One day when I was a child, I woke up to find a naked man sleeping on the couch.
I was eight years old, and I woke up and got dressed and came downstairs ready to go to school and saw this fellow sleeping on the couch under a bedsheet which had partially slipped off in the night.
When you are young, you just accept the odd things adults do, so I walked quietly to the kitchen and got my lunch from mom and then went off to school.
The man had been visiting our house last night and had spent the evening staying up late talking with my father. My mom took us out to the shopping mall that night, leaving the man and my father alone to talk. She explained to me that the man had come to visit my father because he was going through a divorce and needed some counseling.
This was actually not a rare occurrence in my house. People often came by to visit my father and receive his counsel. To me, this wasn't unusual, it wasn't until later that I realized what a special person my father had been.
My father was an English professor. He began his teaching career at the University of Missouri and then moved around to a few other schools. By the time of this story, he was chairman of the English department at a university in the Midwest. He was young for the position, but was already regarded as an excellent teacher and administrator. Unfortunately, health problems forced him to retire early and he died when I was a teenager.
(Thanks to my father, I am only two degrees of separation from JRR Tolkien since my dad became good friends with one of Tolkien's fellow "Inklings," Owen Barfield. I have also shaken hands with W.H. Auden, Madeline L'Engle, and a few other notable people, although I was too young to appreciate who they were at the time.)
But back to this naked man. I don't remember much about him. As I recall now, he had longish hair and a beard and was probably in his mid 20s, perhaps his 30s. I didn't talk with him much, being only eight years old and not exactly able to interact with grown-ups on a serious level. I remember sitting with him at the dinner table and he seemed like an okay person. He and my father stayed up late into the night talking, probably drinking a bit.
By the time I got home from school, he was gone. I never saw him again and he remained just one of many unusual blips in my memory. We all have those odd memories of childhood, adult dramas going on over our heads which are difficult for children to comprehend, so we just ignore it and file it away.
And then, as it occasionally happens years later, someone will give you a bit of information which explains the unusual, unexplained occurrence you experienced when you were too young to understand.
At that was how I learned about this man whom I had found sleeping on the couch that one day. My sister, who is fifteen years older than me, just happened to mention him one day and told me who he was.
The naked man was William Least Heat Moon, author of Blue Highways. For those who haven't read it, Blue Highways is one of those "journey of self-discovery" books which can bring a lot of spiritual comfort to those who read it. Other similar books include, On The Road and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read many of those books as a teenager and a young adult and they brought me a lot of comfort, as they did others.
The theme of Blue Highways is that the author has gone through a difficult divorce and is traveling around the country (using the "blue highways" on his road map) to seek out spiritual comfort and the meaning to life. My father's house, although not specifically described in the book, was one of the first places he stopped because he knew he could find some answers to life there.
And this was the same house I had grown up in. Many, many people have found spiritual solace in Least Heat Moon's book, and he specifically sought out my father because he knew he was a source of such wisdom. And I grew up with this.
I regret to say that I am not a spiritually-enlightened person, even though I lived with my dad who was a source of this wisdom. But maybe that's how it works. A fish doesn't feel the water its swimming in. But I know my dad was a special person and his wisdom, thanks to William, the naked man on my couch, was spread around the world. We never know what impact we will have on the world.
Happy Father's Day.
by PaulsRedditUsername