A father's love

 I’m sure many of you have seen the previews for a movie currently playing in theaters called, Coraline. It looked a little Nightmare before Christmas-ish to me and it made me curious. I didn’t realize it was based on a book until I visited the library last week and happened to see the book on the shelf. I picked it up and flipped through the pages. It looked like a very short read so I checked it out thinking that maybe my husband would be interested in reading it aloud with me.

We read the first half Saturday night and finished the second half last night. Now don’t let my telling you that it is a dark and twisted tale scare you off. I highly recommend this book. Yes, it’s creepy and heart pounding but it’s a powerful example of doing the right thing in spite of the evil that’s threatening to crush you. And any author that can get my adrenaline rushing and visuals swirling through my head as I read a passage of story is a talented one indeed.

Now I come to what inspired this post in the first place, there is a part in this book when Coraline is making a decision to either face the evil or not and she recalls a memory. She and her father had gone on a walk one day. They went down a hill to the bottom of a gully where a stream was when Coraline’s father yelled at her to run away, up the hill that instant. Then Coraline continues:

“As I got to the top of the hill I heard somebody thundering up the hill behind me. It was my dad, charging like a rhino…The air was alive with yellow wasps. We must have stepped on a wasps nest in a rotten branch as we walked. And while I was running up the hill, my dad stayed and got stung to give me time to run away…He had thirty-nine stings all over him…He said that he wasn’t scared when he was standing there and the wasps were stinging him and hurting him and he was watching me run away. Because he knew he had to give me enough time to run, or the wasps would have come after both of us…”

As I read this passage I cried, hard. I laughed through my tears as I explained why to Tom. One time on a family camping trip my younger brother and sister went off into the wood to explore a bit. They were still within site, a bright piece of shirt here, the top of my brothers head there. Very soon we heard blood curdling cries. We glanced into the wood and saw hundreds of wasps swarming through the air not far from camp. In an instant my dad had dashed straight into the swarming wasps, hoisted my siblings up and came stampeding out of the woods with them, still batting off the wasps. I don’t remember much after that. All I remember was knowing how much my dad loved us because he went straight into what he knew would be agony to rescue his children.

It’s amazing how one little act like that lets you know so much about a person.