Daddy and the dining room table

This is a picture of my father taken, probably in the mid-80s. Don't you just love the picture on the wall behind him? Can you see the cows? No? Well, every time he caught one of his children looking at that picture (it was a water color) he would ask if they saw the cow behind the tree. Joke there.

This is where he began studying (the kitchen end of the dining room table) after all the kids left home. Mom let him. Why? I don't know because I know it annoyed her like crazy. You can see behind him the buffet with some cookies and a basket. Also the red candle on the table. It must have been Christmas time when this picture was taken. All those coats piled up on the clothes tree. I imagine some of his children and grandchildren were visiting at the time.

Actually, this picture of dad at the table is pretty neat. You think? Well, you should have seen it after mom passed. I mean he took over the whole table. Now, you have to realize he had a study over at the church, and there was a phone in the church, so he wouldn't miss any telephone calls. I guess it was too cold for him over there, or maybe it was just that his study was so crowded with books and papers that he couldn't find his desk.

Poor dad. He was the brunt of so many jokes because of his constant studying of books (relating to Bible topics). He would get almost every book that came out on Bible topics and then he would critique them. If he didn't like the book and found "errors" in it, he would write to the author, cc: to the publisher and the author's employer. Yes, he would let the author's employer know they had hired a heretic. And if the book met with his Bible knowledge then he would write a glowing report on the book and send the report to the same three people.

I know some people who wrote books valued daddy's critiques. Others, of course, didn't; and he would get calls from the disgruntled, but they never dissuaded him nor persuaded him to believe anything other than what is written in God's word. No guessing games, he put it. You just couldn't "interpret" God's word to fit your psycho babble or your mixed up beliefs. God's word was God's word, and that was it. No ifs, ands, or buts. He was very firm about that.

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