King's Corner: Starting Over
King's Corner column for August 1, 2025 issue
The stretch limo was solid white. The handsome man standing in the middle of the limo, so that the top half of his body was visible above the sun roof, was wearing a solid white tuxedo and a huge smile. As it drove slowly around California’s state capital buildings looking like it had just emerged from a ceremony or event, the string of cans trailing off the back bumper made the kind of noise designed to attract attention. A large sign mounted on the back of the limo announced “Just Divorced”.
That was my dad, Robert “Mark” King, and it was an expensive, heartfelt celebration. Time to start over.
We all have times in our lives when change comes, invited or uninvited. When life as we knew it is not going to return. When the path forward is entirely uncertain, and unavoidable. When our choices that we make now matter for the future. But that doesn’t mean we know what to choose.
Mark had not always been relationship-wise after losing Norma-Jean to cancer. He’d stayed in a good job in the bay area while staying active in the reserves. Upon receiving a pension in his 40s he then worked as an electrician at the Air Force base. But an English woman with a young boy, whom he enabled to get her green card, chose to take his money and run. Rather than mourn, he chose to mark the occasion in white limo style.
Then he volunteered for better paid high voltage electrical work on the Air Force base’s tall metal towers carrying 750,000 volts.
You work in pairs on those towers. You have a strap where you clip yourself to the tower when working at great heights, and only undo that strap to move it to a new location as you climb or descend. Mark had undone his strap while halfway up the tower, and was about to re-clip it when his partner at the top accidentally electrified the entire tower. Mark blacked out, fell backwards, and only his right knee catching on the rail stopped him dropping to the ground below.
He woke in hospital to find that his knee took the brunt of the electrical impact, and he was fortunate to be alive. He was suddenly permanently disabled according to the Department of Defence. He’d recover, but he wouldn’t be working again. For a man who’d always led an active life, this was yet another unexpected change.
How much change are we built to handle? How many times have you felt that all the changes in your life, often coming one on top of another, are a bit much to cope with?
Have you recently moved? Changed your careen path? Fallen in or out of love or a relationship? Gained or lost a child, parent or sibling? Had sudden career success or failure? Had a change in health? An injury, robbery, kidnapping, equipment malfunction, or gotten stranded? The shopping list of shocks to your system can seem almost endless.
As soon as dad was up and walking again we spent time at another unexpected event, my mom’s funeral. They’d wanted to marry before I was born, but her mother stopped it and now, many years later, my mom had a sudden heart attack that took her.
So over a meal I asked dad how he coped with all these changes, and all his uncertainty about what the future held. Some conversations, like this one, stay with you for a long time after.
He, like many in his generation, had volunteered for WWII. They knew there was a chance that they might not come back, and they knew those who didn’t. They had years of living with uncertainty before they made it back. And the world they returned to was different than when they left. Not only had they changed but the country had as well.
Many had solid relationships they could depend on: family, friends, people who gave them a chance in life. They weren’t shy about leaning on those. They invested in people who invested in them, they celebrated life’s small and large achievement together, and they helped each other build sheds, houses and provisions for tomorrow. They found people worth believing in, and then did.
In little and large ways they put themselves into God’s hands. They didn’t blame him; they weren’t ‘victims’, they knew that “life happens” and that if they trusted him, he could see them though.
Now dad’s life revolved around horses, so he used them for an illustration. By this point Mark had a place the other side of Dayton and eight horses in the yard. A thoughtless visitor came out waving his hands and yelling, which caused the horses to stampede right over Mark. One crushed his right foot flat, breaking every bone. Fortunately the hooves missed his head. Yet another unexpected change.
A machine was attached to dad’s foot for three months, suctioning the top of his foot back up and into shape as bones and flesh healed. It was a new invention, and he was one of the first to try it. At the end of that time it had totally healed. Once again he had the chance to recover and more forward. So he did.
Family, friends, and a trust in God despite circumstances. Sounds almost too simple, doesn’t it? Are you ready and willing, if need be, to start over again?
