My dad had never flown before. He had done many things but he had never taken to the sky, except in painting beautiful sky pictures. My dad turned fourteen in 1900 when transportation was by horse and buggy. He owned his first vehicle, an Edsel truck, I believe, about 1910. He homesteaded on Cape Canaveral for several years, studied at Chicago Art Institute, wrote for the Atlanta Journal, and was a popular artist in Atlanta. All that before he married at age thirty-six. He and Mamma (who was only eighteen when they married) had eleven children. They built an English manor-style stone house in Habersham County, Georgia, on family property to which Daddy added more acres as he could.
But in 1950, at age 64, my dad had never flown.
My oldest brother, Orman, lived in Chicago then and wanted my dad to fly up for a visit. He and Mamma had long conversations and it was decided he would go. It was an awesome thing–my dad going on any trip without some of us. But by airplane? After all, he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t flown. Neither had any of us, except John who’d been stationed in post-war Japan. It was John who took Daddy to the Atlanta airport. We saw him off from our front steps. The slightest smile twitched below his gray mustache (carefully trimmed by Mamma) as he tipped his Sunday hat to us.
The house was amazingly quiet with Daddy gone. Nobody turned on the radio to hear H.V.Kaltenborn’s nightly news or Paul Harvey’s news and comments at noon. Mamma and Daddy homeschooled all of us, but that week we didn’t hear his deep voice expounding on current affairs, teaching history, or making comments on the literature we read each evening. And we didn’t hear his wonderful stories like the one about how his father was pronounced dead at two years old on a ship from England to Canada. Obviously, his father revived from the deep coma he was in!
When Daddy came home he had more stories to tell. He told about riding the El in Chicago as far as it went and back. He spent hours at the Art Institute and, of course, spent time with my brother and his family. He said the city had changed so much it was hard to recognize. But my favorite recollection was that of his actual flight.
I couldn’t imagine my dad being anxious or afraid of anything. So when he told us he sang hymns on the plane to calm his nerves I was truly awed. He said he thought the roar of the plane would keep other passengers from noticing his singing. But we knew from our family worship times how forcefully Daddy sang and we were sure the passengers had clearly heard him singing “The Haven of Rest.”
My dad was a bigger-than-life man. Somehow, his telling this account, of his anxiety and how he handled it, made me as a little girl respect him even more. Some things my dad did I’ve tried to follow. But never have I sung a hymn on a flight. However, I have remembered, during anxious times, to rely on God’s haven of rest.
I’ve anchored my soul in the haven of rest, I’ll sail the wide seas no more. Though tempests may sweep o’er the wild stormy deep; In Jesus I’m safe evermore.–Henry Lake Gilmore
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY TO ALL FATHERS!
Pens and Needles 