My father, Stan Worden, had high expectations for me. I knew this intuitively; but I also knew it from the advice he gave me. I didn't always follow his advice. Like the time I was 14 and he found out that I kissed a boy. I received a long, thoughtful lecture on the virtues of purity. "If you start now with kissing, it will lead to other things. By 16 or 17, you'll be wanting to have sex." Ouch! Is my father really being so direct with me? After that, I hid my affections with boyfriends from my father. When I was 17, I wanted to hold hands with a boyfriend in church. But my father was the choir director and he could see me from the platform. We crossed our arms and held hands under our folded arms. Like my father would really be fooled by that. But if he noticed, he didn't say anything.
There was a time that my father undertook to give me music lessons. I have to appreciate that music was his life. In the army, he worked as a musical director. In almost every place we lived, he served as the choir director of the church that we attended. So his desire to give me vocal lessons should have been endearing to me; he wanted to share something of himself with me. However, I resisted his attempts. I clearly remember standing in the dining room of our big brick house on 37th & Grant in Vancouver, WA and singing "I Have A Mansion Over the Hilltop" together. "Try this harmony," he'd suggest. Just to please him, I'd try; but it just didn't interest me. In fact, it irritated me. I finally figured out why just the other day. I think I wanted him to see that I was my own person. His talents were not my talents. I had my own (I just didn't know yet what they were). To his credit, he graciously released me from his musical attempts upon my life. A year or two later, I wrote an essay for one of my high school classes. I remember him handing it to me after reading it: "You have a writing ability," he said. That was my first inkling of my love for writing. As for music, I think he'd be pleased that now at age 61, I'm taking a Music History class at Boise State University and loving it.
It was terribly hard for my father to see me through my transition into adulthood. Through out my high school years, I'd been sold (probably by our church) on attending Northwest Nazarene College. I think my father was glad. He'd struggled so much to make a living without a college education. Seeing his oldest daughter make plans to go to college meant a lot to him. So, after high school graduation in 1968, when I announced that I would work a year first and save my money; he tried to talk me out of it. "Any thing can happen in a year. If you put off going, you may never go." I determined to prove him wrong. I landed a job as a secretary in a life insurance office. Each morning, my father--on his way to Alpenrose Dairy, where he worked as a sales rep--gave me a ride from Vancouver to Portland, just across the Columbia River that bordered the lush green states of Washington and Oregon. That turned out to be a good year; we bonded more and talked about all kinds of things. He even listened to popular music with me (and expressed some shock at the song "Lay, Lady, Lay"). I did save my money and by the following Fall, I had enough to pay for my first year. One day he picked me up from my office in Portland and took me out to lunch. "I have a gift for you," he told me. It was a brand new typewriter. (That was before the days of computers.) When the time for my departure arrived, he loaded up the green family station wagon with my stuff and he, with my mother, drove me the 400 miles to Nampa, Idaho and got me settled in my dorm room.
He was pretty worried when a serious boyfriend entered my life by the end of that year. I came home for the summer and bragged about this wonderful ex-drug using guy, who now played his guitar and sang songs about his faith at various youth gatherings. "A person who's ever used drugs is pretty stupid," he said. "He might go back to it. Plus he's one of those once-saved, always saved people." My father was pretty liberated when it came to Nazarene theology, but this was just a little over the top for him. When he walked me down the isle at my wedding the following January, he paused at the back of the church and whispered, "It's not too late to back out." Still, he graciously accepted Tom into our family.
We came back to visit my family about once a year but didn't see a lot of my father during those visits. By this time, he'd started his own real estate company and was a busy and successful businessman. Then, in 1978, we decided to move back to the area so Tom could attend Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon. We arrived in August with our tawny colored cat, Brownie and our blue-gray cat Charlie. We lived with my parents in their new sprawling house in a woodland community outside of Vancouver. My cats adapted easily to life in their barn; and I floated in the pool and watched my Dad plant fruit trees in his orchard. To my surprise, my father made a lot of time for us. He took us out eat and hung out at home in the evenings. One day, he took us to see his real estate office. As we left the office, he stopped and said, "I have something I want to say to you Tom. If I could have searched the world for a husband for my daughter, I'd want it to be you." Wow! That was big!
A few weeks later, we settled into an apartment in Portland. Tom began classes, got a job as a school bus driver and I began work as a special ed. assistant at an elementary school just across the street from us. September raced by. October began. Then on a sunny, warm, day on October 11, 1978; we got a phone call from my brother. My father had gone to work that morning and was feeling pain in his back. He went to his chiropractor and had the kinks worked out. Then, as he was putting his jacket on to leave, he dropped dead. Paramedics tried to resuscitate, but he was gone.
Now, almost 33 years later, here we are coming up to Father's Day. My father was not perfect. He was kind of a workaholic. We didn't always see eye to eye. But this I know. He loved me. He cared enough to give advice--and to retract it that one last time. I look forward to seeing him some day.
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