Echoes

There are certain moments in my life that never really passed.

They don’t stay where they happened. They come forward with me. They surface when I least expect them, like sound traveling across still water.

I’ve come to think of them as echoes.

One of the first echoes always takes me back to the Neches River.

Early morning fog would hang over the water so thick that the far bank disappeared. The river would be quiet in that particular East Texas way — a stillness broken only by the slow movement of water and the occasional sound of a bird somewhere in the trees.

My father had a camp on the banks of the Neches.

Inside that camp was where the mornings began.

Eggs in a skillet. Bacon frying. Biscuits warming. Coffee on the stove. The smell of breakfast filling that small room while the fog still drifted across the river outside.

I can still see my dad’s hands working over that stove.

At the time it just felt normal. Breakfast. A river morning. A father and a son starting the day.

I didn’t know then that those moments were planting something in me that would stay for the rest of my life.

That is one of the echoes.

Another one lives in a Hobby Lobby aisle.

It was 1999. Joshua was fifteen.

Leisa had wandered off to the yarn section, looking at colors and textures the way she always does when she’s planning something creative. Meanwhile Joshua and I drifted toward the model section where the airplanes and boats were.

We started looking at the kits.

Then something shifted the way it sometimes does between a father and a teenage son.

Mock kung fu.

Light punches to the arm. Ridiculous stances. Both of us pretending to be serious fighters while clearly not being serious at all. We were laughing and half wrestling right there between the shelves.

Just being silly.

When Leisa finally came looking for us, she found us still fooling around in the aisle and just shook her head.

I remember Joshua laughing.

At the time it felt like nothing special. Just a small family moment in the middle of a normal day.

But memory has a way of holding onto things like that.

That moment became an echo.

Recently another echo came while I was scrolling through old photographs.

Leisa and I had just marked forty-six years of marriage. I posted something about it — how we started going steady in the 1970s, married in 1980 while we were still in college, living in married student housing at Lamar in Beaumont and barely making it in those early years.

After posting, I started scrolling back through the years.

Photos from the early 1980s began appearing.

Young parents. A tiny Joshua. Family gatherings. Aunts and uncles who have been gone for years now.

Scrolling through old photographs does something strange to time.

You are sitting in the present, but suddenly you are also standing in a living room forty years ago. The people are alive again for a moment. Their voices almost feel close enough to hear.

Time folds in on itself.

Then there is Joshua’s poem.

Part of it is on his headstone now.

He wrote about echoes in eternity.

When he wrote those words he was just a young man thinking deeply about life and meaning. None of us could have imagined how those words would come to rest in stone.

But they did.

And they echo now.

Some echoes are quieter than all the others.

Late 1984.

Three in the morning.

Our house was dark except for the blue light of the television. I had put a VHS tape of Star Wars: A New Hope into the player.

Joshua was just a baby then — maybe six or seven months old.

He had settled against my chest on the couch, the way babies do when they finally relax into sleep. His small body rose and fell slowly with each breath.

Every father knows that moment.

When a baby falls asleep on your chest you stop moving. Completely. You barely breathe. You don’t shift positions. You don’t adjust anything.

You stay still because the sleeping matters more than the comfortable.

So I stayed there.

The movie played quietly while John Williams’ music filled the room and stars drifted across the screen.

Joshua didn’t know what the movie was.

But he knew that heartbeat under his ear.

He knew he was safe.

Eventually he settled deeper into sleep while the night passed around us.

That moment never left me.

It became another echo.

Over the years I have started to understand something about echoes.

They aren’t just memories.

They are reminders of what mattered.

My father’s camp on the Neches River.

Breakfast inside that little building while fog hung over the water.

A ridiculous kung fu match with my fifteen-year-old son in a Hobby Lobby aisle.

Forty-six years of marriage with Leisa.

A poem about eternity written by a young man who didn’t know how those words would live on.

A baby asleep on my chest at three in the morning while stars moved across a television screen.

None of those moments felt extraordinary when they were happening.

But echoes rarely come from extraordinary moments.

They come from love lived in ordinary places.

And sometimes, when the evening grows quiet, I find myself thinking about a photograph.

Joshua as a baby.

Sitting in a chair.

His arms stretched wide open toward the world.

And there is still something I wish I could say to him again.

I love you, son.

So very much.

Beyond my ability to use words.

#Echoes
#NechesRiver
#FathersAndSons
#LoveThatRemains