For some reason, people like believing impossibilities. For example, they say, “You can’t see the wind. It’s invisible. No one can see the wind.”
I can. I learned to see the wind from my seven-year-old son. We were living in the Nevada desert helping friends run a small gold mine. Luke kept insisting that he could see the wind and I kept parroting the impossibility. “Luke, you can’t see the wind. It’s invisible. No one can see the wind.”
Luke led me through the sagebrush to a vantage point that gave us a clear view over 40 miles of desert and described what he was seeing. Then I saw it too; the dips, swirls, circles and waves of wind playing tag with mountains and sky. It’s a gift from my son that I treasure.
Luke was told he couldn’t climb scrubby cedar trees in the Texas Hill Country because the branches would snap. Yet when we saved a baby possum, Luke climbed upside down in the cedar trees, going from tree to tree without touching the ground, teaching the baby to climb. Not a single limb broke.
When we moved back to the desert, Luke invented “wind surfing.” He tied ropes to the corners of a huge black tarp and let the wind skate him along the ground. One day a sudden gust picked Luke up off the ground, flew him into the window of the house next door, then whisked him into the plowed field behind.
Luke was told, “People can’t fly.” But he did, and with lasting benefits. The alcoholic next door was sitting at the table drinking when Luke flew past the window. The man gave up drinking. “I knew I had to,” he told us, “the day I saw a boy fly past my window.” Somehow…we kept a straight face and never explained about the flying boy!
Luke never believed impossibilities. He was told, “Your ears were damaged by severe ear infections. You can’t do music.” So he learned to play the trumpet and the piano.
Luke was told, “You can’t learn to fly an airplane. Your math isn’t good enough. You’ll never pass ground school.” He learned to fly a plane and flew from North Carolina to California. Then he bought his own plane.
Luke was told, “The Marine Corps will never accept you. You won’t pass the physical. You have scoliosis. You need a metal rod in your back.” Luke prayed and Jesus healed him. He was 37 and just short of retiring from the Marine Corps as a Major when his plane crashed.
My mystery-romance-suspense “Bridge Beyond Betrayal” is dedicated to Luke and includes the prophetic poem he wrote a year before his death. Not only is Texas Miz Mike’s son Ron loosely patterned after Luke (who always gave sound advice and was almost always right—even as a child), but Luke was a constant inspiration in negating impossibilities. Texas Miz Mike learned from his example!
When Miz Mike spots a dead body in the back of a pickup truck, no one believes her. She is told that people don’t tote corpses in the back of their trucks. When she identifies the dead man, no one believes her. His business partners insist he is alive. When energetic Doc is arrested for murder and the town celebrates, no one believes Mike that Doc is innocent. Mike must thrust aside her own dislike of Doc and prove that he is innocent.
Not even romance is safe from impossibilities. Mike and her cowboy hero are just about to get hitched when Doc teaches Mike to dowse for bones. Believing it is witchcraft, Marty is scandalized and breaks off their engagement.
When Mike gets locked in an office building with a nefarious night watchman, it is artist Frank—not Marty—who rescues her. That’s when Texas Miz Mike faces the greatest impossibility of all—choosing between two suitors…if she gets out of being arrested and survives the killer who is determined to make her disappear forever.
Stephanie Parker McKean 