Month: October 2025

Fitting In

Fitting In © 2013 Craig Dahlberg

I am not like my mother—she prayed for everything. She prayed for friends, for waiters, and for the food they brought us. For refrigerators. For roadkill.

She even prayed for parking places. When a car finally budged from its space as we circled like vultures seeking carrion, she would beam, “See? He cares!”

My prayers are more modest. I might seek divine intervention for a missing sock, a cell phone, or a shopping list gone astray in the grocery store. When I was young, I prayed for my pets—right up to the moment of death. Still, now and then, I’ve prayed for someone’s health and watched them become healthy again.

So, I was surprised to find myself—with my hand resting on the shoulder of a young man I did not know—praying aloud for him at a bus stop as passengers milled about.

I had brought my cousin to the Greyhound station so he could board a bus to take him home. We waited—pacing, standing, sitting on cold cement benches until our backsides went numb.

Two hours later, a bus finally arrived. Surely ours. But no; the driver told us my cousin’s bus had been canceled. Another one would come “in an hour or two.”

All around us, mothers changed babies’ diapers on the stone-cold benches. A grizzle-bearded gentleman used his cane to prop up his nodding head. Children overturned suitcases, which occasionally burst open in a soft explosion of clothes and toys.

As darkness approached, the replacement Greyhound bus arrived. A heavyset young man near the front of the line shuffled toward the door. The driver opened it, invited him in, and spoke with him privately. Moments later, the young man stepped back out.

After engaging him in small talk, I asked, “Why did you get on and then come right back out?”

“I was measuring,” he said plainly. “I wanted to see if I could fit in a bus seat. It’s less embarrassing to find out now than when the bus is full.”

His candor took me off guard. I searched his eyes, tucked away behind heavy cheeks.

As we talked, he began to open up. “I’ve eaten my way through my misery. My family treats me like an outcast. Eventually, I dropped out of high school. I’m barely a survivor. And that’s all I am. So, I’m leaving.”

His eyes divulged emptiness—a soul leached of hope. What remained was a broken spirit, searching for a place of healing.

When I reached for his arm, he didn’t resist, didn’t even question my intent. A tremor passed through him—and into me. What was I doing? His burden wasn’t mine. His shame, his fear—they weren’t mine to carry. And yet I couldn’t let go.

There was only one thing to do—pray.

Yet, at that moment, I shared a twinge of his fear. The bus crowd might stare. I might not fit in.

Still, I prayed.

When I opened my eyes, his face was wet with tears. He rubbed his knuckles in his eyes to clear them. Storm clouds had broken; a comforting rain had begun to fall.

And then he suddenly announced he was turning a page—away from bitterness, from anger, from self-loathing. Toward healing. Toward beginning again. After all those years, he believed that finally he, too, could be loved.

And in that moment, I learned something, too. My overweight friend and I were both out of our depth—he, for his weight, and me, for my very public prayer. Like him, I needed to risk not fitting in.

Expressing love is a splurge—an extravagant act that risks embarrassment. It’s a leap off the high dive before you’re sure you can swim.

And sometimes, by taking that one courageous step, we budge both heaven and earth.

Curtain Call

Dad, communing with a canine friend © 2023 Craig Dahlberg

In sleep, Dad might wander a path, inhaling the fragrance of pine trees, or he might revisit familiar, cozy places he held dear. But now he was aging, and naps brought confusion instead of release. His body faltered, and he grew irritable. A uniformed nurse at the assisted-living facility stepped in to give him medication, easing his agitation. As his mind relaxed, so did his muscles. Soon, his lungs would forget to expand; finally, his heart would forget to beat.

We were still on our way to see him when the message arrived—Dad was gone. Only the night before, we had returned from visiting our daughter and her family halfway across the country. I kicked myself for poor timing: I had missed Dad’s departure from Earth by forty-five minutes.

At 106, Dad would often ask, “Why am I still here?” He had lingered on, outliving friends and family. Each time we parted, we knew it could be our last. Still, we shared a secure peace; if it were our final goodbye, neither of us would have regrets.

We cared for him during the nine years after Mom died. Many weekends meant a two-hour drive to see him, tending to his needs, followed by a weary drive home—and then preparing for another long workweek. The rhythm repeated, week after week.

During those nine years, Dad cared for us, too. His humor cleared our career-compressed fog. His devotion to beauty, art, and faith pressed us to look inward, outward, and upward. He remained delightfully quirky: every dog he greeted received a firm rumple of its nose pressed lovingly together. While he never received a nip at this greeting, the canine communion mystified both the unsuspecting dog and its surprised owner.

But eventually, like his own father’s gold pocket watch, the spring broke. No amount of winding its crown would have any effect. Its time, like Dad’s final nap in his small bedroom, had run out.

But this was not Dad’s first dance with death; it was his curtain call. Fifteen years earlier, while shopping at Costco, he left us the first time.

He had stood in the long prescription line among other shoppers, heads bowed over lists and membership cards. Suddenly, Dad simply tipped over—a toppled mannequin. Like a felled tree, without flexing to break his fall—he was dead on his feet. His heart had simply stopped, as if to say, “I’ve had enough.” Flat on his back, the fluorescent ceiling light cast a blue tint on him, contrasting the red blood draining onto the concrete floor from beneath his head.

On his way down, he had nearly struck the woman standing behind him—a providentially placed nurse who immediately began resuscitation. Then, paramedics—shopping a few aisles over—rushed over to help, trundling him into their ambulance, lights ablaze and sirens wailing.

When Dad’s head had hit the cement floor, ever the artist, he might have enjoyed a foretaste of the beauty offered by his beloved artists—Monet, Klee, and Van Gogh, ushering him into God’s ultimate glory, appearing just ahead. Earth’s painted canvas retreated behind him, while before him stretched a new, unending one.

Then came the command: “Clear!” as the ambulance team attempted resuscitation. Somewhere between Costco and Sharp Memorial Hospital, the EMT’s defibrillator jolted Dad’s heart alive.

The glorious images on the divine canvas faded from Dad’s vision. It dissolved into cold stainless steel, a vinyl gurney, and IV drips as Dad shuttled back to Earth, bouncing along in the ambulance.

Revived, he arrived back from his first death.

Dad’s later years were bookended by his two deaths—the first in Costco, into the waiting arms of a nurse and ambulance crew, the second, the curtain call, in his cozy assisted-living bedroom.

The Psalmist reminds us, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places.” Certainly, Dad’s lines had fallen in pleasant places. His life’s boundaries had quietly expanded, stretching out like hidden markers beneath the snow.

My father leaves us his story, this dog-loving artist marked by a star-shaped scar on the back of his head. And he would ever encourage us—no, he would insist— that we keep asking ourselves his favorite query, “Why am I still here?”