My father was a hard working man. That is to say, he owned two small businesses. Hard work was not an option. It was as necessary to survival as eating or breathing. At least that is how it seemed to me as I grew up watching him.

I seldom saw my father out of his work clothes. When he was working a shift at the package store he would wear dress slacks and a button up, but when he was working a shift at the restaurant he would wear his chef whites. The whites were what I remember him wearing most and it was those uniforms that so profoundly affected me.

I remember getting my first uniforms when I became a cook at the restaurant. They defined what it was to be a grown man for me. All the adult men in my immediate family wore them and also the men I spent most of my time with as a child. I suppose it shouldn’t seem odd that I had tied some small thread of my definition of manhood to that uniform.

The thing is, while the uniform did make me feel like a man, it also never really fit me. I was not my father ( a good small business man) and I certainly wasn’t my grandfather a consummate chef. I was horrible at the managerial end of the business and I was only a passable cook.

When my father passed suddenly in the fall of 1990, it didn’t take long for the truth to be revealed that without him the businesses could not survive. I had no talent for the work. I plugged along for six months after his death and then rang the bell of surrender.

I remember turning in my final uniforms on the day we closed the restaurant. That was the day I lost my adult manhood. I was twenty three. Of course I couldn’t articulate any of that back then. I was grieving the loss of my father (I didn’t even know how to do that properly). I was married with two kids and one on the way and losing my only means of support. I was in survival mode.

One of the things I didn’t lose was my father’s gift of hard work. Then there were the gifts my Heavenly Father had given me, that at that point, I knew nothing about.

BUT I WAS ABOUT TO!