IMPORTANT PEOPLE NEVER TELL YOU, THEY SHOW YOU

Important people need one thing:

Someone who knows how important they are.

If it’s someone they like, even better.

But what if no one feels important enough?

The important people in my life know who they are.

They’ve shown who they are and I like them. Pretty simple.

You too can find relief in knowing who is important to you by knowing your own importance.

I took a walk around the block one day wondering who loved me.

What did I come up with?

Instead of the usual stereotypes like mom, dad, brother, sister, I also reviewed step-dad, step-mom, step-brother, step-sister, I kept looking.

Then I got married. My girl made the cut, made the road team.

That’s sports talk for being good enough to be included.

If I got married earlier the road team would have traveled to Ashland, Monterey, San Antonio, Philadelphia, Eugene, Brooklyn, Portland, and finally Tigard.

And it would have been a whole different life.

If I had been married at the age of others in my immediate family I would have had multiple wives, numerous step-children, and I would have been another step-dad in a long line of step-dads.

One Wife Pride

They say, whoever ‘they’ are, that when you marry your intended you also marry their family. They are important people in the long run.

But it didn’t make sense for the longest time.

Marry their family? Sure.

After hearing that I started paying attention to the bigger picture.

I started paying attention to the dad’s in the dating picture.

I met a few. What were my high standards?

Was daddy a force in their lives? Was he a factor at all?

My final stop on the dating game had a good record with her dad: he’d died when she was in college.

“I never got to know my Dad as an adult.”

Neither did I. We would have liked each other.

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But she did have a step-dad. Along with her mom, they were important people to her. Maybe me?

We were in the car with them once and he was talking about an incident that involved ‘colored people.’

My first thought was, ‘Oh no, not that guy.’

If he continued, if he didn’t get a pushback on soft racism, he’d go hard R on the N word sooner than later.

Then I’d ruin the chance of a long and fruitful relationship by slamming him for his unconscious ignorance.

But I didn’t have to. My girl stepped up and it was a masterclass.

“Colored people? What color? Green? Purple? What are we talking about? Color? Come on.”

There may have been a day when such a question would’ve resulted in anger, recrimination, and more ignorance rising.

But not that day.

She tutored her step-dad on race relations like a pro. I was the new guy listening in.

Step-dad wasn’t anxious to hear more from her. I was.

And I’ve been hearing it ever since. Sometimes just enough, sometimes too much, but never too little.

Did I marry her family? Did I ever.

Her Mom and step-dad, along with wife and I and our two kids, ended up living in the same house for fourteen years.

I was the all-round cowboy caregiver for the old man for five after he was left to die from Parkinson’s.

Important People In A Family Home

Was her step-dad really left to die? You tell me:

He’d been transferred to a local hospital from his assisted living place after aspirating food, shortness of breath, and failing fast with purple fingernails and lips.

Low oxygen on the way out?

It was a waiting game that was wearing the wife’s mother all the way down. She looked worse than him sitting by the bed.

So I brought him home for the last few days so she could get some rest instead driving the freeway late and tired.

What to do with someone on their deathbed?

He’d been in a steady decline and about bottomed out, getting his hand held gently by caring people.

We didn’t hold hands. Instead I coached him up on how to live his life the right way.

Since he was in what looked like a coma, I figured it was one of those deals where you’ll never know if they hear you or not.

He heard me. Using my strong voice I gave him the sort of pep talk D-Day soldiers may have heard.

Why do I say that? Because somehow I struck a nerve buried deep in that old brain.

He woke up. And stayed awake for five more years.

Five years. What were the magic words?

This man had been a WWII Marine in the Pacific, wounded on a beach landing, then a long hospital recovery.

I said no one gets things done unless they can get out of bed and get going, that bedtime in the middle of the day was for sick people or little bitches on profile for their scratch, their ‘ouchie.’

He woke up pissed, giving me the stink-eye, so I challenged him.

You Got To Fight For Your Right

I told him he looked like he wanted to fight, that I’d fight him, but not in bed.

“Do you need me to slap the shit out of you in bed like Patton?”

On a hot August day in 1943 along the northern Sicilian coast, Lieutenant General George Patton slapped a soldier. Arriving at the 15th Evacuation Hospital for an inspection, the general moved along the ward.

There he met “the only arrant coward” Patton claimed to have seen in his army “sitting, trying to look as if he had been wounded.” When Patton asked about his injury the soldier replied he “just couldn’t take it.”

As one of the doctors remembered, “The General immediately flared up, cursed the soldier, called him all types of a coward, then slapped him across the face with his gloves, and finally grabbed the soldier by the scruff of his neck and kicked him out of the tent.” 

A week later, Patton repeated the scene at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital (also in Sicily) where he slapped another seemingly uninjured private.

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I got my wife’s step-dad out of bed and we stood nose to nose until he started collapsing on his own.

Then I eased him back down, told him he wasn’t on his death bed because he got up.

I added that he wasn’t dying tomorrow, or next week, or next year, that we would be going to the kids’ football games, basketball games, to motorcycle rallies.

We had things do to and he was going to do them whether he wanted to or not.

Were those the words the D-Day soldiers heard the day before they launched?

“You’re going whether you want to or not.”

How did that sit with a bunch of nineteen year olds? Do you remember nineteen?

My Dad was nineteen when he boarded a ship headed for the Korean War five years after WWII. He and his buddies were raring to go, to get in it.

He told me some of the older guys, 24 year olds who’d been nineteen a lifetime ago, guys who’d been recalled for service, were crying on the boat.

They were leaving wives and kids.

They were the were the important people of D-Day, and this is their day.