Heaven In Cincinnati

Saturday, September 15, 2007
HEAVEN IN CINCINNATI

Great airline prices sometimes carry strange scheduling paths.It always seems to be worth the roundabout trip because the savings are so great. We proved it on a recent adventure.Our trip from Oklahoma to California via Cincinnati was certainly worth the detour in February of 2007. The Cincinnati/North Kentucky airport welcomed us with a surprising spiritual experience.We had already flown the first leg of the trip, from Tulsa to Cincinnati, and while waiting for the second leg of the journey I went to a less congested area of the airport to make a cell phone call to a friend who lives in Cincinnati. I reached her on the phone and we had a good visit before I had to walk back to our departure gate.When I got back to the departure gate, my husband called my attention to a little old man who was walking back and forth in an aisle, his back towards us. My husband said to me, "That man looks just like your dad." My dad had died in 2006 in Arlington, Texas. Daddy was a real character who gave us millions of laughs while he lived. We have relived the funny things he did and we have told the hilarious stories that he told over and over again with increased laughter every time.The little old man in the airport was the same height and stature as my dad. He was about the same age Daddy was when he died, 95. The man walked with the same shuffle and slope of his shoulders and he had on a light blue cowboy shirt and dark blue jeans, just like Daddy liked to wear. He had on tennis shoes and a good-old-boy cap, just like Daddy always wore. In fact, the back of the man's head in the cap looked just like Daddy's, with his bald head visible from above the snapped band and his light gray hair showing below it. The man was a twin for Daddy! After watching the man who was a twin for my dad shuffle back and forth, I had to see the man's face to see if there was any facial resemblance. I walked to the end of the aisle and looked into the face of the man. He had the same tight skinned face that Daddy had when he died, no wrinkles at all, just drooping jowls. The only thing missing was Daddy's prominent nose. Otherwise, the man was a replica of my dad. After rejoining my husband in the waiting area we continued to watch the man, amazed at the astounding resemblance, especially the height, the shuffle, the sloping shoulders, the cap and the clothes. What a pleasure to have a visual remembrance of my dad right before my eyes. While we were enjoying the blessed event, a small girl about five years old, accompanied by her mother, walked into the departure area. We could hear her shoes playing a melody as she walked. That was a new thing for us, to hear a complete song played by shoes. As I sat there I wondered if the music grew aggravating to the mother after an entire day of hearing it. The girl and her mother took two of the few empty seats in the area behind us. When the little girl sat down in the chair behind me, I began to recognize the tune that her shoes were playing. My ears perked up and my spirit rose to new heights when I realized that the song that her shoes were playing was, "You Are My Sunshine," the same song I repeatedly sang to my mother when she was dying in 2005. I also sang the song at her funeral in Arlington, Texas, and at the graveside service in Amarillo, Texas. My husband and I looked at each other in amazement.We sat still in our seats, in complete awe of the situation. We immediately knew that we were supposed to come to Cincinnati to have this wonderful reminder of my parents, their love, their constant emotional and spiritual support, and their zest for life.When we got on the airplane headed for San Diego, I opened a book that we had bought a month before this trip but had not had a chance to read. Inside the book were two sheets of paper stapled together. It was the sermon that the preacher had given at my momfs funeral. My sister had sent it to me quite a while ago. I thought I had put it inside of a folder I kept of my parents' funeral materials, but here it was. Neither my husband nor I remembered putting the copy of the sermon inside of the book. How it got there is a mystery. We immediately knew that the three incidents were to let us know that there is a cloud of witnesses around us and that our loved ones are part of that spiritual cloud. My sister had wonderful insight into the glorious experience. She said that my parents wanted us to know that we weren't going to California without them, that they were still going to be our traveling companions. We had taken many trips with my parents to California, having a ball with them and laughing almost all of the time on those trips. After this experience I will always appreciate the detours that we have to take on our flights, constantly looking for God incidents, which we previously called coincidences.By the way, the price of our tickets were so ridiculously low that we had a hard time believing that we could fly so far for that small amount of money. My dad never liked to spend an unnecessary amount of money on anything, so maybe he had something to do with that, too. Who knows?