I was an elder in the mid-1980s and had been a JW for a little more than fifteen years. While I had managed to distance myself from my worldly non-JW family, I still had enough contact to know where they all lived. Likewise, they still kept track of me.
One day, I get a call from my father, asking me to come visit him because he feared he would not live much longer. My dad also called my brother in Colorado, and he too agreed to come visit my dad. I drove down to Riverside, California from the Portland, Oregon area (about 1100 miles). I arrived about two days ahead of my brother.
The next day my dad asked me to take him out for lunch at his favorite restaurant. So, off we went. It is a steak house with a self-serve salad bar. Of course, it serves beer, which is a staple for my dad. I knew that my dad was going to use this occasion to the full to grill me about my life, and look for any opportunity to take a shot at my religion.
Try to visualize a man who is very old and grumpy with a beat up face like Mr. McGoo. He served in WWII as a B-17 turret gunner, a highly dangerous job. After he got out of that duty, he was assigned to details cleaning up dead bodies. After WWII, he was assigned to force former SS officers to clean up and properly bury dead Jews found in the concentration camps. Needless to say, he drank, smoked, and swore a lot. Life had hardened him, yet he maintained an odd sense of humor about it all.
Here he sits with me, his JW son, having lunch, trying to make meaningful conversation. He is a good talker, but he never understood my decision to join the JWs. He saw them as a bunch of kooks. Somehow the conversation gravitated to my engineering position, and some of the issues I faced in my line of work. As I was trying to explain a point, I slipped and used a swear word. I tried to keep on talking, hoping he would not notice or remember what I said, as I feared giving a bad witness to him.
My dad stopped and looked up at me with one eye. He dropped his spoon into his lunch, and started smiling with a big grin. I was feeling a little embarrassed, fearing he might use my slip-up with foul language to chide and poke fun at my religious views. He said, ?Finally ? you are a man. You have learned to swear! I love you son, you have made me proud.? He then picked up his spoon, licked it off and continued slurping his soup. The funny thing is, he really meant what he said. I felt very odd; as I was pleased to make him proud, but as a JW, I didn?t really feel swearing was exactly the way I should have done this.
My dad views swearing, smoking, and drinking as initiation rights into manhood. He felt that swearing meant that I was uninhibited and unafraid to say things as they are. So, on this day, when I was thirty-five, I was pronounced a man. I took a swig of beer, and knew at least I finally made him proud.
Jim W.
