by Delilah
One of the craziest pranks to date came when I got fired from Philadelphia’s WMGK in 1994 and had to move back to Boston to take a job there. Donna and my business manager at the time, Fred, arranged to have fifty-two bowling balls packed in my moving boxes. I didn’t discover what they had done until I had lugged the fifth or sixth unusually heavy box up the two flights of stairs in the rambling old Victorian house I was moving into—in the middle of a Boston blizzard. One box was marked “attic,” the next was marked “kitchen,” and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why each box weighed a ton! There were bowling balls in an old ice chest, in boxes of spices and kitchen pots, in with my toiletries and my son’s toys.
I stood there, in a blizzard, my newborn daughter wrapped in four layers of clothes and blankets, confused out of my mind as to why Doug had collected so many damned bowling balls! It wasn’t until the umpteenth trip up the stairs that it dawned on me I’d been pranked again.
Oh, God, what a sense of humor You have. You must! Because when I think back to what my love for pranks has begun, I’m amazed at how even the silliest form of expression has spiraled into something so much bigger than me. Pranks that led to on-air fodder that led to a friendship with another prankster, fairy god-Donna, that led to a weekend in Maryland that led to Cheryl on the street in the sweltering sun that led me to Point Hope, Alaska—which gave a name to my nonprofit, Point Hope, and a whole new perspective on our homeless population. Point Hope has since taken off into orphan care, refugee care, and foster care, expanding its reach to help many folks in need domestically and abroad.
Sometimes God just lines it up for you. All those pranksters I speak of, most of them have been on the board for Point Hope, channeling their creativity in other ways that tremendously bless people. And while I still love a good prank story, I also love hearing how someone who was offered a hand up dug themselves out of despair, or how a volunteer, much like my younger self, is changed after being exposed to the orphan care crisis in a refugee camp.
If you have a heart for helping others, and you’re a praying person, don’t be surprised one day when God lines it up for you, too. When all of a sudden your heart is pierced with the truth about a situation that drives you to crave more information and to finally get involved. You’ll feel it, much like I felt it that day sitting with Cheryl on that scorching-hot sidewalk in Maryland. You’ll want to help. And when you do realize you’re ready to serve others, God will make a way, if He’s not already doing so in your life.
What you’ll come to realize is when you serve others, when you volunteer even a little bit, your life will be blessed. No, it probably won’t make you wealthy, but you’ll be richly blessed with joy. For the Bible says so…
“He who is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and He will reward him for what he has done.” Proverbs 19:17
“He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses.” Proverbs 28:27
“Jesus answered, ‘If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’” Matthew 19:21
Search the Internet for Bible verses about caring for the poor and the needy, and you’ll find more than you bargained for. Read those passages, and it will become clear how this life should work.
God wants us to care for the most vulnerable in our society, and if that means you step up to help, you will lack nothing. Because He cares for you, too. And that, my friends, is no joke…
CHAPTER 6:
A HEART THAT IS FREE
My father was a study in contradictions; his entire life was one big contradiction, and within those contradictions were hidden both the secrets of his brilliance, humor, and talent, and the demons that sought to destroy him.
Dad was brilliant, one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. Even though he was a high-school dropout with learning disabilities, he later returned to community college and became an engineer at a nearby electrical Public Utility Department, where he spent the majority of his career. He had the ability to calculate dimensions, square feet, angles, and radius without measuring tools. He could look at a building and accurately estimate how many feet of lumber it would take to build it, how thick the footings would need to be poured, and what kind of electrical service would need to be installed. Outside work, his hobbies included designing and building houses and boats, small engine repair, and making silly but functional things like popcorn poppers and rock tumblers. He was an amazing craftsman and woodworker. But as brilliant as he was, he was incredibly insecure and could never figure out how his controlling behavior led those he loved and cared for to pull away from him instead of lean toward. He felt like a victim, resentment and anger being his foremost emotions.
Dad was funny—he could tell jokes and weave together ridiculous stories that would send everybody off in gales of laughter. His humor was usually politically incorrect, off-color, and on point. He knew how to draw you in, draw the punch line out, raise and lower his voice at just the right times, and could invoke crazy accents and inflections to get his audience fully hooked. He could be a good listener, a great advice giver, a mentor and a friend. He was charismatic and an absolute people magnet when he was in a good mood.
He danced, he sang, and he played the guitar in a country-western band. When Dad was happy, he had a song in his heart and a lilt to his step. Any time we asked him a simple question, he would answer with the lyrics from a song. He loved fifties rock and roll, swing, big band, and western music. He could sing along with Elvis, Waylon, Buddy Holly, or the Platters.
Dad could twist, jitterbug, do the Tennessee Bird Walk and the Watusi, and he never seemed to tire on the dance floor despite his decades-long habit of smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Or so we heard. I rarely saw his dancing skills firsthand, as he and Mom would head out at night with best friends Bob, Doris, Carl, and Ann. The six of them would find a bar with a live band, or the men would play (all three were guitarists) while the women sang and danced. They laughed and partied till the sun came up then drove home to find kids asleep in piles of blankets on the couch, a carton of ice cream gone and bowls of popcorn spilled on the floors.
We loved this Dad when he sang and danced, when he played the guitar, when he and his well-lubricated buddies went off to the garage and made metal art or performed open-heart surgery on my sister’s broken dolly while the moms played nursey. He was animated, larger than life, our music-filled hero.
Then, like a light switch that was flipped, he would change. One day he would wake up singing and silly, and the next he would come home dark and brooding. We never knew what precipitated the change from dancing blue eyes and little ditties to the storm clouds of discontent. But when Dad changed, the entire house was smothered in darkness.
Mom would turn silent, watching with her worried green eyes for a sign as to how bad the storm would be and how long it would take to pass. She smoked more, snapped and pointed her fingers at us kids to make us sit down, be quiet, stop horsing around, be still. Her lips would purse to thin worried lines, her eyebrows knitting together above her straight nose. Her broad, strong face would turn to granite and be filled with fear of the damage that she knew could come with the dark clouds swirling about my father. The damage came in waves of deafening silence, sometimes outbursts of uncontrolled rage, usually directed toward Mom or Matt and me. When Dad would turn, he became icy cold and calculating. He would brood, plot, and stalk our mom. He would withhold affection, withhold finances.
When Dad was happy, everyone was happy. We talked about school, and often Dallen, our neighbor and my brother’s best friend, would be at the table with us. On relaxed days, our dad would do something unexpected, like pinch the middle from his dinner roll (to form a pocket for butter and jam) and pitch it at someone at the other end of the table, creating screams of laughter.
We kids always had kitchen duty afterward. My dad would supervise with a full cup of coffee, a cigarette,
and his feet up on the corner of the table. If it was a roll-pitching night, we’d bravely tie his shoelaces together and then startle him awake. I think we actually got him once, but he’d play along pretending to trip dozens and dozens of times. After dishes, if the weather was nice, we’d head outside to play and sometimes go to the beach.
But when Dad was in one of his moods, we sat in awkward silence at the table, followed our routines, tried desperately to remember our manners, never complained, and asked to be excused as quickly as possible. Mom sat next to Dad so she could jump up from the table and get him fresh coffee or more potatoes when he indicated he wanted them.
Dishes on these days were never done to his satisfaction. On more than one occasion he pulled all the pots and pans out of the cupboard and demanded we wash them all over again. The floor wasn’t clean enough, and the oven needed to be scrubbed. Even prearranged activities had to wait, driving us to events was a terrible inconvenience, and we lived with a pit in our stomachs wondering what the punishment would be, and to whom would it be meted out.
Punishment came in waves of deafening silence, or several whacks across our bums with his leather belt. The strangest things would cause a volcanic explosion when he was in the midst of his darkness… a misplaced screwdriver in his workshop, a woodpile not stacked to his satisfaction, a garbage can left without a liner, tomatoes missing from the salad, Mom arriving ten minutes late from a dentist appointment…
By the time I was in high school, the father I had grown up with seemed to be long gone. My sister, DeAnna, had a different relationship with him and has much different memories, but my father had all but disappeared for me. When I reached ninth grade, he and Mom had become strangers living beneath the same roof pretending to be married. Mom chose me as her confidante and shared her frustrations, fears, desperation, and secrets. She wanted to leave; she cried for hours about fears and her misery, but she had neither the courage nor the life skills to go. I felt flattered to be her confidante and looked at my father through different eyes—her eyes. In retrospect, it wasn’t fair to me. I took on her attitude of frustration and contempt. I think it was opposite for DeAnna. She had always been a daddy’s girl. Though he did not confide in her, like my mom in me, she was more empathetic to his pain and drew closer to him trying to protect what she only knew intuitively was his fragile soul.
Dad knew Mom was angry, desperate, and unhappy, which caused his depression to grow and his moods to worsen. Looking back, it really was quite tragic that two people who loved one another so fiercely could not communicate or express their needs to one another, so they lived in complete misery.
Dad had dozens of inventions, hundreds of plans, and more schemes than a leopard has spots. Had he followed through on any of them, he probably would have been wealthy, even famous. But his brilliance and talents were squelched by his doubts and fears. For some people alcohol destroys their gifts; for Dad it seemed to fuel his creativity. When sober, his boldness and his creativity gave way to headaches and smokes. He was never a mean or obnoxious drunk, nor do I remember his good friends ever being mean or out of control. Thankfully, all I remember are the songs they sang late into the night as the stars twinkled overhead.
When I was sixteen, I found out my father had been married before our mom. A girlfriend had become pregnant when she was sixteen and he was nineteen. They had a daughter, Maddalyn, whom he apparently adored. Soon after her birth, his young wife’s old boyfriend reentered the scene. The marriage was soon over. Turned out, however, she was once again pregnant. Kenneth was born twelve months after Maddalyn, to divorced parents. My father never believed Ken was his (this was long before DNA tests), and some time after his wife remarried and he had married my mother, he relinquished his parental rights. Although my half siblings lived in the same community I grew up in, we never knew they existed until we were emergent adults.
The kids were adopted by their stepfather and carried his name, not ours. Maddy and Ken Watson were my father’s dark secret, something that he hid from the world. Whether it was the unplanned pregnancy, the young marriage, or the divorce that was the source of his great shame, I don’t know. We never discussed it as long as he lived. I was told of his first family in secret by my mother’s parents when Dad and I were having one of our epic rows. But I do believe it was this secret and the overwhelming pain of being disconnected from the children he loved that was at the root of his depression and manic behaviors.
On the Thursday before Memorial Day 1985, our family was dealt a devastating blow when my brother, Matt, and his wife, Anne, disappeared in the small plane he was piloting. It wasn’t until five years later that the wreckage was finally found. We were then able to have a memorial service for them and some closure to our living hell. My half brother, Ken, whom I’d met not long before losing Matt, contacted me and asked if he could attend the service. I didn’t know how to respond. Dad had disowned me years earlier because he felt I’d dishonored our family by marrying a black man. It wasn’t my place to invite Ken or to tell him he couldn’t attend; I wasn’t even sure what would happen when I showed up.
A few weeks later, I attended the graveside service. As I stood outside my car, Ken approached me and gave me a hug. He looked sheepish and nervous; he’d never even met Matthew, even though they had attended the same small community college at the same time. As we stood talking, he looked at my father, walking toward the enclosure. “Is that him?” Ken asked. It was then I realized this young man, in his thirties, at his half brother’s funeral, had never met his father.
Awkwardly I approached my father, leading Ken by the hand. I hadn’t seen Dad in a few years and wasn’t sure how he would react. “Ken, meet your father. Dad, meet your son Ken,” I said, then turned and left the two of them standing together. Ken was the spitting image of our father, and if Dad had ever questioned whether he was the actual father or not, the answer was obvious when he looked at his son’s face and saw his younger reflection.
A few minutes later, the oldest of my father’s six children, Maddy, arrived with her two boys. My dad must have thought he entered hell that day. Our mother had finally—by having an affair with an old family friend—gathered the courage to leave him just months earlier. My dad was stricken by his collapsed marriage, the grief of losing Matt, and the shock of meeting his adult children and grandchildren, but also from the sadness of shutting a door to me and being too stubborn to realize it could be easily opened again.
Dad was a stubborn, prideful man. Once he made a declaration, he felt he had no option but to stick with it. When he disowned me, even though I know from what he told others he regretted it, he was too prideful to retract it. Luckily, he did open his heart to Ken and Maddy in the last few years of his life. He not only formed a relationship with the two children he had lost touch with, but he was able to spend a great deal of time with his grandchildren before he passed. I pray that gave him comfort and peace and he was able to finally let go of the terrible secret that poisoned his heart for far too long.
Dad was only fifty-seven when he died. He weighed less than one hundred pounds, I am told—lung disease had robbed him of his music, his laughter, his ability to walk more than a few feet without gasping for oxygen. Whether it was the cigarettes or the chemicals in the mills he worked in as a young man that destroyed his lungs, or faulty genetics (as my daughter and I both have weak lungs), I don’t know. Honestly, I think his early demise had more to do with the pain of keeping secrets and the poison that comes from bitter regrets. Dad loved fiercely but was filled with regrets. He never learned to swallow his pride and say, “I’m sorry, I was wrong.” He was a genius who was a fool, a builder who tore down what he loved the most, a talented musician who couldn’t find the words to the songs in his heart.
Joe Cocker recorded a wonderful song in the eighties called “Letting Go.” I’ve played it hundreds of times on my radio show for people who are trying to move forward, trying to let go of a toxic person, a marriage, or even a memory, a
nd free their hearts to move forward. The chorus strikes a chord in my heart:
Letting go,
Letting go,
The hardest part is knowing
That I’ll miss you so.
I’d like to wish you well,
Hey but it hurts you know,
Sometimes doing what is right
Means letting go…
Sometimes doing what is right means letting go—letting go of the memories that hold our hearts captive, or letting go of relationships that are toxic to gain back our serenity.
Many years ago—in fact, a few years before that song was released—I went for a hot-air balloon ride as part of a radio promotion. My son Isaiah was only a toddler and probably can’t remember being hoisted with me into the big woven basket. As the brightly colored balloon filled with hot air, the balloonist who held our lives in his hands explained the importance of the weighted sandbags that held the basket in place until the balloon was inflated enough to carry us skyward. When he said it was time to soar, the ropes were untied and we sailed heavenward. The seasoned balloonist explained that a few weeks prior to our outing, he had witnessed another balloonist trying to ascend, who neglected to untie all of the weighted sandbags from his craft. One rope held on, and the balloon was dragged down, with the balloonist and his passengers clinging to the tipping basket as it bounced awkwardly against the ground until at last the balloon was deflated and the basket came to rest upright. Luckily, no one was hurt, but it could have been a deadly disaster.
