How to deal with tragedy (and make the best of it)

I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who think their parents love story is the stuff of legends but I KNOW my parents story is truly one for the books. My mom, Michelle, was 20 and had very little life experience. She was the only child of a single mother and even though she was absolutely beautiful, funny, smart and full of love, she lacked self confidence due to her (wrongly) thinking that she was fat and unlovable. My father, John, on the other hand, had way more life experience then a 22 year old should have. He was the second born son of a preacher turned real estate investor and a teacher. He was the poster child of every middle child, preacher/teacher son cliché. On the outside, they were completely different yet their souls aligned.

My parents first met in 1985 when my mother was babysitting her childhood best friends infant son. The infants father was a childhood friend of my fathers. My mom was sitting on the sofa, daydreaming about having her own baby as her friends baby slept in his room, when she was abruptly interrupted from her daydream by a very loud series of knocks on the door. She looked through the peephole and saw a man she only recognized from her best friends wedding photos. Hesitantly she opened the door to a man who asked who she was. He then announced that he had been working on a car down road, needed to use the bathroom and it was fine because he was John and he was friends with the couple. She was too overwhelmed by his energy to say no and luckily for my mother, he was who he said he was and not a serial killer. He barged in the house, went to the bathroom, came out, asked where the baby was and when my mom pointed to his room. My father opened the door, looked at the baby and then proceeded to look at my mother and tell her that one day they could make a beautiful baby together. Mind you, this was all within five minutes of meeting her. Needless to say, my sheltered mother was completely speechless. My father left soon after and when the babies parents returned she told them all about her strange encounter with their friend John. This has never been confirmed but I think it was all planned in advance because my father knew nothing about cars so why would he be working on one and who in the world would tell a complete stranger that one day they would have beautiful babies?!? I have a hunch that he saw my mom in a photo one day and just had to meet her. The next time my mom babysat the little boy my dad showed up again and from that point forward they were pretty much inseparable. They got married in 1986, moved to San Marcos for a while and then when they moved back to Dallas, they ended up renting the very same house they met in. It’s the house they brought me home to when I was born in 1989. My crib sat in the same spot as the baby they once looked. According to all accounts, I was just as beautiful as my dad had imagined I’d be.

We didn’t have much money but our tiny house held so much love. Daddy was a paper distributor for the Dallas Times Herald and my mom did all the paperwork. We did everything together as a unit. I was taught from a very young age that family was everything. My parents gave me the world. I didn’t want for anything. It didn’t matter that we were broke, if I wanted red cowgirl boots, well then we would go to garage sales and thrift stores until we found some. I was their little buddy and they taught me that my thoughts and feelings mattered. After the Times went under, things got a bit more stressful but we were okay. Daddy managed to get hired on with the Dallas Morning News and although his route was much smaller, we were doing okay but he wanted more for his little family. One day, he got a call from his father who told him to go read an article about a man who was trying to sell his business but the only people who wanted it just wanted the land. They didn’t care about the mans business that he had spent over 45 years building. My father was hooked by the story and intrigued by the mans business. He went and met the man (Mr. Orr) and knew that he just had to figure out a way to buy it so he went to his brothers and father, borrowed some money and used every cent my parents had ever saved as a down payment. Mr. Orr typed up the contract on his personal typewriter and he and daddy agreed that Mr. Orr would keep his office and teach my parents how to run his business. I was a month shy of four when the papers were signed.

Every morning, the three of us would get in the car, put on the oldies station and go to Rock Island together. While my daddy sold things and my mom did the books, I honed my dance skills by putting on performances for Mr. Orr, Hubert Ray and Jack Orr (Mr. Orr’s brother. Looking back on it, they could have been cast as the leads in the Grumpy Old Men. All three men were known to be a bit persnickety and demanding but to me they were just my attentive audience. I vividly remember walking around the store with Mr. Orr as he pointed out different doors styles and random plumbing parts to me. He was one of my first teachers and I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for him. Mr. Orr stopped coming in everyday about three months after the sale was final but he still remained a huge part of our lives. He became a grandfather to me. He helped finance our families house, paid for half of my college fund and signed me up for the Barney Club which meant I got a new Barney VHS tape every month. Obviously the college thing is a way bigger deal but to a four year old obsessed with a purple dinosaur the Barney thing was the best present ever. My sister was born in 1994 and my parents made Mr. Orr her Godfather. He had never held a baby before he held her. Once a month he would come over to our house for one of my moms delicious home cooked meals. It was at one of these dinners that we realized Mr. Orr’s niece had once been married to my moms absentee father. I like to think it was a sign from the universe that my family was always meant to have Orr-Reed.

After my sister was born, things started changing. I had started kindergarten and my mom was too busy taking care of an infant and transporting me to school to come down to work with my dad everyday. The store started making money, daddy started investing in other ventures and the bank account was much fuller. We had the big house, fancy cars and crab dinners but it was never enough for my dad. He always wanted more and could never be happy enough with what he had accomplished. He stopped being the man who would go to 10 thrift stores until he found red cowgirl boots and he became someone else entirely. By this point my brother had been born, Mr. Orr had died and my mom was doing everything she could to hold her family together. Eventually it got to the point where being with my dad wasn’t healthy. My daddy was a great man but due to his own lack of self love he just could never accept that he was good enough. He had always had issues with alcohol but when I was little he didn’t drink. He didn’t start drinking again until after he started making all the money. My mom didn’t want us kids to be exposed to it so even though she loved him with every fiber of her being she filed for divorce when I was 12 years old. Everything changed after that. Without my moms influence, daddy couldn’t function. There wasn’t enough money to support two households at the level we were accustomed to especially because daddy was blowing money on stupid things. They both were shells of their former selves. Mom kept everything together for me and my siblings as much as she could while nursing her broken heart.

By the time I was a senior in high school (2007), my parents ended up getting back together. At that point, I was completely disillusioned by my father. I was disgusted with his behavior and I wanted nothing to do with him or Orr-Reed. I vowed to never take over the store or live in Dallas. I moved off to Nacogodoches for college to start my own story. Funny thing about life though is that you never know what’s going to happen. It doesn’t really matter what you plan, sometimes things are just destined to happen. Four years went by and my dad was back to his old shanigans. My mom left him again only this time, even though I know mom was right to do it, I felt so bad for my daddy because I saw how much pain he was in, I became his buddy again. He was just so lonely and I couldn’t stand the thought of the man I loved so much being alone so when he told me I was ready to move back home and become his business partner I jumped at the chance. We became inseparable. I tried my hardest to take care of him but his demons were larger then I was capable of fixing. I thought his drinking was under control but it just took one night for everything to fall apart.

Have you ever lived your life as a headline? Before January 26th, 2013 I never had. “Friends, family remember salvage operator who was slain in Old East Dallas nightclub” isn’t exactly something you want to read when it’s about your dad but suddenly it was my life. My dad went out to a bar, a fight broke out, he tried to stop it and for his efforts he was beaten to death with a barstool. I was 23 years old, my sister was 18 and my brother was 13 and our father was dead. I’ve written other pieces about that experience and even done a documentary about it so I’m not going to get into what that experience was like again. It still hurts too much. It’s a wound that will never heal no matter how much time has passed. It wasn’t just the grief that hurt. My father had made some very bad business decisions and our family business was leveraged to the hilt. He left us nearly three quarters of a million in debt. My mother and I knew that we had to keep the store going and although she had done the books for years and I had grown up in this business, we didn’t have the first idea of how to actually accomplish it so we just did it. When you have a dragon breathing down your neck, you can’t turn around, you just have to run fast which is what we did. It’s what we are still doing. It’s been over eight years and some days I still have no clue to do this. There’s no book out there called “so your dads dead, now what?”. No cheat codes to Google or secret large inheritances. It’s just us getting up every morning and refusing to give up. All we know is that we love this place. We work this hard and keep going for my daddy, Mr. Orr, my siblings, my son and my sisters son. We keep trying against all odds because we have faith in this business and in ourselves. Is it easy? No. Do I go home and cry a few times a month? Yes. Do I love it? Yes.

Our story is unique but it’s not all that special. Behind every small business is a story of hope, dreams and perseverance. There are so many things wrong with world and an easy way to be a part of the solution is to support local businesses. Let’s ignore that small businesses are the back bone of society and that dollars spent at local businesses go right back in the community and focus on that when you shop small, you are telling people you have faith in their dream. You don’t think are crazy for trying to make the world a better place and you want to be a part of it. Not everyone is crazy enough to have their own business but everyone is capable of supporting the crazy ones.