A Season Of Life.....

My younger brother's wife gave me a Christmas present in 1987. It was a book by Oswald Caruthers titled "Growing Strong In The Seasons Of Life" - a series of daily devotionals. In all honesty, I read a few of the devotionals, and put the book aside and never looked at it again. But I did remember the title. There certainly are seasons of life, and the subject is too rich for a brief blog posting......for me, a seasonal change took place in the latter half of 1987. It began with my near-death on July 4th as I crashed head-on at nearly 50 m.p.h. in my small Toyota pickup truck into two pine trees near Lake Hemet in the Southern California mountains. I managed to crawl out of the wreckage shaken but unscathed. I actually returned to my job a week later on a Saturday, encountering our Hungarian employee, Andy Sandor. We talked for a while. He spoke about the day in 1956 when, at the age of 6, the walls began vibrating in his family's Budapest apartment. Then, as he said, "my father grabbed me with one hand and my mother with the other and we went outside. The Soviet tanks were coming from one direction, and we went the other direction" - to freedom. It was around this time in 1987 that I encountered another guy at our employee parking lot. I had never seen him before, and never saw him again. He claimed to have moved into the vacant room of a house in Irvine where I had lived the previous year with an older couple. This guy mentioned Bob, the devoutly religious recovering alcoholic who owned and lived at that house. Seems like Bob fell into a vat of chemicals on his job and died. I drove down and visited his wife Peggy, and the circumstances of Bob's death appeared quite suspicious. It was precisely at this time that several very deliberate and over-qualified fellows began employment with our airline transportation company. The lead guy was Mike, and on several occasions after work at about 2 A.M. we would sit in my truck and talk. One night, he turned to me with his grizzled half-smile and said, "Phil, when we move in, people die." And they did.