trish hermanson - Home

The Father I Don't Know

6/14/2019

I’m the blondie in the stroller with my sister, pushed by the father I don’t know.
     Early one morning my mom came into my sister’s and my bedroom with red eyes. She handed us tiny cups of grape juice and quietly announced, “Daddy’s in Heaven with Jesus.”
   The night before at age thirty-nine, he’d slumped over from a sudden sharp headache and died. A brain aneurism, we think.    Ask me my age then, and I would have held up five fingers.
     Ask me today how many memories I have of Daddy, and I’ll hold up four fingers - staring at the back of his head from the back seat of the car as he drove; burying my hand in his giant palm as he walked me to kindergarten where he was the principal; running to his school office to get a bandaid when I fell and scraped my knee; and wrestling with him at night until I collapsed with giggles.
That's it.
      I’ve studied photos of him in his college football gear. Read romantic letters he wrote my mom from a sub chaser during World War II. And watched home videos where he flashes his wide grin.    But honestly, I don’t know him.
      So I’m throwing out a challenge to you who still have your dad. Sit with him and look through old photos. Watch home videos together. Call him and ask questions, questions, and more questions about his growing up, his dreams, his career.
     You may discover a father you never knew.

How to Fall Forward Like My Friend Victoria

6/7/2019

My friend Victoria showed me that when we fall, whether from our failures or things others inflict upon us, we don’t have to fall back. We can fall forward.
     Even through tough times, Victoria’s stock response was “it could be worse.” And she endured tough times: hiding under the kitchen table when Nazi bombs rained upon England during World War II, a hardscrabble upbringing in Liverpool, the death of a husband, raising kids on her own, a foreclosure, and a brain injury when a truck hit her.
  Her attitude that life is an adventure kept her moving forward as she threw herself into various careers. Some brought in bread, some busted. At one point, Victoria was so broke she lived off of canned tuna and “gutter apples” she scrounged. But she heeded the words of her hero Winston Churchill to “never give up.”
     When her hip went bad, she moved in with us, crawling up the stairs until she regained her health. Yet when I was down about something, she’d brew a cup of proper tea, remind me “you gotta laugh,” and regale me with stories.
     In recent years she’d gone from surviving to thriving through her blog, Honey for Your Soul. Hundreds responded to her life-giving encouragement. Her final tweet: “Never quit! Keep asking, seeking, knocking!”
     Then a heart attack. The finish line. And this time when she fell, she landed in the arms of Jesus.
     The best fall forward. Ever.

Painting by Kerolos Safwat

Can I Get a Bit of Leonardo daVinci's Genius?

5/30/2019

Can I get a bit of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius?
     The guy was centuries ahead of his time with his inventions of flying machines, submarines, scuba suits, machine guns, and military tanks. And his paintings are a standard by which art is still evaluated. Could I have just a part of his brain?
     I can! We all can!
     At an exhibit commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death, I learned we can gain a piece of his brilliance by practicing unquenchable curiosity.
     “Leonardo may have been the person with the greatest amount of curiosity of any human who ever existed,” biographer Walter Isaacson says. In Leonardo’s notebooks we discover the Fifteenth Century Renaissance man is wondering what the tongue of the woodpecker looks like, how people can walk on ice, and why the sky is blue. He’s like a two-year-old, raising questions nonstop - a trait we sadly outgrow.
     But Leonardo never did.
     Researchers say that only one-fourth of one percent of people are geniuses. Yet any of us can increase our knowledge by asking who, what, where, when, why, and how.
     We may not master the mysteries of the universe, but we’ll be filled with an awesome wonder of it.
  All by asking questions.

My Kind of Cookbook

5/24/2019

I love writing so much I’ve sometimes forgotten to eat. If it weren’t for my husband, a great chef, I’d turn into a scrap of dried leather. (He thinks I compliment his culinary skills only to keep him in the kitchen, but I relish every meal he creates - especially because I’m not making it.)
     It’s not that I’m a bad cook. It’s that I’m distracted. My mother used to concoct a twenty-four-hour salad - prepare it a day in advance so the flavors meld. I never start it until it’s nearly time to eat, so I call it my twenty-four-second salad.
     I’m not the only writer like this. C. Robertson says her poetry is “a disease, a sort of recurrent itch that keeps me awake nights and makes me burn the bacon and causes my husband to use unholy adjectives.”
     I’ve set some burnt offerings on the table, but I call them “blackened.”
     Author Virginia Greene Millikin says that just as loaves of bread won’t rise without yeast, stories don’t rise “without that piece of your very heart that you have put into it.”
     So that’s my problem. I don’t put my heart into cooking. Maybe if I…oops, gotta run. I need to have a meal ready in fifteen minutes so we can get out the door.
  (Did I mention my husband is a great chef?)

All I Ever Needed to Know about Mom Revealed in a Moment

5/16/2019

It happened in a moment, but the memory has stayed with me for a lifetime.
     I was about twelve, waiting with my mother in a packed auditorium lobby for the doors to open for a concert. In the crowd, a woman on crutches lost her balance and clattered down the stairs. Everyone froze in silence, embarrassed as she struggled to reach her crutches and hoist herself up.
     And no one did anything.
     Then Mom broke from the throng and stepped forward. “Are you okay?” she asked as she touched the woman’s arm.
     This spoke volumes to me. You see, my mother wasn’t the flashy type. She never sought attention. And in my growing up, we had endured the usual mother-daughter struggles, with me cocky enough to think it was all her fault. But this one event taught me everything I ever needed to know about Mom. And I learned it in a quiet, unexpected moment, which is often when character most clearly reveals itself.
     I have no remembrance of the concert that night. It was overshadowed by what became the main event - Mom doing what was right when no one else did.
  Which challenges me: do I have the character to break through the crowd and do the right thing?

Croutons...
Chew on these seasoned bits of life for a little hope and humor along your highway.

JOIN ME ~ I’ll send brief, occasional posts to lighten your backpack. We're on this journey together.

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