Daddy Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

called
Mechanical Soft.
    Twenty-nine days in the Ann Arbor hospital and two weeks in a rehab clinic learning how to walk again. And yet—Dinah would never walk normally again.
    Her skull had been badly fractured. She’d bled into her brain.
    It was a
miracle
she’d lived. A
miracle
she’d ever managed to stand on her feet let alone walk again.
    She would continue rehabilitation for months. Her sense of balance was askew. Often it would seem to her that the floor was tilting below her or the very sky tilting above her. She would never sleep through a night—never more than a few hours before waking frightened and disoriented. The child’s fingers were gripped tight in hers and she would never let go.
    Do you love me anyway? she’d asked Whit. It had become a soft-fading wistful mantra.
    Jesus, Dinah—I love you more than anything and anyone in my life. I’ve always loved you, kid.
    Robbie’s father had gotten high soon after they’d brought their infant son home from the hospital. Smoking dope exhaling smoke luxuriantly through his nostrils saying, God damn, Dinah, we’re going to bring up our son to be
happy
. None of this bullshit from our families, OK?
    She was totally in agreement. No bullshit from any quarter.
    No neurotic crap. No “complications.” Our beautiful son is perfect in his soul, all we’re required to do is let him flower. Stay out of his way.
    She was totally in agreement.
    She did not believe in a god of vengeance and wrath—a petty little ranting god. She believed in a god of whom it might be said humankind had been made in this god’s image—this was the god Robbie would know, if Robbie knew any god at all.
    Already, Robbie had asked about “God”—he’d been hearing the word and all strange words provoked his curiosity.
Mommy what is “God”?
uttered with such childish perplexity and a wish to be informed that she’d laughed and kissed him and said
God is a spirit in the universe looking over us. God is in this house but invisible.
    “Invisible?”
—Robbie asked.
    You can’t see God. When there’s something you can’t see it’s “invisible.”
    “’Visible—how do you know where it
is?”
    Dinah and Whit had quoted their remarkable son how many times. There was never a son like their Robbie to say such clever things.
    “’Visible—how do you know where it
is?”
    One night when Dinah was still in the hospital at Ann Arbor Whit didn’t come to her room until late.
    After 10 P.M. he came. His words were slurred and his breath smelled of beer. He began to cry. She asked if there was news and he said no news and that was why he was crying. He’d been strong until now but now he was falling apart he said. Hid hishead in his arms, on Dinah’s hospital bed. His face hidden against her thigh. The damp of his tears wetting the bedclothes. He kneaded her bruised hand. She was confused and not entirely conscious. She’d come to hate the morphine for what it did to her mind but she wasn’t able to sleep without it. Or maybe she was asleep and was dreaming a dampness against her thigh and a man sobbing beside her saying softly so that no one could hear
Why! Why’d you take him there.
Why’d you let him go.

6
CHURCH OF ABIDING HOPE DETROIT, MICHIGAN APRIL 12, 2006
    Shall we not say, we are created in God’s image?
    Gently the Preacher moved among the flock of starving souls. His blessing fell upon them like precious seed. His eyes bore deep into theirs, in knowledge of their aloneness and their great hunger which only one of the Preacher’s spirit could satisfy.
    Moses Maimonides tells us that Time is so precious, God gives it to us in atoms. In the smallest units, that we may bear them without harm to ourselves.
    For we dare not gaze into the sun. For the sun will blind us.
    It is the Preacher who gazes into the sun, and risks harm for the sake of the faithful.
    We are a dignified people. We are not a crass cowering cowardly people but a great people, of these United