His last gift

I was a daddy's girl from the start. I remember one night when I was about four, my dad came to me with two sleeping bags under his arms and said, "Ready to sleep under the stars?"

I was wild with joy. I'd wanted to sleep under the stars for as long as I could remember anything, you know, about three years.

I followed him to the back yard, and helped him unroll the sleeping bags on the ground. As I crawled into mine, I looked up at the stars, I felt I had the best dad in the world.

When I was seven, my dad took me to the Agway store.

"Pick out the knife you'd like," he said.

If you lived on a farm, you know the value of having a pocket knife. I choose one that had a varied colored handle, and I carried it everywhere except church. I used it to cut bailing cord, carve sticks, and a miriade of other things.

As life moved on, and my family fell apart, I became angry at my dad for some years, for what I considered betrayal. It took me years to understand a bigger picture. We reconnected.

Then in 1994, I got a call. I was living in a women's monastery at the time.

"They found I have cancer," Dad said. "Mesothelioma. It's unoperable or treatable. The doctor's said, if I want to do anything, I should do it now."

Dad came to visit, as I lived in a cloistered monastery and was not allowed to leave. He asked me about that multicolored pocket knife.

"Oh, I used that one so much I broke the blade when it became too thin."

Dad left to do some errands, and when he came back, I went to see him in the parlor.

"Here," he said, shoving something towards me. I looked at it, puzzled. I hadn't asked him for anything.

I opened a box, and in it was a small pocket knife. I stared at it, thinking of that gift so long ago.

"Everyone should have a pocket knife," he said.

That was Dad's last gift to me. I have it to this day. It reminds me that even though people can do hurtful things, sometimes the person is hurting as well, and hurting people hurt people.