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Time To Move Along
Bob Perry on How a Good & Faithful Man Says Goodbye
The first concrete memory I have of -Joseph Fraser Vincent Sr. is of the day after the night I brought his daughter home from a date an hour and a half after her curfew. In my "defense," both he and his wife Fran were supposedly out of town until Sunday night—this was Friday. Who comes home from an out-of-town trip two days early, anyway? Besides, Mary had assured me that if we'd called and asked permission to stay for the second movie of the double feature, her parents would have been fine with it. I mean, it wasn't our fault they wouldn't invent cell phones for another twenty years. It seemed like a perfectly legitimate rationalization to me.
I slowed to a rolling stop and dropped Mary off at the curb behind her house. The next day is when I remember first being introduced to the giant of a man whose physical stature was rather slight. He told me how he had entrusted me with his daughter and that I had disappointed him. He told me he expected more of me than that. As he talked to me, I shrank ever more deeply into the shag carpet at my feet. Yet he never raised his voice above a calm, conversational tone on that day or any other over the next 38 years that I knew him.
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Bob Perry is a commercial airline captain. He and his wife of 35 years attend Center Pointe Christian Church in West Chester, Ohio. They have five sons. Bob holds an M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Biola University and a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy. He defends the Christian worldview at truehorizon.org.
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