How I got to where I am ….Wherever that is
Marshall Adame
October 09, 2007
I live in a three bedroom house in North Carolina. Nothing fancy, just a modest two thousand square foot house on a corner lot in a nice neighborhood. Our house has a large front room with a vaulted ceiling. We have two bathrooms which were remodeled a few years ago and a very nice “Americana Styled” den with this really nice large HD TV. (My grandchildren really like that room. That’s why we put it there). In our master bedroom is a walk-in closet. Well, it is actually a “walk-through” closet because, a few years back, I had a door installed in the other end of the closet. The door leads to a private office I built into what used to be a garage. It is actually a small office where I am able to reflect and type out all the position papers I have formulated, follow the news without annoying Becky and think about what I need to do tomorrow. On the walls of my office is a lot of Marine Corps and State Department stuff, some antiques and trinkets, old and not so old. Stuff which may be boring to most, but which holds great meaning to me. In the corner of the room is a small desk and executive office chair where I usually sit for hours.
On my desk, sitting just inches from where my left hand rests on my keyboard is the one thing I value more than anything else in the room. There on my desk, slipped into a clear plastic shield, to protect it, is my fathers California drivers license. My father, Johnnie Rodriquez Adame, died in 1973. He was a poor gardener who, at the time of his death, had little to almost nothing to show for his 54 years of life. The day he died I took his drivers license out of his wallet and told his wife to keep whatever else he owned.
I have kept that drivers license with me ever since. Now it sits safe and protected on my desk. It sits where I can see it every minute that I sit in my office. I look at his dark hardened face and try to remember his sweet nature and the harmless demeanor he always had with whomever he was with.
Actually, until the four years before his death, I barely knew him. He left our family home, with one of my sisters and two of my brothers, when I was eleven years old. I actually next saw him again when I was sixteen. He coincidently happened to live very near where my girlfriend Becky, (Now my wife) lived. Even after all that time, when I saw him, all I could think was how much I loved him. I never mentioned the past and neither did he.
My dad was an alcoholic who died of Liver disease. He was a very gentle man of low estate who never sought to hurt anyone. He loved me a lot and before he died we were close. It was as though he waited for me to get to the hospital. He died in my arms. His driver’s license is the only thing I own that my dad actually touched with his very own hands. It is priceless to me.
I have always sought to honor my dad in my own life. If I have done anything good, or worthy of praise in this world, I want to honor my father with it. I am hoping to put his driver’s license on my new desk in our nation’s Capital in 2009.
We are all driven by something in our lives. Fear, love, hate, power, greed, a desire to do good, family, status, religion, nationalism, and the list goes on, but something drives us forward in our lives and, more than not, it is a combination of drivers taking us where we are going.
In my own life there are drivers which push me forward. Great icons included, but among those powerful influences which help me to fight the good fight, causing whatever good I do in this world, is an old drivers license on my desk which sits as prominent before me as the picture of Abraham Lincoln, JFK, The Marine Corps Emblem and the Great Seal of the United States of America.
Some who know me may think my dad had little to do with what I have achieved in my life, in fact, that I achieved in spite of him rather than because of him.
Don’t you believe it!
http://MarshallAdame4Congress2008.com
On my desk, sitting just inches from where my left hand rests on my keyboard is the one thing I value more than anything else in the room. There on my desk, slipped into a clear plastic shield, to protect it, is my fathers California drivers license. My father, Johnnie Rodriquez Adame, died in 1973. He was a poor gardener who, at the time of his death, had little to almost nothing to show for his 54 years of life. The day he died I took his drivers license out of his wallet and told his wife to keep whatever else he owned.
I have kept that drivers license with me ever since. Now it sits safe and protected on my desk. It sits where I can see it every minute that I sit in my office. I look at his dark hardened face and try to remember his sweet nature and the harmless demeanor he always had with whomever he was with.
Actually, until the four years before his death, I barely knew him. He left our family home, with one of my sisters and two of my brothers, when I was eleven years old. I actually next saw him again when I was sixteen. He coincidently happened to live very near where my girlfriend Becky, (Now my wife) lived. Even after all that time, when I saw him, all I could think was how much I loved him. I never mentioned the past and neither did he.
My dad was an alcoholic who died of Liver disease. He was a very gentle man of low estate who never sought to hurt anyone. He loved me a lot and before he died we were close. It was as though he waited for me to get to the hospital. He died in my arms. His driver’s license is the only thing I own that my dad actually touched with his very own hands. It is priceless to me.
I have always sought to honor my dad in my own life. If I have done anything good, or worthy of praise in this world, I want to honor my father with it. I am hoping to put his driver’s license on my new desk in our nation’s Capital in 2009.
We are all driven by something in our lives. Fear, love, hate, power, greed, a desire to do good, family, status, religion, nationalism, and the list goes on, but something drives us forward in our lives and, more than not, it is a combination of drivers taking us where we are going.
In my own life there are drivers which push me forward. Great icons included, but among those powerful influences which help me to fight the good fight, causing whatever good I do in this world, is an old drivers license on my desk which sits as prominent before me as the picture of Abraham Lincoln, JFK, The Marine Corps Emblem and the Great Seal of the United States of America.
Some who know me may think my dad had little to do with what I have achieved in my life, in fact, that I achieved in spite of him rather than because of him.
Don’t you believe it!
http://MarshallAdame4Congress2008.com
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