David the Coach
Copyright© 2020 by A Scholar
Chapter 1: Our Hero
David MacFarlane was 34 years old, and the kind of guy every kid in town wished they had for an uncle. And most of the kids in his small town knew him well, because of his volunteer work for the past 7 years at the local junior/senior high school as both an assistant swim team coach, and assistant girl’s volleyball coach. Under his coaching, the boy’s and girl’s swim teams and the girls’ volleyball team had been district champs every year for 6 years and had gone to the state championship meets twice each.
He’d also been a volunteer assistant football coach for the high school team in Dixie County for several years, coaching the Defensive Backs and Special teams, helping the team go to the Regional 2A Tournament the last 4 years he’d volunteered, including one Regional Championship. until the program had expanded enough two years ago to require three paid teacher-coaches, instead of one teacher-coach and whatever volunteers he could scrounge up.
One of the small jokes in town was that the local high school football team had not advanced to the District Championship, let alone reaching the Regional Tournament since David stopped coaching nearly three years ago.
Older folks in his small rural Florida town of Suwanee also remembered him as the man whose young wife and twin 3 yr. old daughters had been tragically killed ten years ago back in 1988, during a convenience store robbery. The tragedy happened when the store clerk came up with a semi-automatic handgun of his own and began wildly shooting at the robbers, but between the clerk’s and the robber’s wild shooting, they had killed all of David’s family instead.
When he was barely 19, David was a Junior in his Master’s degree program at UF when he married a woman who was 6 years older than he. Dr. Abigail MacFarlane (née Goldman) had met David when she was 25 and just beginning her internship at Shand’s Medical Center at the University of Florida. David was doing a hospital rotation there as part of his EMT-Advanced training in preparation for a long voyage to complete his Master’s Thesis. He and Abi had been completely smitten with each other, and over their parent’s objections had married just 8 weeks after that.
Nine months and nine days later, Abi had given birth to healthy twin girls, Sharon and Lois.
Abi had just finished her residency in obstetrics and gynecological surgery when, at the age of 30, she lost her life along with her daughters.
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