Your True
Tales
February 2004
– Page
10
The Bed
and the Amazing Coincidence
by Elaine B.
My father had been deceased for about three months when this "coincidence" occurred. It was and is still comforting to me.
A little background: my dad was what you would call a handyman. He could fix anything. As an adult, I still relied on him to fix stuff that broke down around my house. He was the first person I turned to when I had a question about how to do something "handy." I had an old brass bed that I had bought from a yard sale. It was over 100 years old and was in need of some welding to get it back in useable condition. I had no idea what to do. I looked in the phone book, I asked friends... I didn't get anywhere. It occurred to me that there used to be a small shop that had a sign out front that mentioned "welding" out in the country where I had gone to school. I figured that 25 years had passed and it probably wasn't there any longer, but I had nothing to lose. I thought to myself, "If dad were only here, he'd fix it in no time." He had had welding equipment along with pretty much every kind of equipment you can think of in his garage. My mom had sold all his stuff.
I put the headboard in the truck (my mother gave dad's his truck when he passed) and I took off in search of this place still in my memory. It was about 20 miles away from where I lived. Driving up a road I had probably travelled twice in the last 25 years, I got to the area and, of course, it wasn't there. But a country-type of gas station was. I got out of the truck and went inside. I told the guy there that I had remembered something about a welding shop there years ago. I explained the small welding job I needed done. He said that he had been in this location for 30 years and didn't know what place I could be talking about, but he said to go a quarter of a mile up the road and turn left at a big black mailbox. This was a driveway that would lead to a house in the woods where a "Jim" lived. He said that this "Jim" worked on small engines and did a lot of handyman work in the area. He was retired, so he was usually home.
So up the road I go, turn in the driveway, drive a bit up a gravelly drive until I came to a small house with a giant detached garage. The garage door was open so I parked and walked over that way. My mouth fell open. Here came a man... in his 70s, about 5'8", bald, wearing overalls. He looked like he could be my dad's brother, if he had one. I was getting over my shock and explaining how I came to be there. He invited me inside the garage. It had antlers above the door, hunting dog tags hanging on a nail (hunting dogs in a pen in the back), an old American flag on the back wall - everything my dad had had in his garage, including the hunting dogs out back!
I had a hard time maintaining my composure. Jim said he could weld that piece back to the headboard easily. I helped him lift it out of the truck and we carried it inside the garage. I was telling him how much he reminded me of my dad when I heard a vehicle coming up the gravel road. I looked up and a white pickup truck was pulling up in the driveway. It was a maintenance truck from The Virginia Commonwealth University that was about 40 miles away. It said "maintenance" on the side. When my dad died, he had been head of maintenance at the University. I almost fainted. I told the man in the truck and he said that yes, he had worked for my dad. I found comfort knowing that my dad was still helping me fix things, just as he had in life.
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