RESTRAINT IN THE MIDST OF VIOLENCE

He is a man of calm persuasion, not easily brought to violent anger.  Though he has his human moments.  Not a man of large stature, he once walked through a door to remind his oldest son of the chain of command.  He followed this up with a gentle moment of reassurance, of the deep fatherly love he held.

This day was regular, indifferent, the kind of day that strikes no memories in future years.  The phone rang and his wife fielded a call that would start a chain of events to be held in memories for years ahead.

He was a courteous, kind and likeable man, and what could change a man like that to his opposite is a mystery to this reading.  When Tom’s family sold the house to him and his, he was kind enough to allow Tom to store a few things in the garage until a place was found for them.  The call was from this gentle man, but he was no longer gentle in nature. He began spewing vile obscenities in a verbal barrage that rivaled none. Tom agreed to go to the house and remove his belongings from the man’s premises.

Tom and his son were half way through their task when it happened, fury broke loose.  Flying through the door to the house like an angry hurricane wind, the man was carrying a shovel handle in one hand and a scowl on his face.  He continued the verbal assault from earlier in the evening, and gave Tom a shove.  Both men lost their balance and fell to the ground, the man on top of Tom.  Balance was not the only thing lost at that moment, Tom’s son lost his fifteen-year-old temper.  He reached for the nearest thing he could grab, apiece of lattice, and brought it down with a crack across the man's legs!  It was then that a major life lesson began for Tom’ son.  Tom looked up from the ground and instructed his son to put the board down and step away.  Why the fifteen-year-old boy was so obedient at that time, he may never understand, but he did exactly as Tom had commanded.

Tom rose to his feet and shocked at what he witnessed.  With a fearsome vengeance, the man swung the shovel handle and landed a blow to the side of the boy's head, then drew back for the next strike. The boy blocked this shot with his elbow.  Demanding the man’s attention, Tom turned the man’s fury away from the boy.  The shovel handle struck the side of Tom’s head with a sickening thud, then the man continued striking Tom across the back, until the shovel handle broke from the terrible blows.  The boy in obedience stood and watched as his father took punch after fearsome punch to the face and mouth.  The assailant’s father grabbed the boy by the jacket and raised a ball peen hammer high above his head.  The boy slithered from his jacket to escape a possible crippling strike.  The man’s mother and wife even involved themselves when one grabbed the boy’s hair and the other his arm.  Tom, in the mean time, was still enduring the strikes from the crazed man, never striking one blow in return.  Tom took the full fury of the man’s anger and never once attempted to strike back.

Thirty-six years passed and the memories still return to the boy, especially when potentially violent situations arise.  The boy's son needed rescue, as it were, from the place he was living.  The fifteen-year-old boy, now a 46-year-old man ran to his son’s aid.  The people where his son was living did not  appreciate that the young boy was leaving the life of  enslavement.  As the man loaded his son’s belongings into his pick-up truck, the profanities began to fly.  Remembering what had happened 36 years earlier,  the boy’s father hurried the boy, his girl friend, and his stepmother into the truck and continued to tie down the load.  Raging inside with a seething anger, he held his tongue and rage completed his task at hand and protected his family from the possible violence of the ignorant.  The verbal assailants did not really recognize the love of a father for his son, and harbored selfish rage.

I am the author of this painful lesson.  I am the fifteen-year-old boy, I am the 46-year-old father.  This is remembered as a tribute to a man that knew how to respond to a situation, and not blindly react.  This is written to pay tribute to my father, Tom, who, if he had handled the situation that Halloween night differently, would have change the man that I have become. 

With that, I pay the highest tribute to Tom, my father, my son’s grandfather, and a great molder of men of restraint. I am Paul Clark. Thank you DAD if it weren’t for you, I would not be me, and I could not be the father to my children that I am.  Teaching such great lessons as Restraint in the Midst of Violence.

                                                                        Paul Clark

                                                                        Fathers Day 2010