Read Family Squeeze for Free Online Page B

them up and take them for a test drive, which is to say that he would sit his sons on a stool, drape an itchy sheet over our bare shoulders, and flip a little switch. The clippers alternated between gentle hum and chain-saw decibel without warning, and if parenting is about making memories, this was parenting extraordinaire.
    “Just take a little off the sides,” we would beg, knowing full well that Dad had always wanted to be a farmer, and this was as close as he would get to haying season.
    “Eh?” Dad would say. “I can’t hear you.”
    After spending a few minutes on one side of my head, he would go around to the other, and—relying solely on memory—try to even things up. I wore a lot of hats back then, dreaming of a time when crew cuts would be back in style.
    Dad sat in his rocking chair and grinned as I reminded him ofthose days. Then he took me by surprise. “It’s your turn,” he said. “I need a trim.”
    Few things have given me greater pleasure than this sweet revenge. But as I cut, I thought about the days ahead, and I began to worry. There’s an old Jewish saying: “Two things in the world you absolutely should not worry about: what can be fixed and what cannot be fixed. What can be fixed should be fixed at once, without worry. What cannot be fixed, can’t be fixed—so why worry about it?”
    It sounds good on paper, but I come from a long line of gifted worriers. And so as the days passed, I worried about what to do next. And I asked questions of God, questions I’d never wrestled with before:
How can someone who has spent a lifetime loving and serving You be rewarded this way? What purpose is there in this anguish, in this seeming abandonment? How do I do the right thing given these circumstances? How do I honor my father when honoring him will surely include putting him in the hands of strangers more qualified than I one day soon? And by the way, I have other responsibilities too, Lord. I know I’m not supposed to feel resentment, but it’s creeping in
.
    One night while running my hands along a shelf filled with books my father had given me, I came across the story of an aged man who lived in his only son’s house.
    When evening came, the whole family would gather around the big oak dining table to share a meal together. The son and his wife treated the old man well. And he took great pleasure in watching his grandson Matthew grow. He loved to take the child onto his lap and tell him stories.
    As the years slid by, the old man’s hands began to shake. Sometimes he would spill his tea because of those trembling hands, or he would drop a bowl. And little by little his son became more and more impatient with him.
    One evening, as the family sat at the dinner table, the old man accidentally hit his bowl with the soupspoon and the bowl broke in half, spilling soup onto the tablecloth and onto his lap. His son stood to his feet and hissed under his breath, “I’m tired of you spilling food on our good tablecloth and breaking our good dishes! If you can’t eat with manners, eat alone.”
    The next day, the son brought home a wooden bowl. He set a table in the old man’s bedroom, using an old sheet as a tablecloth, and served him his food in the wooden bowl.
    The old man said nothing and ate his meals alone day after day.
    One day when the son came home from work, he noticed Matthew working on something in the corner. “What keeps you so busy today?” he asked.
    The boy looked up from his work. “I’m making a bowl, carving it from wood all by myself,” he said.
    His father was surprised. “A wooden bowl? What will you use it for? We have such beautiful dishes.”
    The little boy answered, “I’m making this bowl for you. When you grow old like Grandpa, and your hands begin to shake, I’ll have this wooden bowl ready to give you in your little room.”
    The man stood still, staring at the bowl. Then he rushed to his father’s room and fell to his knees. “Forgive me, Father.