Dedication

It was high school graduation night and our son was among the several hundred who had participated in the ceremony. We wanted to make contact with him before we drove home and celebrated with relatives. We looked all over and could not locate him.

And then I found them, a daughter and her father. I stopped briefly and watched. Jane, a tall slender girl, and Sam, her father, a short stocky man, stood looking lovingly at one another. She took her National Honor Society braid and placed it around his neck, and they both laughed. She made other quiet statements to her father and he chuckled. Smiles and perhaps tears.

I never forgot the poignant scene of the lovely daughter looking down at her father and can recall it even now so many years later for I knew the full story. I was told the father raised his daughter from the time she was an infant without help from anyone except a babysitter. He saw her through the pre-school years, middle school years and through her high school years. Finally, at age eighteen he prepared to send her off to college.

Upon graduation she fully understood her father’s dedication and loved him perhaps even more than other children loved their fathers for she understood his sacrifices. A few years later I saw them again, this time at her wedding.

There was not a doubt in my mind. This man was the most dedicated father I ever met, and she was the luckiest girl in the world. Blessings to them both.