He was a Carpenter and a Firefighter and a Sex offender! My Dad.

Please meet the greatest Dad in the world, my father!

He was a good-looking man, strong and tall, he was also brilliant! Oh, let me brag a bit and tell you that he passed on some pretty good traits to his children and he had a pretty cute wife too, that would be my mother. People say that my mother was beautiful, and smart, and bossy and just basically a pain in the neck most of the time, but she was also one of those women who decided that marriage would be a forever deal. It was her love for him that made him a sex offender.

I want to tell you about my dad because I’m hearing that my daddy wouldn’t be allowed to fight fires today. I read about it in the news and I decided to tell you what I know about being the daughter of such a man as my father was!  There are a lot of things I could tell you but one of those stories was about a fire call at about three o’clock in the morning. I remember one early March night when the wind was blowing so hard that it was shaking the street lights, the trees were bending low to the ground, and the windows were rattling in our house, the wind was howling and cold. Back in those days, we had a certain telephone ring for fire and make no mistake about it, that phone would ring loud enough to wake up the dead, the rings were a code and told firefighters the general direction of the fire and this fire was in the country. I heard that my dad was one of many men who fought that fire and lives were saved but nothing else was, the fire burned the house to the ground and much of everything else around it with the wind whipping up the flames. Together the firefighters fought for hours and my dad came home looking like burned charcoal. It wasn’t the first fire that he fought so bravely, and it wouldn’t be the last. He developed lung disease and died, but before he died he told me that he was tired of living not knowing where his next breath was coming from. The smoke from firefighting was not kind to my father, and it’s not kind to any firefighter out there!

But wait! What? Should my dad have been a firefighter folks? Should he have had to die that way? He was a sex offender, what was he doing out there fighting fires? Shouldn’t he be in a cave somewhere with a GPS bracelet strapped to his ankle and wrapped in a blanket with holes, shivering against the cold March wind? I have a couple of caves in mind and I’m sure that he could have found a blanket somewhere! Would he have lived longer if he had never fought a fire? Should I be angry?

He was after all, a sex offender, my father, and by the way, why was he allowed to build homes and, OMG, he was the lead construction carpenter who walked on many of the steel beams of the high-rise buildings in Denver! Think of all the contamination from just touching things that he must have done! Should I be ashamed?

I remember the day he came home and cried, he was sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, a little two-year-old girl had just died that afternoon, the family called the fire department when their baby had somehow managed to fall into a well. My dad cried on and off for the rest of that afternoon, he said the little girl reminded him of his daughters, especially my little sister who was about the same age. Folks, think about it carefully! Was it my father’s fault that the little girl died? Did his presence with the fire-fighters impede their retrieval of that little girl’s body in some way? Would she would have lived if he hadn’t been there? Should I be ashamed?

If you get this far, you will be surprised to find out why my father was a sex offender, it was a very bad thing that he did! He met my mother at the tender age of seventeen when he was age thirty-three and it was a whirl-wind romance filled with moon-lit nights and all sorts of what my Dad used to call “Whoopy.” Oh my! Yep, he for sure was a sex offender and if most people out there had their way about it, or anything to say about it he would have been in prison and my mother would’ve been raising me alone. Truth is, it’s highly unlikely that my sister would have been born. My sister? A highly intelligent and very gifted woman who doesn’t like sex-offenders, but reality has it that I doubt if she’d like the idea of never being born. She managed to become quite a wealthy woman with a business that most people would die for. She lives up on the hill, I’m sure that you get the picture! Should I be jealous?

Truth! ….. It would have been worse for our family if he would have managed to get a parole, our lives would have been pure hell because he would have been on the registry for life as a tier three! I would have been bullied in school, I wouldn’t have had nice friends, my father wouldn’t have been able to find a good job, and my mother would’ve been supporting us on the salary that she could  have made in the tiny town that we lived in. And, that’s if they would have given her a job and that’s if we could have stayed in our home which is something I doubt very much because I don’t think that my mother could have paid the bills.

Okay, by today’s standards, the world would say that my mother was a little helpless girl of the tender age of seventeen who became a victim because she thought that she was in love with my father, and even worse, remained a victim!  She didn’t get pregnant for ten years but when she did, I was born, and I had a sister later. Together they raised two children who became very independent and do quite well, (my sis is rich!), and then when they were married for thirty six years, he up’d and died of a lung disease that sucked the life right out of him.

You see, a firefighter doesn’t just risk his life when he’s putting out the fires and saving lives. A firefighter is risking his life for the long haul on a bet that he will stay healthy, but my dad lost the bet! Should I be angry? Well, that’s something that you can bet on! But the worst is and please listen up very closely, the worst is that in today’s world you would’ve spit in my father’s face if he would’ve tried to join the fire department to fight your fires and save your kids, and then most likely you would have had the local newspaper shame him and run him out of town right after he saved you and your kids! My dad was a firefighter because he thought that was a good way to help people, he didn’t do it because it was fun and games. Not one man out there who risks their lives trying to save YOU is doing it because they think it’s “fun.”

Am I angry, yeah, I’m angry! To try to force firefighters out of their service and shame them is wrong, wrong, wrong! I don’t care who they are or what their history is! When they are trying to save life and you are shaming them, I’m sorry.

To try to make laws that say these brave men are so evil that they shame you by trying to help you is equally wrong, to say that they cannot be firefighters is as near to the pit of hell that I can think of. It’s a Satan get behind me situation if ever there was one!

I don’t like the way that you have treated my father’s courage and dissed the way that he died!

You can bet I’m angry and you can bet that you haven’t heard the last from me!

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