Chuck

The long dark nights of Advent have me thinking of my stepfather.

I was a senior in college when, after 27 years of marriage, my parents divorced. About a year later, my mom was visiting my brother in Southern California and decided to look up her old boyfriend. A few months later, she and Chuck were married.

There was a lot to their story I didn’t know.

I didn’t know that a few days before my parents were married in 1952, my mom was with a friend about to get on a bus to go home after a day of classes at Michigan State University. Chuck drove by and offered them a ride. After dropping off the friend, Chuck told my mother they were going to Indiana to get married. My mom protested but Chuck drove on, to Angola, Indiana, and found a justice of the peace. The man asked my mom if she wanted to marry Chuck and she said no. The justice of the peace told Chuck he’d better take my mother home before he got into a lot of trouble. 

When they returned to Lansing, Chuck asked my grandfather to stop my parents’ marriage. My grandfather told Chuck she had made her choice and to get out of the way. 

My father didn’t know any of this until several years later. I learned it in the 1980s. 

Chuck moved across the country to Southern California to be far away from my mom. Twenty-seven years later, she found him.

I didn’t like Chuck when I met him. That’s to be expected; kids don’t like their parents’ suitors. But there were other reasons why I didn’t like him. We were straight arrows and he did stuff we didn’t do, like smoking, drinking, and gambling. Apparently, the smoking was a deal breaker for my mom and he stopped cold turkey. She tolerated the drinking and gambling. 

Things happened when we gathered in California before the wedding that raised red flags. It was around Christmas, and I was with him when he went to pick up a Honey Baked Ham for his bookie. Call me naïve, but I’d never met someone with a bookie. We went into a restaurant one evening and three or four guys at the bar called out to Chuck. It was like Norm walking into Cheers.

The morning of the wedding, he gave my brother bar-by-bar directions: “You go down two blocks to the Wooden Keg, take a left, go three blocks to Bob’s Hideout, take a right, and before too long you’ll see the church on the left. If you come to O’Leary’s Tavern, you’ve gone too far.” 

We decided it was her decision, not ours, and kept our mouths shut.  

Another story I didn’t know was that a decade or so after he’d moved to California, Chuck went to Las Vegas for a weekend and lost so much money he didn’t have bus fare to get home. He knew his own father wouldn’t bail him out—that apparently had happened too many times in the past—so he called my grandfather, who wired him money and recommended he clean himself up. Chuck told me that story more than once, to impress on me how good a man my grandfather was. I didn’t need any help admiring my grandfather. Instead, I got stuck on what the story said about Chuck. 

Chuck didn’t want to be around kids, so when my wife and I would visit with our young children, he’d either go to Las Vegas or spend the day playing cards and drinking at the Elks Club. I remember him coming home drunk one afternoon and falling on his face in front of his grandchildren trying to walk up the stairs. 

And yet, and yet, and yet. People are never as simple as we make them out to be. One time, my mom was going to come to Michigan and take care of our kids for a few days while Gretchen and I went to Florida for an important conference. My mom called the day before we were supposed to leave and told us she had come down with a nasty stomach bug and couldn’t imagine getting on an airplane. Before I could say anything, she said Chuck was on the way. When he arrived, he lied and told me he had been able to use my mom’s ticket. Later, she told me he bought a ticket on the spot, which was not inexpensive, and apparently, he decided while he was at it, he might as well fly first class. It cost him a small fortune to rescue us. Our kids later said their days together were like the movie Uncle Buck. We’d call home and ask how they were doing and they’d say things like, “We’re okay, but this sure is different.” Yet the guy who didn’t like kids went to heroic lengths to help us. I will never forget it. 

He never had anything good to say about ministers—didn’t trust them—and never attended church as an adult. But eventually, he started going to church with my mother. They found a little Presbyterian church close to home and Chuck even liked the pastor. Before long, Chuck started attending an early morning weekday Bible study. 

Then my mom got Alzheimer’s disease. I wondered how Chuck would handle that. I needn’t have worried. He rose to the occasion. At one point he said to me, “I have been looking for purpose and meaning my whole life. Taking care of your mother gives me that.” He cared for her at home for five years. If anything, he probably waited too long before moving her into a care facility.

He gave up the things he used to occupy himself with—like playing golf and going to the Elks Club—and stayed home with her. His only standing engagement those last few years was with the Bible study at church. He became a kind of saint, a complicated saint with feet of clay, but a saint nonetheless.  I have come to believe, even though I didn’t see it then, that my mother knew what was inside of him all along. 

My mom died in 2013. Chuck died a few years later.  I’m treasuring the memory of him this Advent. Advent is a time of waiting, but what are we waiting for? We’re waiting for something or someone to be born.

“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked Jesus. Isn’t the answer something like this? Isn’t this what being born again is all about?

On these long December nights, I’m thinking about Chuck, and about grace slowly working things together for good.