The Refrigerator Magnet

I don’t have any real current events to put in my blog, but for a day or so I felt like writing something. The question has been; what? Then this morning I went to my refrigerator and saw the magnet on the door. I knew immediately what I could blog.

When I was growing up my dad and I got into a lot of arguments. I don’t think I won any of them. We argued about how long I could play on the computer, if and when I could borrow a car, and how much money I could spend on clothing, and every once in a while, what the clothing could look like. Some of these arguments were recent enough that they can still irritate me a little. But my father really is a saint. This all came to mind this morning when I happened to glance at my one and only refrigerator magnet.

One summer day, when I was about 9 or 10 years old, my dad sacrificed an entire Saturday afternoon to take two of my girlfriends and me to Lake Hope State Park in southern Ohio. At that time, we lived in Columbus, Ohio and Lake Hope was an hour or so away. All the way there to the lake us kids constantly pushed and shoved at each other, we chattered and giggled endlessly. It must have been like pure torture for my father, but he never said a word. He just endured it.

When we got to the lake, us girls spent two hours splashing each other, giving each other piggyback rides, and performing various kinds of silly hydrogymnastics in the water. We had great fun. The whole time Dad watched us from the shade of a tree along the shore. When we got hungry, my father escorted us to the snack bar where he bought us hamburgers, Cokes, and potato chips. Several hours later, when we had tired of the water, we kids got dressed, and Dad took us on a hike on one of the trails through the woods.

The only time Dad actually stopped and talked to us the entire day was on that trail. We stopped at a little clearing and he told us about the time when he was our age, and he was trekking through the woods in the dark, one snowy winter evening on his way home from ice skating on a pond. According to Dad, he was just meandering along when all of the sudden his hat got knocked off his head and he immediately felt a stinging on the back of his head where he had been slightly cut. My dad turned around to see who or what had attacked him but nothing was there. It scared the heck out of him so badly that he ran all the way home. Once he got home, he franticly told his mother -my grandmother- what had happened. My father thought sure he had been belted by some sort of ghost that was haunting those woods, but my grandmother calmly told him that most likely he had been struck by a swooping owl that had seen the fur on my dad’s hat and took it for an animal traveling through the woods. I still remember that the story had us girls nervously looking up into the trees overhead.

Just before we left Lake Hope that day we stopped at a bait shop to get some snacks for the drive home. While we were there, Dad bought me a Lake Hope refrigerator magnet. I thought it an odd little gift, but my father told me I should put it in a drawer and someday I might see it and be reminded of my day at Lake Hope.

For about ten years the magnet was lost and forgotten, but not any longer. A few years ago I found it with some old pictures.The Lake Hope refrigerator magnet now sits in plain view on the door of my refrigerator. It is the only thing there. It reminds me not only of that long-ago trip to Lake Hope and all the fun we had, but also that my dad really is a saint.