Jim Croce - Time In A Bottle 1972

I loved this when I was sixteen. I played this song on the piano for a friend at her wedding in 1975.

Dear God, Please Bring my Daddy Home Safely

Dad on his horse

Dad as a electrician

Dad as a father walking his daughter down the aisle
I looked scared and Dad was saying,"Keep that dress
away from my feet!"

Dad and his Ford tractor

Yesterday I saw an old friend of my dad's at the grocery store. We were in the same check-out line so I asked him if he knew that my dad has passed away. He said yes he did. I told him Dad had been in the hospital for six weeks and that they had given him morphine that had caused him to say some funny things. My dad had been an electrician and he thought he was working on the electricity in the hospital ceiling. He had a tv cable in his hands and was looking up at the grid ceiling thinking about fixing it. He asked my husband for tools and was telling us that if he could just get a certain man he knew to come everything would be alright. I said to my dad's friend at the store that this was funny, but this was before we knew how bad his condition was. So I guess this prompted my dad's friend to tell me what a good time he and my dad and another friend who worked with my dad had at the electric company shop. One time he said someone gave my dad a big jar of homemade whiskey. So the three of them sat at the shop in some big easy chairs that were there and passed this jar around and drank it all. He said that he got up to leave and could barely walk out through these huge double doors that you pulled trucks through. I don't even want to think about the driving that he did. So I laughed with him and told him to take care of himself as I said good-bye. After I got into my car I thought to myself I should have told him, "You guys may have been having fun, but you don't know the countless nights I lay awake in my bed praying for God to bring my Daddy safely home." I would listen every night for his pickup to pull up in our long driveway so I could finally go to sleep. We lived out in the country on a county road in a small town (the same town that I live in now). It was quiet and I could usually tell the sound of his pickup coming down the road. I had an upstairs bedroom and I would go to the bathroom window overlooking the front yard and check to make sure his vehicle was coming down the road or into the drive. He didn't always come into the house right away. He usually fell asleep out in his truck. But at least he was home. My dad quit drinking about 20 years ago but he probably drank 35 years straight before that. That's one of the reasons he didn't make it after his surgery. His liver had some cirhosis (sp?) and they couldn't get him to stop bleeding. That's one of your liver's main jobs is to stop bleeding. My dad has been gone for 3 months now on the 27th. I watched him in the hospital, his body filled with fluid twice his size that his kidneys couldn't work hard enough to get rid of. And it didn't matter to me one bit what my dad may have ever done or not done. I just wanted him to live and be well. He was my dad, just my dear old dad. It's hard to let someone go, but believe me I have many good memories of him. I love you, Daddy. I always will.