The Dad Story Project
Encouraging fathers, one heart at a time
Peter’s Blog
I’m actually right-side up in this photo, it’s our yard that’s upside-down (which explains why my hat doesn’t fall off).
S. Peter Lewis
My daughter is slightly nuts (and I love it)
Journey back to the secret place
The house stood empty. Dad and I stood exhausted.
With our backs against our overloaded trucks, we stared at the home where time had knitted our family together since 1958. Mom was gone now, and we were packing up the house. Bright rectangles on the walls showed where hanging photographs had kept the world from fading. The house echoed and whispered with far off and long ago sounds, like a shell held to your ear, a gigantic shell where something wonderful used to live.
Dad looked down at his shoes. “I suppose we ought to leave,” he said, quietly.
Neither of us moved. This would be the last time. This would be forever. We would never leave this place again because we would never come back.
“Dad,” I finally said. “There’s more last thing we need to do. We need to go back to the Secret Place.”
Dad tipped his head, his eyes narrowing as he reached far back to a time when he had walked with his small son in the forest and discovered a secret place. I watched his eyes remember.
“Oh, Pete,” he said, despair touching the joy in his voice. “We’ll never find it.”
“Yes we will, Dad,” I said. “I have the key.”
Years earlier, I had sneaked off to the Secret Place during a family gathering. I had sat on the flat granite boulder that looked out over a swampy pond and let my mind wander back to distant years, to dad and I, together, making campfires, heating pots of tea, whittling sticks, listening to frogs, and talking.
Alone, I had tried to lift out of all those years the wonderful something that had made this place special, but I couldn’t do it. It felt like the world had a hole in it. I had picked up a sliver of granite that had cracked off the boulder, slipped it in my pocket, and left.
Now that sliver of granite was back in my pocket and Dad and I were thrashing through decades of brush.
I found the place first, ran ahead, and jumped up onto the boulder.
“This is it,” I said, spreading my arms wide.
Dad caught up and looked around.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It might be. But I don’t think we’ll ever be sure.”
I pulled the stone from my pocket.
“I took this from the Secret Place long ago,” I said.
Dad watched as I bent down and slid the stone key back into its void at the edge of the boulder, each corner, each crack, each notch and facet, lining up perfectly.
He turned and sat on the boulder and looked out over the old pond, and slowly an enormous smile broke across his face. I picked up the stone and sat next to him.
We sat shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, hip to hip, knee to knee, our shirts and jeans rustling together. We sat as if there were only one of us and we had never been apart; as if plain old living had never gotten in the way; as if time had waited for us; as if forty years ago was still yesterday.
The air filled with the quiet of time. We imagined that we smelled wood smoke, sensed the hot tingle of tea on our lips, felt pine shavings peeling out from under our pocketknives.
Dad looked down through his fingers, down through the leaves and soft earth, down through the layers of years to a time when a big man and a little boy sat here, sat on this very stone, sat with one pair of feet on the ground and one pair of feet dangling in the air.
“What was it about this place?” Dad finally asked. “What was it that made this place so special?”
I turned the sliver of stone over and over in my hands while I searched for a way to say it, for a way to tell Dad that when I had come here by myself I’d felt disconnected, and that now I knew why. I needed to tell him that it wasn’t this place that was special, but that it was us, that it was him and I, a father and son who shared so much more than molecules in their blood; that it was a love and a friendship so deep, so rich, so long, so steadfast that we had trouble believing it was true; a relationship so solid it made this granite bench seem like soft clay. I searched the quiet hole in the air for words.
“We were just together,” I finally whispered.
Leaves fluttered down from the autumn sky and we heard them tick against each other as they tumbled down.
“That’s right,” Dad said. “We were just together.”
We sat there together in the deep quiet of time.
We were the only two people in the world.
We didn’t need any more words.
Cement forms and water pipes
This is a sneak preview from the next book (I’m still waiting for someone to write an awesome foreword).
I have several time machines.
Two of the best I carry with me at all times.
One holds up my glasses (my nose) and the other—a pair actually—stick out funny when I pull my hat down too low (my ears).
Every once in a while, a passing whiff or a far-off sound will catch me just right, instantly transporting me back to a place and time long forgotten.
In the quick smell of burning leaves I find myself with my dad, on a Saturday morning in 1968, down at the firehouse, washing Engine 3 with soapy water.
The flinty scent of hot sand takes me to the beaches of Long Island Sound, with my mom, walking slowly along in bare feet, searching for shells.
At the creak of a screen door I’m instantly ten years old, down at the lake, running along the dock and about to cannonball my cousin.
Flying in from nowhere, without warning, triggered by who-knows-what, these memories are often startling in their clarity and context—and they don’t always make sense. A woman once walked briskly past me while I sat on a park bench. I overheard her say something into her cell phone and in a flash I found myself driving through Cleveland while holding my breath. There isn’t enough room here to explain that.
My earliest memory is of being lowered into a hole by my father, who has tied a rope around my waist, and is giggling. It was triggered twenty-five years later by the sudden smell of wet stone.
In the summer of 1963 Dad was building a huge addition on our house and he press-ganged me into service. He had built plywood forms for the new concrete foundation—two parallel walls ten inches apart and five feet high, their bottom edges cut in irregular patterns to conform to the contours of the bedrock outcroppings they straddled. Working off a stepladder, Dad tied a piece of rope around my waist and slowly lowered me into the tight, dark slot of the forms. Kneeling at the bottom, blinking, I was in a different world. The light was dim and still. The air was cool and smelled faintly of rock busted with a sledgehammer. There was a pleasant odor of dampness. Along each wall, in a regular pattern, a grid of small holes on the left wall matched an identical grid on the right. Starting at one end of the wall, I found the first pair of holes. In each hole was an eyeball—Mom’s on the left, Dad’s on the right. My job was to catch the end of a wire thrust to me from the lady behind the left eyeball and pass it through the hole to the man behind the right eyeball. Dad would pull each wire tight and twist it off, locking the walls together at that point.
Working backwards, I shuffled along the bedrock looking for eyeballs. We would start at ground-level and put in all the wire sections up to as high as I could reach, then we’d all move to the next set of holes. When we were done, my knees were skinned and I was filthy, but when Dad lifted me up out of the forms I was as happy as a little kid could be, and later, when the cement truck came and the slurry sizzled down the chute and shot into the forms and welled up around the wires, Dad put his arm around me and said, “I couldn’t have done this without you,” and he meant it.
This memory had been lost to me for over two decades, until one day when my own son was very small. I was trying to trace the hot and cold water pipes in my basement and I needed his help. Holding his hand, I gently led him down the stairs into the dim innards of our old house. I explained the challenge, and then lifted him up onto my shoulders. Holding his little shoes in my hands, I walked slowly while he reached up between the joists to feel for the pipes. “Warm, cool, cool, warm,” he said, as we shuffled along in the gloom.
As I turned left around the oil tank, the musty odor of the damp granite foundation stones suddenly washed past me.
In that instant I was three years old again, down in that dank slot between the concrete forms, with mom and dad, looking for eyeballs.
I gave Jeremiah’s little feet a loving squeeze.
“I couldn’t do this without you,” I whispered.
“Cool,” he said.
10 Unforgettable Lessons on Fatherhood
A pastor friend of mine sent me the following short article and I couldn’t get through it without tears in my eyes—both because of the wonderful testimony of a son speaking about his father, and because the standard has been set so high for all of us. Please click the link to read the entire article.
Oh that we would leave such a legacy!
By Ray Ortlund at Desiring God
READ THE REST!In public, my dad was one of the great pastors of his generation. He served most notably for twenty fruitful years at Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena, where John and Noel Piper worshiped during their Fuller Seminary days. Dad and John were dear friends.
In private, my dad was the same man. There was only one Ray Ortlund, Sr. — an authentic Christian man. The distance between what I saw in the New Testament and what I saw in my dad was slight. He was the most Christlike man I’ve ever known, the kind of man, the kind of father, I long to be.
In no particular order, here are ten lessons on fatherhood I learned from watching him, each lesson living on in my life from memories of his care for me.
(Excerpt and link published here with permission as stipulated at DesiringGod.com)
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