Never met a guy who didn’t imagine himself ever acting anything but heroic… certainly was true about Philip… the hero…. the wannabe Marine  (because (to me) they were the most heroic of our Armed Forces… always responding heroically…  to any and every situation…

… did you read that story about the lady caught in the current by the bridge and people just stood there and watched her drown… if I was there … I would have been in the water in an instant…. or all the people standing around in broad daylight watching these two guys beating up on a women and stealing her purse?  Did you see that… nobody did anything… they all just stood there and watched…  if I was there.…I’d have been in the middle of that in an instant… etc. etc. etc.

The truth is… we really  don’t know  how we are going to act until it’s a real situation for us and we are there with a decision to make… that’s the other kind of  “experiencing truth”  that makes something ours… not  hypothetical  about what the great Phil Wolff would have done  IF – he was there…

So… here is my story… it is true… because I experienced it…  It was in the late 70’s, our little kids (probably 5 to 6ish) were up on the second floor… Ellen was doing something with them when I heard the sirens and looked out the side window… saw a half dozen police cars heading for the parking lot by the railroad station out back…  I went to the back window… then I saw the man they were obviously chasing…. he had a gun in his hand… he looked to one side of the garage… then the other side… then at our back porch…

Love…  His kind of love… just knows what to do and acts… I never moved so fast in my life… all I knew was I was going to beat that guy to the back door… he was not going to get into my house… the only way he could do that would be over my dead body…

I burst out the back door onto the porch… ready for whatever…  he was gone…. all I could do was cry and say  thank you Lord… over and over again…. over and over again.  Doing it again right now.