A little longer than a few weeks

My stay was only supposed to last a few weeks that day that my mom dropped me off at my aunt and uncle’s house when I was 4-years old.

Armed with just my Ninja Turtles overnight bag and a few toys, my life was transplanted from a dingy, brick apartment building near downtown Durham to a suburban split-level.

It was a different world away from my old, blood-smeared front door where a man had lost his life in a drug deal gone-bad just a few months before. The pile of broken bricks near the center of the courtyard were more than just crumbled clay -- the brick cemetery buried hopes and dreams. The empty expressions on the faces of the single mothers hinted at the desperation of their lives.

The inhabitants of the lifeless buildings were all once bright eyed 4-year olds at some point, with dreams bigger than the tall oak tree that sat in the middle of all the buildings. Now, they toiled about in low-income housing with their only hopes being to one day get off welfare and praying for their children to end up better than them.

When I arrived, my aunt and I grew close quickly, but it took longer for my uncle an me to build a bond -- I wasn’t used to having a male figure in the house. As the few weeks grew into years, my uncle Bob became my greatest friend in the world. Every evening, it would be me and him sitting in the recliner, watching Inspector Gadget with a plate of cheese and crackers never too far away.

I spent my afternoons playing football or basketball with all of the neighborhood kids, without the worries of being pushed off the court by older kids. Many days were spent swimming in my backyard pool or decked out in camoflage playing capture the flag in the woods. There were no more sirens at my new home.

As I grew older, our bond grew stronger and I began to realize why I was so captivated by my new dad. I could see him go out of his way to make a pan of cornbread for someone or spending his last dollar on lunch of his work crew.

He made sacrifices on the larger scale, too. When I first moved in, he was 52-years old and nearing an early retirement. He had just bought my mom a Porsche (which was later traded for a Toyota van) and their only daughter had just graduated from college. Instead of spending weeks on the road renovating hotels up north, he was working around town. He no longer had to deal with the pressure of raising a child and making sure there was food on the table.

That all changed the day I moved into his house and he again signed up for at least 18 years of service -- monetarily, mentally and physically. On top of having to pick up more work in the anticipation of one day sending me to college, he now had to figure out how to raise a little boy during the years he was planning on spending time with my aunt on vacations. He had to drag his tired, worn down body out into the yard and toss the baseball with me.

He did all of those things, without complaint.

More than anything though, he believed in me. When I told him that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a sports reporter, he got angry at me. He knew that if I did anything else, I wasn’t following my heart. There were so many times he convinced me that I could do things that I knew I couldn’t, but had to try anyway so that he wouldn’t be disappointed.

When I moved to college, I found an emptiness that couldn’t ever be filled. He would call me at random times during the day, just to tell me he loved me or tell me about his day at work. It was great to hear his voice, but those midnight conversations on the back porch could never be replaced.

Bob had the choice of whether or not he wanted to be my dad, and he took the opportunity and put everything he had left into it. Only because he gave up his early retirement in exchange for 10-hour days am I able to sit at this laptop and write this. Without him, there’s a strong likelihood that I would have never made it to college. I wouldn’t know what a sunset looks like over the San Francisco Bay and I wouldn’t understand what it is to love someone so much you’d give up anything you had so they wouldn’t feel an ounce of pain.

My stay in his house lasted about 14 years longer than two weeks and I wouldn't have had it any other way. He tried to make a beautiful thing of my crumbling bricks.