Don E Peavy Sr, click
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Blogs by Don E Peavy Sr
On Burning Bridges 12/10/2008 8:16:11 PM
"Never burn a bridge you might have to cross." That was the admonition my father gave me when he learned that I had dropped out of high school. He was devastated by the news because he had high hopes for me and he found it absurd that I would drop out of school in the 11th grade.
For my father, education was the bridge to the future--not in terms of determining whether or not one lived, but rather in determining the quality of one's life. He shared with me his own experiences of how being a high school drop out had relegated him to a life of low paying jobs and disrespect. He told me of the disappointment he suffered in not being able to care for his family as he would have liked to.
I listened to my father. Yet, like so many other young people, I did not hear him. My mind was closed to the issue and thus I remained out of school and suffered the first major mistake of my life--a mistake which has taken me many years to overcome.
I was born in Fort Worth, Texas on December 2, 1950, and was the fifth of what was to become a family of 22 children. My father was a cook, then a construction worker, and lastly an employee at the local meat packing house. My mother was a domestic worker until the civil rights movement opened up manufacturing jobs to blacks, at which time she went to work at a local electronics assembly plant.
We were poor but happy. My parents were hard workers and fiercely independent--two traits which most of us children would inherit. Another trait of my parents was resourcefulness. How my parents could take such good care of 22 children on their incomes has long been a mystery to me. Another matter over which I have gotten gray hair is how the 24 of us managed to live comfortably in a three-bedroom home. To us, the communal bath was a necessity, not a luxury!
Out of the crisis which followed my dropping out of school, I came to know and to understand the importance of family. For family is the anchor which can stabilize one in a sea of change and ill winds. When all others reject us, family is there to welcome us home.
I believe it was Robert Frost in his delightful poem, "The Hired Hand," who wrote that "family is where you can always go and they have to take you back." Frost's wisdom represents my concept of family as being a bridge we can always cross back into a land of peace and harmony. Of course, this is an idealized version of family which does not do justice to those all too frequent moments when home is a prison and not a refuge.
This sentiment was best expressed by Thomas Wolf who wrote that "You can never go home again." For too many, home is a place of tears and fears and is a bridge best exploded with the dynamite of absurdity.
Notwithstanding this bitter reality that defines far too many homes. my home was and is a refuge and even today, if the need arose I could go home. For of all the things I have been, I have never been homeless. No matter how far I have traveled from home, and my travels have been many and far, I have always been within distance of the bridge of family which could take me back to a place of comfort and refuge.
