"R"

When I was in the third grade, my mother informed me I needed to work on my handwriting. I remember telling her it was pointless, for not only did I look like my Dad, I had inherited his handwriting skills as well. (This was pre-preacher days when Dad was a pharmacist. Let's just say not only do pharmacists know how to read a dr's messy handwriting, they can write that messy as well.) I don't remember all of Mom's response, but I do remember her back arching and me spending some time practicing writing that day. And that night after supper Dad spent some time with me at the table working on cursive letters. It seemed to me his handwriting radically improved after that.

Another thing my Dad and I have in common is our middle initial "R". While our middle names are totally different, as a child I loved to write my name Monica R. White because Dad always wrote his Jerry R. White. To me it seemed like this special bond we had. After I got married, it surprised Bobby a little that I kept my middle name and dropped my maiden name. In hindsight I understand some of his reasoning. Keeping the maiden name does make it a little easier on filling out forms, but all my nicknames from my family stem around my middle name, and just as Dad has always been Jerry R, I've always been Monica R. Giving up my middle name and initial felt like throwing away my identity even more than giving up my maiden name did. So I became Monica R. Bryan. A few years after we were married, it somehow came up that unlike my sisters, I hadn't kept my maiden name. While my reasoning surprised my parents, I think they also liked it. I am my father's child, after all.

Besides the dark eyes, short squat stature, straight dark hair and overall pudginess, Dad and I share, he also instilled in all four of us a love for nature. Sunday mornings before he became a preacher were my favorite times. While Mom cleaned up the kitchen, we would snuggle on, around, and on top of him by the porch window and watch squirrels and chipmunks harvest nuts.

But more than anything else, he lived out his life in front of us applying Scripture to his life. It wasn't just a book he read from and made us squirmingly sit through after breakfast. For him it was/is a way of life. When he became a preacher and they lost his business, they could have filed for bankruptcy. Instead my parents claimed "A good name is better to be chosen than great riches." The next 20+ years of their life were financially difficult, but I wouldn't trade those life lessons for anything in the world. When I came home complaining about kids in my new school saying untrue things about me, his response was to apply the principles of Matthew 18. And when we had to pray for a new vehicle because ours was literally dead and the money wasn't there, we took Dad's joke to pray for a Cadillac seriously. When his nephew whom we hadn't heard from in several years called a few weeks later, Dad shockingly told us he was in retail for the Cadillac company, had bought a used car at wholesale a few years earlier, and for some reason we kept coming to mind when he thought about selling it. We were dirt poor, but we had a very nice car to drive. I think that one still boggles Dad's mind. Our response was, "That's what you told us to pray for!" And the one of the many things I loved about my Dad as a teenager was that he was never afraid to admit he was wrong or didn't have all the answers. I don't think he'll ever realize how much of an impact he made on me during my teen years.

And while he probably won't read this blog, Happy Birthday Dad!