Well, apparently I only thought I had written that story down. Since I can't think of a title for it at the moment, I'll just drop it in here. When it gets a title, maybe I will give it it's own thread. Greg
@73fj40lc , here's another one.
I have mentioned in several other threads how close my father and I became after my nearly fatal bicycle accident in 1980, and how we remained so until he passed in 1999. As I mentioned in the “There Is A Special Place” thread, I continued to feel my father's spirit long after his body ceased to breathe. This is another one of those stories.
A couple of years after I remodeled my kitchen in 2001 we had a small leak under the kitchen sink. Being as our cabinets were typical oak faced with pressboard interior, I knew it wouldn't take well to getting wet. Luckily we caught the leak right away. But I decided as an extra precaution that I would cut a sheet of plastic to put down inside the cabinet. I just happened to have inherited a dozen 4' x 8' sheets of white plastic that my father had not put to use before he died.
So I went over to his warehouse [the same one that caught fire in 2016] get a piece of plastic and cut it to size. Every time I went to the warehouse in those days I still felt my dad's presence there. It had been his man-cave, and the place where we had most of our serious discussions about life.
I laid a sheet out on the floor, got a marker and tape measure from his desk and started to mark out my dimensions. In the middle of scribing a line on the plastic, the marker went dry. So I retracted the tape measure, got up, went into his office and grabbed another marker. Then I knelt back down, pulled the tape measure back out and went to continue my marking. As I extended the marker to the spot where I had left off, I had to stop. Where I had left off marking, there was now a 1.5 carat diamond sitting on the plastic sheet!
At that point in my life I had been going through some rocky times trying to juggle my business (think dot.bomb), my family, and help my mother get her financial affairs sorted out now that she was 'running solo.' I felt that
that diamond was my dad's way of telling me that I was still on the right path, and doing a good job. And in case you all don't remember, my dad was a jeweler.
I kept that diamond with me and enjoyed showing it off on a regular basis for the next couple of years; more so in telling the story of how I got it. Unfortunately, after dining with some friends at Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake one morning, someone pick-pocketed my cycling jersey. I lost my cash, my drivers license, half a dozen credit cards. And I lost the diamond. But I still have the memory.