The Water Hose

CHAPTER 2 - It’s My Life

My prayer was that God would break me in the same way that Jesus was broken nearly 2,000 years before. I got out of the shower, and began putting my clothes on, watched a little TV, and then at 7:02 in the morning my cell phone rang. It was my dad.

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My dad had this white, two door, 1995 Toyota tacoma truck, when I was growing up. I swear I thought that thing was God or at least made in heaven, because that truck seemed to run forever. Because the truck was a ‘95 model it was equipped with manual windows, a keyhole where you would place your key in to turn the passenger airbag off, and a tape player.

As dad worked longer for VDOT, his job location continued to change as his experience grew, so his commute became longer, and with this he decided the tape player was outdated, and that a CD player was needed in his truck if he was going to make the commute to northern Virginia.

For hours, I remember my father working hard to install the system on his own. It was a project he knew he could accomplish. In between a few beers, in the middle of daylight, he got it done.

The next morning was foggy, and the roads wet from the rain the night before. In my hands was a piece of toast, smothered in butter and grape jelly, the usual. Dad was old enough to conquer the world, I was old enough to barely see over the dashboard of that old white truck. To this day, I can not remember where we were going, but on that morning, looking back, I found myself.

The year was 2000, and to my dad Bon Jovi never grew old, nor became irrelevant, so he ripped open the packaging on his new Bon Jovi “Crush” CD, and from the sound of the first guitar riff he seemed to be transported back to the days when he would play bass in a local band as a teen. My father was in his early thirties, I was five, but reflecting on it, I am having a hard time distinguishing who the child was.

Dad was so full of life, so undeterred from his dreams. What I am so thankful for is that he never taught me how to live, he simply lived and that was all I needed to see to know how I want to be. Everything he did, he did with passion and love, this was seen in the way a grown man unashamedly could still play the air guitar or air drums at a stop light and simply not care what he looked like to the car beside him.

The things that were close to him, were the things that he used his heart to prop up above the clouds. If he believed in something, he would give that thing or person all he had to make the situation better or the person happier. Randy James, my dad, became a shelter for people; a place people could go to entrust their deepest concerns.

On that same Bon Jovi album “Crush”, there is a song called “It’s My Life”. The song is not just a Billboard Top 100 hit, but an anthem. No song resonates with the person I saw in my father’s blue eyes that day. The beauty of the song doesn’t come from the vocals, or the musical talent, but the meaning of the words and the message conveyed from it. The song is a challenge to live life while you still have life to live, the song is a requiem for those who’ve gone before us and have given so much of themselves to make this world better. It’s a song for those who’ve been told to quit, but fight anyway.

If there is one thing that I have learned since hearing this song, sitting next to my dad all those years ago, it is this: life is fragile, and the moment you think it is secure and safe is the same moment, like a vase, it falls to the ground and breaks.

As a kid, you feel safe. Invincible. Unbreakable. However, that innocence is quickly taken back by the society we live in, the things children are exposed to and the way things simply are.

In 2001, my parents divorced, and I didn’t understand why my dad wasn’t at the house for Thanksgiving, or the reason why there was a man I wasn’t too familiar with spending Christmas with my mother and I. I didn’t understand at the time why my brother was a slightly different color than me, or why that same man held him and called him son, while he only called me “Tristan.”

I saw my dad every-other weekend, which to a child, seems like an eternity. As the years progressed, and I grew older, the opportunity to see my dad was what caused me to study a lot harder in school. I thought if I did all of my school work well, he would be proud of me and then I could tell all of my friends in class that my dad was coming to pick me up!

At that age, when you see two people you love separated from each other and you don’t understand “why”, you feel helpless, but also it hurt a lot. Because every attempt to try and get my mom to go live with my dad again, so we could be “a family again”, failed, which made the distance of traveling from house to house that much greater and the definition of a “home” foreign to me.

No matter what you are facing in your life, situations do not outlast the survivor. Meaning, no matter how painful whatever it is you are dealing with may be, the fact that you are reading this book is proof enough that you are running just a little faster than that which is chasing you, it is proof that you are surviving and that the pain is pushing you to higher heights! Because you are reading this book, you are a survivor, someone who decided to live life adventurously no matter the cost. Your pain isn’t permanent, but it is for a purpose.

Despite the pain the divorce of my parents caused me throughout my childhood, I always clung to the memory of dad and I riding in his truck, not having a destination, listening to “It’s My Life”, barely being able to see over the dashboard. “It’s My Life” wasn’t just a song Jon Bon Jovi wrote about his own life, he wrote the song about my dad, he wrote the song about a hollywood movie star, a barber, an inner city teacher, a single mother. Jon Bon Jovi wrote this song about all of us, because life isn’t meant to be lived by only one group of specific people, but by everyone before it’s too late.