Walks with my dad

 
A few scenes with my dad are rather special to me. Times when I discovered something about how he felt; things that helped shape the way I see and feel about things today. I was about eight years of age at the time of the following events.

There always seemed to be so very many people in Lune Street, Preston; a busy, bustling street with so much to see and take in. I guess we had gone about a quarter of the way along it when I heard the sounds that roller skates make as they move across flagstones – a sort of click-clack as the wheels cross the join between two stones.

The sound quickly got closer, and suddenly there he was: a man aged about 55 with thin, grey hair, scuttling in between the legs of the passersby whilst seated on a square, padded piece of wood with small metal wheels at each corner. He propelled himself along with the aid of two short sticks, his hands protected by pieces of cloth. Very skillfully he manoeuvred himself around, and was gone as quickly as he had appeared.
There was something else about him, something that only registered in my mind after he had passed by. The man had no legs, just two short stumps also wrapped in pieces of cloth. I was just about to as Dad about him when we came across this next scene.

An elderly man was seated on a box in a doorway to our left. His fingers were moving slowly across the page of a large open book that he held on his knees, and he was talking at the same time. The man was blind, and he was reading from the Bible which was in braille. On the ground at his feet was a cloth cap into which people had thrown a few coins. Dad dropped something into it too as we passed by, and the man paused in his reading to quietly say thank you.

When we had gone a little way down the street I asked Dad what had made the man blind (because Dads are supposed to have the answers to many questions, aren’t they?). “I don’t know, lad,” said Dad as he stopped and looked at me. “But every time I see him there like that, it makes me think how fortunate I am and I thank God that I have my sight.”

Those two encounters have stayed with me all of my life.

Dennis Crompton © 1994