Book Review: Love's True Second Chance by Jeff Dawson

Normally, most of the books I read for review are genre fiction, but when I had the chance to read a memoir about a second chance at love, I couldn’t pass it up.

Jeff Dawson’s Love’s True Second Chance is a poignant glimpse at love and redemption. The author’s conversational style sweeps you into the story from the first moments. Dawson’s anecdotes about the time spent with his high school sweetheart are heartwarming. If you are a fan of real-life love stories, I recommend adding Love’s True Second Chance to your reading list.  

You can find Jeff Dawson on Amazon.  

 

From the Author:

After Debbie passed, I asked her girls if they would like for me to chronicle the short time their mom and I spent together. In thirty years, the total time was twenty-five months. But it was an amazing twenty-five months. They agreed to the idea. They thought it would be a wonderful tribute to their mom and they might even learn a few stories about her. And learn they did.

I'll admit, it was tough reconstructing our years in high school. Everything was going well until I went off to college. Our relationship went downhill rapidly. Despite not being very happy, no, really pissed off, I never could forget her. 

One of the most important lessons I learned when we reunited was, we were brought together when we needed each other the most. I will always cherish and remember the short time we were allowed to share each others lives. 

 

 

 

Memories - The Dance

And now, I'm glad I didn't know
the way it all would end, the way it all would go.
Our lives are better left to chance;
I could have missed the pain,
but I'd have had to miss the dance

.- The Dance by Garth Brooks

 

The florescent lights of the high school hallway give her a halo-like glow as I adjust the ruffles of her recital tutu. My five-year-old only daughter looks like a beautiful angel surrounded by the light and the hushed baby blue, pink, and lilac of her costume. She is an angel. She is a miracle. It’s a miracle to be here with her enjoying the excitement before she goes on stage to dance. 

The combination of the lights and the cold concrete walls of the hallway where we wait don’t return me to my high school years. This isn’t my high school, and I have no memories lingering in these rooms waiting to seep back into my soul. Instead, they bring me back to the longest wait of my life four years earlier. 

The quiet stillness of rushing her to a nearby town echoes in the spaces of my mind. We travel in the first hours of the morning on the coldest day of the year where the only warmth comes from a restaurant fire we can see as we drive hurriedly on the unwelcoming, cold and cracked asphalt. The air is cold, chilling, sucking the very breath out of our bodies as we rush through the automatic doors. The icy intake of air into my lungs makes my chest ache. My body seems to be freezing, dying from the inside out. Yet, I ignore it. I am not actually dying. Our daughter is dying. Her face is ashen, and her eyes glazed, she clings to me bundled in her soft blue, lilac, and pink blanket with what energy she seems to have left. She is in pain, yet too weak to cry. 

My thoughts interrupted as my beautiful miracle calls to me, “Mommy, watch me twirl, Mommy watch me dance.”  I swallow my tears and smile as I watch her lift her graceful arms and twirl happily about the hallway with her friends. The school floor is as slick as ice making her feet fly faster. The incandescence catches the sequins on her costume and her blue eyes sparkle with delight.

The glow pulls me back in again, back to the now noisy hospital room. The lights are blinding. It’s filled with all sorts of medical technicians and nurses, and I can’t get near her. I see her beautiful graceful arms, but the medical staff has them held down, stretched out to her sides. She is screaming, terrified of what they are doing. They have to restrain her. She looks as though she is being held in place waiting to be crucified. Sharp needles pierce her everywhere; her arms, her hands, her feet to draw blood, but they cannot find a decent vein. They finally place some rubber tubing tightly around her head and try to draw blood from her tiny scalp. I fight my way to her, and the nurses part so I can get closer. I feel myself crying out to God, but no words escape my lips. I hold her hand and beg silently for God’s mercy to end her pain. 

      She was leaving this earth as though she was never meant to be here; as though she was always meant to be an angel, gracefully dancing in the heavens. But God changed His mind; He brought her into our lives and decided she would be a miracle instead. Four years later, my beautiful miraculous daughter continues to step out on the stage of life and dance.    

Memories - Summer School History Lessons

We never went in the front entrance to the school. In all the years we had been going there we always went up a grouping of five or six crumbling cement steps and through the service door entrance. We passed through the janitors’ area and into the hallway. The hallway floors were always shiny, almost like glass. Alternate squares of muted maroon and white created a checker board pattern throughout the school. My brother and I would play a game trying to make it to the classroom by just stepping on the maroon colored squares with their flecks of pink and darker red. We wandered the mostly deserted halls maneuvering like checker pieces and day dreamed about the history the building held.

Once we made it to the classroom, it was heaven. It smelled of new books. The kind with heavy bright white pages. When we unpacked them from their cellophane prisons they released the most pleasant fragrance of glued paper and ink. When we fanned open the pages, it felt like spring. New and full of potential. We would stack these in the cupboard in Mom’s classroom and surreptitiously place some of the foil stars she kept to put on student’s papers into our pockets. Those little treasures in gold, silver, red, blue, and green metallic thrilled us.

Our next task would be the bulletin board.  The large rectangular announcement area to the right of the shorter chalkboard would call to our imaginations all summer tempting us with any number of ideas. Armed with open staplers we would stab its cork skin and adorn it with thick green construction paper. Green is one of my mother’s favorites. Then we cut out beautiful purple orbs and carefully tattooed them in black ink with students’ names. We would attach them to the paper arranged in a bunch like grapes and put up letters that read “Welcome to the Bunch”.

My brother would draw complex cities of chalk on the large black board, while I helped Mom organize more things. One thing she wouldn't let us touch was her desk. It was a massive, carefully organized bunch of disorganization. The large desk calendar that anchored everything was covered in doodles, mainly of bunnies. I liked to sit in her chair and pretend I was a teacher like she was.  The drawers were miniature time capsules, full of things she confiscated off her mischievous students from year to year like jacks, a set of old maid cards, several Hot Wheels cars, and some lip gloss.

We spent our last week of summer vacation each year not at the pool, the playground, or the trail on the mountains behind our home, but soaking up the history of those school halls and building our own family stories. History seeped from every pore in that school building. History of students past.Trophies in cases from long ago victories. Fading pictures of sports teams and drama clubs. Indelible marks of nation’s past on the arm of the school superintendent who served in World War II and spent time in a German prison camp. Our parents’ working lives were there. Our lives were there.