My Father and the Old Maple Tree

Today was my turn to take big B, Robert, Bob, Bobbie, all names attributed to my father, out for the day. Ever since our mother's passing 12 years ago, his children, us siblings, take turns daily to make sure our father, who lives alone, is never lonely.

Don't get me wrong, my 89 year-old dad is still in tip-top shape, physically and almost mentally, for his age. He had been a beer salesman for 35 years, which meant he basically lifted hundreds of pounds of beer cases daily, which he will make sure to remind anyone that crosses his path.

"I may not be a rich man, but I'm in better shape than any of my lawyer and politician friends that sat on their asses all day!" as he would ever so glibly point out.

Today I thought I'd take dad to a park about 15 miles from his home. Moores River Park. Dad has mentioned that particular park quite a few times before, and how he had spent so much time there in the past. Today was the day he could finally give me his official tour.

Ask anyone who knows Big B, whenever a familiar location in our hometown is brought up, a little glimmer in his eyes appear as if Robert Abraham has just met his future bride-to-be.

First off, dad pointed out the vintage swimming pool where he and his friends, after they had made the five-mile trek, would climb the fence on hot summer nights to be able to practice their awesome diving forms and also cool off, especially when it was against the rules to do so.

Pops also took me to a rusty metal fence along the city dam where he and his buddies used to walk along the top of the fence and play "balance". It was basically a dangerous tight-rope competition of trying not to fall in.

But something really caught dad's attention this time that made his gait a little longer and a little bit faster. He was quickly heading to an enormous old maple tree. In fact, I could hardly keep up with him. When he reached the tree, my father quickly walked around to the back of it, as if he was looking for something. There wasn't anything nearby but a half acre of Kentucky bluegrass, so I couldn't imagine what he was searching for.

Just as I got around to the portion of the tree trunk that my dad had reached so quickly, I witnessed him dropping to his knees. I panicked. If he was going to have some kind of medical emergency, we were pretty far from our car, and there was nobody in sight to help. My father wasn't a big man, but 175 pounds was more than I could handle.

As this aged man was still on his knees, I saw him reaching his right arm into an opening that was formed in the trunk of the tree, almost like a mini cave. I asked my dad what he was doing, but he was so focused on this hollow cavity that I thought he had just discovered, that there was no response from him.

For what only seemed like a minute or two, I saw my father eventually pull his arm out of the tree holding what looked like a very dirty, very old leather bound little black notebook.

"I found it, I found it," my dad announced, misty-eyed, as if he had found the answer on curing lung cancer, the cancer our mother died from.

"What did you find"? All I could see was a tattered leather, what seemed to be, small black notebook. I couldn't imagine what possibly he may have discovered that made him so excited.

As I was going to try to help the old man up, he chose, instead, to sit himself down, leaning on the old maple tree for support, which I happily sat by and leaned on myself.

Slowly I watched my dad unraveling a thin leather strap that obviously held this ancient notebook bound together for what seemed to be decades.

As my father slowly opened one of the pages of the notebook, there laid what looked to be a brown-tinged, dried rose. Dad quickly closed that page, as if he was hoping to continue the preservation a little longer.

Several pages after that, Big B pulled out a tiny yellowed paper bag. In that bag he poured into his hands six pennies, which he asked me to hold onto.

But what my father seemed most interested in came after he flipped through several more pages. There, in beautiful cursive, was someone's handwriting on one of the pages. Dad looked down at it, as if he was reading it for the first time, and tears started welling up in his eyes. He looked back up, handed me the black notebook opened to page 10 that he had just read himself, and asked me to read it, too.

What I read brought me to tears, also:

"April 4, 1949. On this day this red rose symbolizes our love for each other. When I, Robert Abraham, get back from my stint in the army, Marie and I will get married. The six pennies demonstrate how many children we both want to have.

Signed, Marie Saab and Bob Abraham."

Under their names were both signatures I had recognized.

I couldn't believe my mother and father had placed this little black notebook in this exact tree, at this exact park, 72 years ago. I put the pennies back in the paper bag, placing the paper bag back into the notebook that contained the dried rose along with my parents' written commitment to each other, and took it with us on our ride back to my father's house. My dad could hardly wait to show my other brothers and sisters. There were six of us.

After my dad showed my oldest brother, Greg, the little black notebook and the contents inside of it, Greg had noticed that the pennies were actually 1943 copper pennies. He immediately looked up the copper pennies on CoinTracker.com on his cellphone, a site that he frequented quite often, as coin collecting was one of his favorite past-times. Greg's face quickly went from a normal hue to a crimson red, and his breathing became shallow.

"Each penny," Greg, announced, "is worth approximately $60,000 each"!

So not only did my father find a symbol of my mother and his love for each other from over 70 years ago, but he was also able to gift his children each one 1943 copper penny!

I'd say, in so many obvious and not so obvious ways, Robert Abraham was a very rich man.

The End.