Forgiven: One Man's Journey from Self-Glorification to Sanctification Read Online Free PDF Page A

— except that one time. . . .

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    Vince Russo
    Okay, once me and my friend Mike got my father a bit anguished. You see, Jim didn’t have much, but he had his lawn — my father cherished his lawn, if you saw Danny Aiello in 29th Street you know what I’m talking about. He’d cut it, rake it, trim it, thatch it, water it, watch it
    — it was his Garden of Eden. In other words: The Lawn Was Off-Limits! Well, kids being kids — we insisted on playing on his Field of Dreams on those occasions when he left it unguarded. On this particular day, soccer was our game of choice. So there was me and Mike kicking the soccer ball about on Jim’s glorious carpet. Little did we know that Jim was crouched down in hiding on the other side of the backyard gate, just waiting to see if any trespassers would violate his oasis of green. Just as I yelled, “He shoots — he scores!” with a lion’s roar Jim leapt from his crouch and came after us with his sterling-silver grass clippers.
    Mike and I — we were outta there Road Runner style! We’d never seen Jim like this — the small, gentle, quiet man transformed into Leatherface right before our very eyes! In our haste to get away, we left behind the poor, innocent, black-and-white checkered ball. What a mistake! In a frenzy, Jim, unable to catch the younger, agile kids, got to the soccer ball instead. In Jason Voorhees fashion, Jim firmly put the innocent ball between his legs and with precision stabbed it repeatedly with the clippers. Not believing what we were seeing, Mike and I carefully wandered back into the scene. Jim looked back and gave us a look that was half Nicholson in The Shining and half Riff Raff in Underdog . Now, in all his glory, I looked my father in the eye and said innocently, “Dad . . . that’s Mike’s ball.” All of a sudden there was another transformation — this time from the out-of-control Incredible Hulk to the quiet, meek and weak Bruce Banner. Not knowing what to do or say, I mean the soccer ball lay dead in front of him — Jim slumped his shoulders and did what he always did —
    apologized. He then went quietly back into the house, the grass clippers tucked gently between his legs.

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    Forgiven
    Apart from that incident, Gentle Jim was such a laid back kinda guy.
    In many ways, he was a saint. To this day he has one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever seen. . . . Wait a minute, let me back up for a second. . . .
    Okay, he had a huge heart when it came to kindness , but he was the cheapest human being you ever met. Let me put it to you this way —
    Gentle Jim used to wash his car with kerosene, in order to save on the Turtle Wax. He was just so cheap — he never went into his pocket for anything. I remember him telling me the same story every Christmas from the time I was five until I was 25: “When I was little and we had no money, the only thing I got for Christmas was a cowboy suit
    — and I was happy.” I remember thinking, year after year, “What does that have to do with my drum set, or my Nintendo, or my stereo?”
    But the truth is my father really had no money to spend because my mother always took it from him. Jim would come home from work every Thursday and just hand his paycheck over to Terrible Terry (my mother’s second pet name). She paid the bills, bought the groceries and basically spent the rest of it. My father actually used to have to keep a miniature, plastic piggy bank full of quarters in case of an emergency — and I’m not kidding. Yes, Rin-Tin Terry (yet another pet name) was the banker and the law. But if you’re the law, you must mete out some form of discipline. How Terry kept me in line was unique. First, she would scream at the top of her lungs, then follow that up with idle threats and the famous, “I feel my blood pressure going up!” From there, my mother would do something that, I must admit, I