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Time To Move Along
Bob Perry on How a Good & Faithful Man Says Goodbye
The first concrete memory I have of -Joseph Fraser Vincent Sr. is of the day after the night I brought his daughter home from a date an hour and a half after her curfew. In my "defense," both he and his wife Fran were supposedly out of town until Sunday night—this was Friday. Who comes home from an out-of-town trip two days early, anyway? Besides, Mary had assured me that if we'd called and asked permission to stay for the second movie of the double feature, her parents would have been fine with it. I mean, it wasn't our fault they wouldn't invent cell phones for another twenty years. It seemed like a perfectly legitimate rationalization to me.
I slowed to a rolling stop and dropped Mary off at the curb behind her house. The next day is when I remember first being introduced to the giant of a man whose physical stature was rather slight. He told me how he had entrusted me with his daughter and that I had disappointed him. He told me he expected more of me than that. As he talked to me, I shrank ever more deeply into the shag carpet at my feet. Yet he never raised his voice above a calm, conversational tone on that day or any other over the next 38 years that I knew him.
He didn't have to.
Power & Trust
Almost eight years later, I was back in his living room again, asking for that same girl's hand in marriage. He had sent her upstairs to her bedroom while he and Fran asked me lots of questions about my plans and how I meant to care for their daughter. I don't remember many of the specifics, but I do remember how the conversation came to a close. He looked at his wife and asked, "What do you think about all this?" She responded positively.
He turned to me, looked me straight in the eye, and said, "Well, I suppose we'll have to call Mary down here to break the tie." The pause between that comment and when he started laughing was a little too long for my taste, but I guess I deserved it.
Several months later, I thought I had one-upped him by making this proud Army man, and member of West Point's Long Gray Line, walk his daughter down the very long center aisle of the Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis to give her away. I should have known better. At practice the night before, when the chaplain asked the proverbial, "Who gives this woman to be married to this man," he had responded exactly as expected: "Her mother and I do."
During the actual ceremony however, he changed things up. As he gave me his daughter's hands, he looked me in the eye once again. "With pride," he said, "her mother and I do."
It was a simple addition to the script—but those eyes. That voice. There was power and trust in them both. The kind of power you can't escape. The kind of trust you would never dream of betraying.
This was a man who served as a U.S. Army artillery officer, a Vietnam veteran, a math professor at West Point, a War College graduate, and a commander of men. But if you knew any of those facts about him, you probably didn't learn them from him. This was a man who, at 72 years of age, ran the six-mile second leg of the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon with me and two of his sons—at an 8:40 minutes-per-mile pace. This was a man who, at age 74, completed the twelve-mile March Back from Beast Barracks to West Point with the new plebes in the Class of 2010—one of whom was his oldest grandson. During that march, my father-in-law couldn't sit down to rest because he was having stability issues in his knees and was afraid that if he sat down, he wouldn't be able to get back up. It wasn't until years later that we learned his balance problems that day were the first sign that ALS had begun its relentless, eight-year attack on his nervous system.
Bob Perry is a commercial airline captain. He and his wife of 35 years attend Center Pointe Christian Church in West Chester, Ohio. They have five sons. Bob holds an M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Biola University and a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy. He defends the Christian worldview at truehorizon.org.
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