FORGIVENESS CAN 'T WAIT
I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness lately and this always makes me think of my Grandpa Earl.
A couple of years ago, I finally forgave my grandfather for what he did to my grandmother. You see, after 30 some odd years of marriage, he had an affair which ultimately broke not only my grandmother's heart, but the marriage as well. Grandma survived, like the trooper she has always been and built a new life for herself. But I was so angry at my grandfather. How could he have done this to Grandma? To our family? How could he have allowed a midlife crisis to make him act in such a ridiculous manner as to embarrass our whole family and run through the small fortune it had taken he and my grandmother a lifetime to build?
But as the years went by, I started to remember things about Grandpa. Like the way he always took me on his lap as a little girl and asked me, "How's your love life?" Or the way he never could stand to see me get into trouble, no matter how much I deserved it. Or how he let me learn to drive the riding lawn mower across his acreage, being sure to warn me not to run over any kildare nests on the rocks.
Grandma forgave him as well, and started to tell me funny stories about him. About how she moved the bedroom furniture one day and how Grandpa, who liked to get frisky, came running into the dark room to leap on the bed only to land his ass flat on the floor because he hadn't realized she'd moved the bed! Or of how they went out to eat once and he wanted to fill his drink. Only he didn't know how because Grandma always did it for him. Grandma was visiting with someone and so he got up to do it himself, not knowing that Grandma was watching him out of the corner of her eye.
He stood before the drink area, which incidentally was by the ice cream machine.He filled his glass with ice successfully, but for some reason got the idea that the ice cream machine was the soda machine and before he knew what happened, he had pulled the lever and put a big dollop of ice cream on top of his ice.
According to Grandma, he looked to the left and right to see if anyone had noticed. Then he took a big lick of his ice cream and sauntered back to the table--just as if this was what he had meant to do all along. Grandma said she didn't dare laugh because he was kind of sensitive. But she said he was always doing funny little things like that.
It was good to finally forgive my grandfather, to remember how I felt about him as a child, to remember seeing him with sitting tall in his saddle on his beautiful mare, Sugar. I only wish I had forgiven him before he died of cancer. I wish I had visited him more often in his last years, found out more about his love of writing, of his tour of duty in Europe in WWII, of his days as a rancher and dairyman. Why did I wait so long, until all I have now is stories from my grandmother and father and a picture of Grandpa with his saddle, staring out at me with the gentlest eyes I've seen on any man besides my own husband?
It makes me thing of "Top of the World" a song by The Dixie Chicks. At one place it says:
I wish I had known you,
I wish I had shown you,
all of the things I was on the inside...
because everyone's singing, they just wanna be heard,
disappearing every day without so much as a word
somehow
I wanna grab ahold of the little songbird
Take her for a ride to the top of the world
right now...
Life really is too short to hold grudges, as trite as the phrase may seem. Because we really aren't promised one moment of tomorrow. We really don't know how long we have to get to know a person. We really don't know how long we have to do any of the things we need to do. So we need to squeeze every bit of life on this earth from each moment that we have. To me, the worst tragedy I can think of is that I would stand before my maker and say: "I wasted the time you gave me. I didn't do the things you designed me to do. I didn't love the people you put in my life because I thought I would get around to it tomorrow."
Only tomorrow never came