Thursday starts the National Football League Draft of college players to move on to the next level of their sport.

Spring is the time of renewal and fresh starts.  The NFL gives seven rounds of draft picks to reach team, and the teams select with the worst teams first.  

My father was a huge New Orleans Saints fan.  He went to every game for over 15 years as the team was one of the most disasterous franchise in sport.  Never a winning season for twenty years of frustration.  Watching games with him, a player might do something nice on another team and my father would calmly say, "Saints could have had him."  True because the Saints were so bad they could have taken any player now performing.

In 2002, my family had just moved to Alabama the previous August.  I had been diagnosed with MS a year ealier and now we moving forward.  One wife and two infants were going forward with life.  We moved into a small house and quickly swapped up to a better home and our world was spinning forward.  My rother had just gotten married a few days earlier.  All seemed to be getting set.

I got a new job and things were looking good.  I went off to training on Monday and all was good.  Meeting a flock of new people and I felt impressed and others seemed impressed with me.

I retired to my hotel room for the evening.  Read the newspaper and see who the Saints picked, Maybe call my father and hear the next group to break our hearts.  I was going to eat in my room and the phone rang.

"Rodney, your father died," my wife said.

My world crashed.  My parents had separated in the last year.  My father moved from the family home.  He moved from a nice house to a small, dark, depressing apartment,  I recall one window was up against a brick wall.  Suburban home in a great neighborhood to this situation?

My mother had chosen to leave him after quietly carrying on with another man.  Her situation got deeper as my father's monies drained.

Dad had an undiagnosed condition.  It was not MS, but something else similar

My father and I were not closest of relations.  He disagreed with many decisions through my life as I became an adult, but was respectful.  He looked for the "five year plan" and I was always nebulous with no clear vision of where I was going, but I felt as if I was moving forward.  Then I met and married my wife, we had kids, and moved towards the better we prayed.

In one of our last conversations, my dad told me, "I never really knew what you were doing.  I could not figure you out but you made it work.  jobs.  Leaving school,  Women you dated and now look at you.  Nice career starting in advertising, you own your own home, have you college degree.  Now you have a beautiful wife and two kids.  You made it work,  I am impressed."

All these years later, that enduring memory gives me lift.

The next day one of my new coworkers took me to the airport as I traveled to the funeral.

I think my aunt picked me up and brought me to their home.  She loaned me a car and off I went to the funeral home in a borrowed shirt and tie.

As we poceeded to the burial, I started thinking who was going to speak for my father at the service.  He had life long friends but none too close.  My mother who just left him?

I started writing the eulogy in my mind.

Dad was not the cheeriest guy but not the darkest either.  

It was a bright spring day.  Great temperature and all things good.

The eulogy was about the day my father graduated from college.  Also a beautiful spring day I told the assembled, and my grandmother was so proud.  Her first child to accomplish this feat.  One of my grandmother's friends walked over to congratulate her.  They spoke of pride and accomplishment, but her friend tampered the moment of concern for my father having a hearing aid.  My grandmother smmiled and told her, it was not a hearing aid, rather a radio earphone.  My father was not going to miss the Indianapolis 500 auto race,  the story got a nice laugh then I twisted the joy and told the assembled that if you keep that good feeling about my father in you heart, he would live forever.  (Turned out to be a Native American idea.)

After the service, several of my father's friends approached me with con if the congratulations.  They expressed amazement on how I could hit every note with realism and simplicity.  One of them told me I left something out: if there had been a second sporting event, dad would have used a radio in each ear.

After the funeral, my mother could not have been more distant.  She said her goodbye and peeled rubber getting away.

My brother, his wife (Rebecca) and I went to lunch after the service and my brother told me we had to goto the apartment where dad died.    Neither of us had gone yet.  Rebecca passed because she was the person who discovered my father (less than a month after her wedding).

My brother and i drove to the apartment silently.

I went into the apartment and looked around quiet and observant.  i saw a panoply of pills on the floor and just thought he might have made his own end.  

Looking around, the apartment was in a state of mess except for the breakfast table.

The newspaper was opened to the sports page with big article about the New Orleans Saints football draft.

Literally to his dying day, Dad wanted the Saints to reach the promised land...

Power to the people.

Power to the cure.