Black History Month: Who Inspires Me Part Two

-

 

As #BlackHistoryMonth draws to a close, I want to share Part 2 of who inspires me. Like my mother you won’t recognize his name, you won’t find his name in history books, but his name is forever engraved on my heart. He was my dad, Ray O. Benjamin. A Korean War veteran, carpenter, husband, father, he taught me it takes more strength to hold your tongue than to loose it. I never heard him curse or even raise his voice.

He taught me that family comes first. Always. That being part of a family sometimes requires sacrifice that doesn’t feel like sacrifice. I remember the great Black Out of 1965. We were little kids. Mom was home alone with us. Dad was on the subway on his way home from work. Once he was off the train he proceeded to walk home by the light of the moon and matches. He walked from Brooklyn to the Bronx. Once he got home, he climbed twenty-one flights of stairs in the dark to reach us. Opening the door, moonlight told him he climbed too far, was on the roof. When our Aunt, who had also walked to our place with a flashlight and the moon to light her way, opened the door, he fell into her arms. But he was safe. His family was safe.

He taught me that family is greater than the sum of its members, that stronger families makes stronger communities; that there is no problem too great to solve, if we work together. Even though he is gone now, every day he inspires me to be the best husband I can be, to be a better man, to put family first. Always.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catching Up With...Stacey Thomas, the Philadelphia Wedding Chapel

-
Image
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I recently married my longtime partner (see Musings Stanley (left) and me with Stacey Thomas of a New Husband, June 29, 2014 . Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of marrying some bright prince. And as a writer of gay romance, I’ve written gay weddings into two of my books, brilliant, extravagant affairs both. The wedding in What Binds Us ,  included a groom on horseback and “Ten thousand pale pink roses—an entire crop from Holland flown in that morning,” while at the comparatively simpler wedding in Unbroken “it seemed everyone in the world was there” including a flock of startled peacocks. Yet, when it came to my own wedding, panic set in. I didn’t know where to start. I knew I didn’t want to get married in a church and I knew there wouldn’t be hundreds, or even dozens of guests in attendance. In desperation—at that point we only had two weeks to get married on our 17 th anniversary—I goggled “weddings in Philadelphia.” The P...
Read more

Notes From an Old Man: Old

-
Image
Old. A word innocuous enough, and certainly useful at times. We’ve all heard it and used it and read it without any particular feeling. But recently the word became attached to me and… whoa boy …I have feelings. It started last year when I found myself suddenly unemployed. Being one to pick myself up and dust myself off and get back on the horse that threw me, I mentioned to a retired friend that I was looking for a new job. “Aren’t you too old to get a new job?” she asked. “No,” I answered, probably somewhat cockily. After all I was a catch . I have decades of experience and there is practically nothing in the arena of corporate communications that I hadn’t done, or experienced. I’m an award-winning fiction writer, for God’s sake! Then of course, my friend turned out to be the frickin’ Oracle at Delphi . I climbed off my high horse, decided to focus on my writing and got a job that would allow me to do just that. Pretty quickly the young people there attached “Mr.” to my name, ...
Read more

A Fatherless Father's Day

-
Image
Max as reluctant to let Dad go as we were. I remember the accident as if it was yesterday. I had been living in Washington, D.C. for three years. That particular morning, a Saturday, I was running late for work. It was a gray, wet morning at the edge of Winter. Heavy rain, like molten white gold, fell from an aluminum sky as I blazed along at 80 mph. A gray car merged onto the roadway from the right, then proceeded to move into my lane without signaling. The car was moving so slowly it looked like it was moving backwards. I pressed the brakes hard, pumping steadily with increasing pressure, my right hand tight on the gearshift ready to down shift. Realizing collision was inevitable, I glanced at the speedometer: 60. The impact sent my little car spinning towards the concrete divider separating west-bound traffic from east. The world seemed upside down. I remember thinking, I’m going to die and I never got to be friends with my father . I glanced up at the sky, oddly unafraid,...
Read more