an occasional basketball game to cheer on his favorite local athletes. He plays a mean harmonica, and he buttonholes just about everybody he meets to come on down and listen on Saturday afternoons when the country jam group gets together at the local town hall.
Now when my dad-in-law receives one of those car-key ads, he knows that he hasn’t won a car, but you can tell by the way he studies the photograph of that automobile that he would still love to be able to give it away. And you know what? I don’t care what those gray scratch-offs say, a man like that is the best kind of winner you can be.
Blessings,
Sue
Sue — Just read your piece about your dad-in-law and his desire to give you a new car. It reminded me of the Christmas my dad-in-law gave me a lovely mink stole. I sat there stunned, without words (for once). He said something like, “I bet you never thought you’d really get one, eh?” It took a little digging but I finally discovered that months and months earlier, he had overheard me say, “I wish I had one of those old raccoon coats for football games. I’ll bet they were really warm.” Somehow, “fur coat” got planted in his mind and when he came across an estate sale that summer, he snapped up a real fur, knowing I’d be so grateful. So I was genuinely grateful. I actually wore it to a family wedding and it still hangs in my closet, a reminder of a man who went to great lengths to give me a Christmas present I would never forget.
Oh Penny, what a beautiful story!! Thank you so much for sharing it with us.