This is a bit I wrote a few years ago to share with friends. It's my "Father's Day Story."
-----------------
Growing Corn and Little Boys
For the first few years of my life, my family lived in a small town in East Texas. The area was mostly farmland, except for the rocket motor plant where my dad worked as an engineer. We left that small town shortly after I turned 4, so I don’t remember much about it. I do remember looking out of the window of Dad’s Ford Galaxie at, what seemed to me, to be miles and miles of corn fields.
The sight must have made an impression on me, because one night at dinner, I took corn from my plate and announced that I was going to plant it so I could grow corn just like I’d seen in those fields. Dad and Mom tried to explain to me that you could not do that with canned corn, but I knew better. So, after dinner that night, they let me plant a handful of leftover corn, butter, salt and all.
The next morning I hurried out to see how my corn was doing, and would you believe there was a single stalk of corn about as tall as I was, growing right there where I’d planted? Lord was I excited! There’s a picture of me, around my house somewhere, four years old with a look of excited astonishment, standing next to my stalk of corn.
Many years later, when I found that picture at my parent’s house, the memories came back to me with surprising clarity. My Dad filled in the gaps with his version of the story.
In his version, there was a 4 year old boy that believed so strongly that he could grow corn from his dinner plate that a Dad just could not let that moment of faith pass unrewarded. In his version there was a Dad that tucked his little boy in for the night and drove out to a nearby farm to ask a favor, so the corn would be there for the boy to discover in the morning.
“I wanted you to know that if you believed hard enough, you could make anything happen,” is what my Dad told me when I found that picture.
--------------
I called yesterday to thank him again.