I turned 40 years old in May twenty-seven years ago, and Daddy died that following October. I still learn every day of his importance as I journey into the gaping hole he left behind.

Several of the young men wanted to talk about turning 40. I told them to let me think on it before we talked.

It strikes me that our twenties are often a rehash of our high school years with a little more “street smarts.” We begin having real responsibilities as we move into our thirties. I felt that older men began taking me halfway seriously when I turned 35. As we ease closer to 40, life can become serious in a different sort of way than it ever has been.

I’ve observed that for many people, the decade of the forties is almost like being a bullheaded teenager again. People often go crazy. Sometimes it’s a divorce or other situation that sends people out on a wild goose chase, but armed with more knowledge and greater tolerance levels of their vices. This can be a bad combination. A man that’s been drinking or getting high since he got out of high school now has twenty-odd years of all those bad decisions piling up. It can be overwhelming, and many people end up digging such a deep hole they’ll never get out. Forty is like the last chance to get off the crazy train.

Sometimes a man’s life simply falls apart at 40. Sometimes it’s not vices but just life, much like me losing my Daddy at 40. It’s like one’s life is built of a bunch of small pieces that get swept into a box and dumped over a railing, crashing into a big mess below.

So then our forty year old can go crazy, or he can start paying attention to things he’s never noticed before. My guys will want to know what those things are, and my answer is simple: “If you’re paying attention, you’ll see them.”

The old story says Moses killed a man when he was 40, and then spent 40 years herding sheep in another land. Moses had seen it all in the desert, but one day he saw a burning bush. I’d bet any of us old guys can say we’ve seen a burning bush of some sort. The key thing to notice is that the bush won’t stop burning, but yet the bush is not consumed. If the bush won’t stop burning but doesn’t burn up, one can count on the fact that they are in the presence of God.

It’s safe to say a man will come into the presence of God in his 40’s. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a Living God.

One must make a simple choice when he sees The Burning Bush. Listen, or run. That choice determines what happens thereafter.

***

Probably the main reason I began studying on this is the business interaction with a group of men who seemed to be trapped in the ninth grade. I realized that the ostensible reason they asked me to be on their board -- to help provide leadership -- was a waste of time.

And time is one thing I’ve begun thinking a lot about.

So I resigned from the group.

I told a good friend of these things, and my urge to clear the decks, so to speak. He asked: “why do you think you are doing this now? What is your motivation?”

I said: “It’s like being in a hot-air balloon, and I can see mountains up ahead and I’ve got to be able to clear them. The only way to go any higher to clear them is to dump some of the sandbags over the side.”

I have resolved to no longer spend any time talking with the many people who have a ninth-grade mindset.

For many years I have called people just to see how they are doing, to continue to make the effort to maintain a connection with them. But after thinking on it, I have resolved to stop calling the people who have never taken the time to call me to see how I’m getting along. This represents a bit of a painful decision, but I’m getting over it. None of these people are any busier than I am, and in many cases they’re not nearly as busy as I am. It just doesn’t matter to them anymore, and I get it. The fact that the “it” that just doesn’t matter to them anymore is “me” is a bitch, but it’s best to acknowledge the facts on the ground and move on.

I have arrived at an image to understand all this. There is a bridge between me and every other person spanning a huge chasm. In the middle of the bridge is a dotted line. I can only go to the dotted line. If the other person doesn’t come and meet me there, we have nothing. If they don’t return phone calls, I take that to mean it no longer matters to them. Thus, after a few times of going to the dotted line and seeing nobody there, there’s no reason to walk out on the bridge anymore to begin with. I’m not burning the bridge, but I’m just not going to spend any time maintaining my half. If it collapses from disuse, so be it.

I will spend a deeper time with fewer and fewer people. At this point that means my wife and the dogs.

When I first wrote this, I included my oldest friend in North Georgia, but he died this past December. I spoke at his funeral in January, and his death has left a big hole in my life.

I am fortunate to know two or three people in my old hometown who make an effort to stay in touch. I’m lucky to have a couple of good and trusted friends here in my little country town.

I have no idea of what “the mountains ahead” represent, but I have a few ideas.

Going back to the hot-air balloon idea, maybe the balloon isn’t going to clear the mountains. Maybe it’s not intended to. Maybe the balloon’s purpose is just to get me higher up the hill and save some steps so I’ll have more energy to clear the path at the top. The recent trends and decisions make me think there will be damn few people on that path.

So, this brings me to the “last phase of life” I’m preparing for. What is that, exactly?

Many people retire and noodle around on golf carts and take their grandkids to Disneyworld. Welp, there ain’t no grandkids, and I ain’t got a golf cart. I enjoy working and am able to keep working, besides the fact that what most people put into pensions I put into tools.

I have long since reconciled that at the end of the game I will die, and my ashes will be scattered around the field out back. A few people may gather in a room or around a fire, eat a cheeseburger, and tell stories about me until they run out of stories. The man I’ve asked to run this program laughed and said: “Well, hell, we better tell ‘em to bring sleeping bags because we’re gonna be there about two weeks. There’s gonna be a right smart lot of stories.”

No matter how short or long the bull session is, those stories will go around town for about two weeks and everyone will laugh. And then nobody will think about me again, unless they need something complicated fixed.

And that’s just how it is -- for all of us. Hell, it happened to the mightiest man I’ve ever known -- my Daddy -- and aside from me and maybe my siblings, I doubt anyone has given any thought to him after he’d been gone for thirty days.

So, then, what does the “last phase” mean? We’ve established it isn’t going to add any longevity to the memory. It probably won’t lengthen the number of days remaining, though it should make them fuller and richer (I think).

The “old cultures” had definite phases of life, unlike the American notion of perpetual adolescence.

Childhood was relegated to being a child, with little tidbits about learning to respect their elders, various games, with additional lessons thrown in about how to fish and hunt and navigate through the woods.

Around age thirteen, a boy was taken from his parents and put into a sort of training away from everyone he knew, where he was shown more about hunting and trapping and skinning and fishing and navigating. He was told stories and mysteries and riddles. Much time was spent beside a fire as he learned much from old men he had barely noticed before. After a moon and a half of time he was woken up from a deep sleep on a moonless night, told to gather up his hunting and fishing gear and hurry up about it, taken blindfolded deep into the woods, and told to return to the Village in three days -- but don’t come back without a carcass of something to contribute to a feast. We can easily imagine he didn’t even inquire what the feast was about. And the two or three men who’d taken him out there and dumped him off into who-the-hell-knows-where vanished into the shadows.

We can only imagine what would happen to the modern kid this happened to.

The tribal boy probably cried himself to sleep just like the modern kid would, in between being scared shitless at all the real and imagined night sounds.

The difference between the modern kid and the tribal kid is the tribal kid woke up the next morning, went out and observed where the sun was rising, and began looking at the lay of the land. Before long he was hungry, so he caught a fish, cleaned it, cooked it, and ate it. He put an extra fish in his bag and set off to find a hill so he could begin figuring out where he was.

My guess is the really good ones knew by lunchtime where they were in relation to home. The marginal took two days, perhaps, but none stayed lost too long.

At the end of three long days he emerged from the forest muddy and bloody, carrying a deer and maybe a few rabbits to round things out. On the way he had begun to think about the feast, and could not place the reason for a feast at this time of year.

But the young man made a turn halfway down a hill and could see smoke ahead. A little further on, he got a glimpse through the trees of a crowd around the fire in the Village center. He found a creek to get some water, and as he looked into the reflection of the still pool he saw what a bloody, muddy mess he was. He left the blood and mud just where it was, instinctively knowing the blood and mud was a kind of badge he had earned through this weird experience he hoped was coming to a close.

He hoisted the carcass back onto his bloody shoulders and walked with purpose towards a path he knew leading to the Village center. As he came around the bend, a man hollered out: “There he is!” Drums began to sound, the Village broke out in a strange song he’d heard in his youth, and a line of men formed a gauntlet, beginning with the painted Warriors just a few years older on up to the oldest men he knew. All of them grunted at him with a smile and took his hand. The Warriors just a bit older than him raised their fist and punched him on the arm with a big grin and a roar. At the end of this bizarre receiving line stood his Father and his Mother, silently watching him.

We can imagine his last few steps were taken with a solemn pride, as he suddenly realized the feast was to honor his return.

There were other components to the ritual: food, dance, drink, as well as noticing that girls he’d grown up with looked different somehow, and some smiled shyly in his direction.

His father was proud of his son. His mother was also proud, but she cried just the same, because she knew he would now become a Warrior and a killer, and may get cut into pieces by another tribe.

And the boy did become a Warrior, learning to fight and kill just in case it was necessary to know, going into battle where he fought and killed his tribe’s enemies, getting bloodied and cut up and skint up but always coming home alive after ruthlessly inflicting as much damage as he could to anyone who sought to harm his people.

He had children with one of the shyly smiling girls, and after 150 moons his oldest son was taken away. A moon and a half later he watched his son walk the gauntlet of the brave and now younger ruthless Warriors now pounding congratulations into his son’s arm just as it had been done to him and as he had done to others. And his shyly smiling wife cried for the same reasons his mother had cried.

The next day, a man he had rarely seen visited his home. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“Come, now.” And the man took off at a trot.

Our little boy-turned-older Warrior followed this man he had rarely seen through the forest and up into the hills, where they came into a strange looking compound decorated by antlers and skulls and other skeletal parts, and dotted by piles of rocks in purposeful shapes. The man led our Warrior around a large outcropping of rock where an Ancient Man he’d never seen before was sitting in front of a fire overlooking a deep, rocky ravine.

The guide left the two alone. The Old Man offered him a drink and a smoke. “Sit. We will talk.”

They sat a good little while before the Old Man spoke. “Your boy will now become a Warrior, I understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Along with learning to defend his people he will learn how to stir up mischief just as you did when you were young. You will no longer be a Warrior. Stand up.”

Our subject is thinking he is suddenly going to be punished for the sins of his youth.

“Stand close and gaze into the fire. Gaze into the fire, my son, and contemplate the purity of what you see there. Pay attention to how the fire causes every battle scar to tingle, and remember the fires that burned before those battles. Your boy will find those same scars if he is lucky, and he will recognize your scars in you because he will bleed the same way you did. Gaze into the fire, my son, and contemplate the purity of what you see there.”

He gazed and saw each battle, the flashing of the rock and the blade. He saw the screaming, bared teeth and blazing, impassioned eyes of the fighters, and he recognized his wife had the same look as she gave birth. He saw the bloody hair of his enemy’s heads over and over intertwined in his bloody fingers as he lifted them off the dead men’s bodies. He felt the cool river water washing the dried blood and mud away the next day, as he and his remaining Warrior brothers prepared to carry the bodies of their slain tribesmen home with honor. He was surprised by deep racking sobs of grief for these honored Brothers, and his love for his wife. He suddenly understood he also wept for the men and the families of the men whose heads he’d removed.

The old man said nothing until our man had finished weeping. “Now. You have seen the purity of the fire, and how the fire consumes all, knows all, and contains all. You will return to the Village, and you and your Warrior brothers who also have sons will sit as Judges of the misdeeds your sons will commit.”

Our man began to object. The old man held up his hand: “No, you must do it. You have been a fierce Warrior, and have done well. You will now see this is the biggest battle yet, except you will be fighting an inner enemy instead of an outer one. If you raised your boy right, you have nothing to fear from this position. We will talk again. Now go and Judge fairly, as you would want the other Judges to do.”

And so for the next fifteen years, our man sat with his former Warrior brothers in judgement of tribal problems. Just as the Old Man had predicted, almost all of those problems were caused by the sons of one of the Judges, or the son of one their Warrior brothers.

Each Judge knew any of the other Judges was capable of killing him outright. Each Judge knew they themselves were judged harshly, quickly, and fairly when they were young. Each Judge knew the whole tribe’s very existence depended on each of them to be impartial and to see to it there were no favorites or exceptions.

It helped that the young Warriors had occasional battles through which they built tribal loyalty and were able to work out any extraneous energy. Having defended their Village, it was almost impossible for these young men to consider harming any of its members. Besides, there were older Warriors whom they not only respected but also feared, for they had seen up close what these older men were capable of. Each young Warrior was expected to live up to a certain code, and each older Warrior was responsible for seeing that one younger Warrior who was not his own son understood how things were done. The older Warrior saw to it that this was learned well, for if a young Warrior was to be brought before the Judges, the older Warrior responsible for him was brought first. Often the punishment of the younger Warrior was meted out by his older brother Warrior before the young one was even hauled in. The older Warriors did not want to go in front of the Judges, and they saw to it that they did not.

It was innately understood that the fabric of the Village was fragile, and absolutely nothing was allowed to disrupt the flow of things or to cause that fragile fabric to fray.

We laugh at the old “savage” Indian tribes, but many of them lasted for hundreds and maybe thousands of years without any threat beyond another tribe, and that was settled by the simple shedding of blood. But it is worth considering that we’ve never heard about any of the old tribes collapsing from their own internal moral rot. There was simply no such thing, and if there was, it was not allowed to last long.

One feature of becoming a Judge was frequent visits to the Old Man and his Fire overlooking the deep, rocky ravine. Our subject learned the reason for each antler or skull in a tree and the meaning behind each pile of stones. He learned to sit in silence and smoke with the Old Man for long periods, and quickly learned that each time his solemn obligation was to tell the Old Man what was in his heart. He would reveal his deepest thoughts, and often stare into The Fire for long periods, sometimes spanning several days, before the Old Man would speak. Over time he learned that all he had to do was speak what was in his heart as clearly as he could, and in the Old Man’s silence The Fire gave him the answer.

One day, the man he rarely saw came to his home. “Come, now. We must go.”

He followed him up the winding trail to the outcropping. The guide stopped short and said: “You know the way.”

He walked around the outcropping to find an old woman bent over. She looked at him and smiled. “Come. He wants you.”

And there, on the ground, lay the Old Man. The Old Man said: “Help me sit up. Sit beside me now.” The Old Man patted the smooth rock next to where he lay.

Our man recognized the place where the Old Man patted the smooth rock was the Old Man’s seat. His old wife squatted down with them, and our man’s hands trembled as this mysterious sequence unfolded.

“Here, we smoke one last time.” The Old Man drew from the pipe and passed it over. “Go get your wife and bring her. You will live here now. My wife will help you both for a little while, she knows much you will need to know. I will say that you have not been better than other men, but you have been faithful to The Path. This shall be your Seat, and this shall be your Fire.”

***

We all face this challenge, as we take any work presented to get things moving. And when things take off, we cannot imagine not taking the work.

Working yourself to death is a real fact. Nobody can change it but you. The exception to this is a heart attack from overwork which will get your attention. This happens to a lot of older guys who never learned to find balance.

Aside from illness, nothing stops you from working yourself to death -- except you.

It is a relatively simple decision to make.

No decision is still a decision. If you don’t decide to not work yourself to death, then you make the decision to indeed work yourself to death.

You’re coming into a period of life where I hope you’ll begin plotting a course rather than just riding life’s currents. It is the right time of life to begin that work.

It sounds easy. It is not.

Most people will not do it. I suspect not plotting a course mostly has to do with how it requires thinking instead of wasting time fighting where the currents has taken one.

Life’s currents almost never lead to any place in particular. They’re just currents. Many times they are circular like a whirlpool, where one goes faster and believes one is getting somewhere. For an in-depth look at where whirlpool currents lead, study the water in the toilet after you flush it.

Plotting your course is a lifetime study.

Your thoughts about success should begin to change. This is really a constant series of decisions -- often several times a day -- about what success means for you. Nobody can decide this but you.

Many men chase money and that’s it. It’s easily done and easily measured. But several decades of examples prove this pursuit always ends in a meaningless place of no real value. Money is certainly important, but worrying about money will keep you up at night. Remember, the love of money is the root of all evil.

In my view a man must learn how to live inside his own skin and understand what matters to him: what are you willing to do or willing to sacrifice?

Anything one buys can be lost or stolen. It pays to study that which cannot be lost or taken away.

My experience has taught we will either intentionally ponder these questions or they will force themselves upon us in the burden of regrets over having taken the easy path instead of the right path.

The right path becomes easier after a while, but is initially incredibly difficult because it is foreign to one’s youthful thinking.

You are coming into real adulthood now. Many men never grow out of childhood thinking because change is difficult, and they ultimately pay a steep price for that choice.

God waits for you to pray for guidance. You will receive it if you are mentally ready.

***

My generation was the first to see a new evolutionary development: The Spoiled Brat. The Brat soon became “the new normal.”

Non-Brats were once called “well-behaved,” but these oddities were ridiculed as deprived. Their quiet parents were appreciated by teachers, but generally overlooked because of protestations by the Common Brat’s parents about having to do homework or carry books all over creation.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Angry parents squeaked and grease took the form of computerized multiple choice tests and no books at all, constraining students to the limited mental space constructed on a floppy disc and tests designed to allow near-imbeciles to pass. The once strived-for Honor Roll became greatly populated.

Trophies were given for simply showing up.

Pushing young minds to think was deemed an unnecessary strain on the universally accepted term known as “the System.” Excellence became “working within the System” to score well. (It should be noted for accuracy that any measures of achievement are being eliminated in all the leading places.)

Casual observers noticed many problems exist in undiscovered places where multiple choice won’t suffice. This was solved by efficiently discarding the offending object. Engineers designed relatively simple things to fail shortly after warranty periods expired.

Old folks who grew up using items built with pride that lasted decades objected to this new trend, but nobody cared what they thought.

Soon Brats were running companies. Business goals focused on the immediate good for the company. Long-term good was “outside the System.”

Reasonably working together to resolve differences was inhibitive to expression, and it was was too difficult to see a situation’s many sides. Empathy and tolerance were promoted, taking the form of one side empathetically tolerating a different person’s tantrum setting fire to a portion of town and destroying priceless works of art and other oppressive means of honoring human achievement. Eliminating the idea of striving for greatness allowed anyone to become a partner. Positive thinking and creative intelligence just weren’t fair.

The notoriously silly concept of groups seeking guidance through prayer had long been debunked as a fool’s errand, so its absence was barely noticed. The few remaining adherents to this arcane practice were easily relegated to the advanced world of “meeting online.” Stubborn cases were arrested.

Long-accepted Laws of Physics were discarded. The belief that everything has a price was deemed unacceptable.

We have a simple overview into the grandeur of progress and the magnificence of how a smoking wasteland easily replaces backward examples of a mistakenly-vibrant society. It is proof of what a small group can accomplish when they work together.

We can now turn our attention to the unlimited possibilities of what comes next.

***

Jacob counted 100 men with their families in John’s Tavern. The whole Village was there. Jacob knew them all. He’d fought the French and Indian War with many of them when they were 18. He nodded at them, and remembered how excited they all were to follow Colonel Washington. He remembered the boys who didn’t survive. Jacob and Mary’s daily prayers were to spare their children from war.

Jacob struggled every night, seeing in dreams the first of many men he had killed. Every neighbor had the same dreams. They quietly discussed praying their children could be spared those dreams.

Many in Jacob’s Village had helped stand guard against Indian raids after the War. Jacob’s boys had sat with him on guard duty as messengers, and luckily they’d had no trouble. But his brother Peter lived to the west, and Peter’s family and neighbors had been caught by surprise and brutally killed.

Jacob had learned the hard way one must guard what one loves.

Mary’s sister Martha married Jacob’s younger brother William over in Lexington. Mary was proud and frightened the year before to read of Martha and other wives behind trees loading muskets while their husbands shot at the British. The British demanded the Villager’s guns. William and his neighbors refused, and shooting began. Before it was over, Wiliam and Martha lost 93 neighbors. But William and Martha and the other men and women killed 300 Redcoats. When the Crier described Lexington Commons being soaked in blood, Jacob said quietly: “I’m getting too old for this.”

He watched men’s reactions to the Lexington news. A full third of his neighbors called for men to kill Patriots like Jacob’s brother. Another third said: “Hold on, we might lose paying customers.”

Jacob and the remaining third later discussed how a third of their neighbors wanted them dead, and how another third wouldn’t stop them. Jacob and his friends resolved to know exactly which men were which.

The British Government had become oppressive over the past few years. They’d finally begun quartering soldiers in people’s homes while the family slept in the barn. It hadn’t yet happened in Jacob’s Village, but thirty-four men shook hands: “It won’t happen long.”

The Crier stepped up on a barrel.

“When in the Course of human events,

it becomes necessary for one people

to dissolve the political bands

which have connected them with another...”

For the next twenty minutes men listened and watched one another. The Crier spoke of pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

Jacob thought: “I should have been killed long ago. My fortune is my wife, children, and grandchildren. I haven’t lost my honor yet.”

Each man understood he’d soon have to kill some of his neighbors, or his neighbors would kill him and his sons.

Jacob grasped Mary’s hand.

***

We often don’t even know God has acted through us. That’s why God is God.

I’ve met quite a few (many overly-educated) who think the idea of God’s Plan is all hokum. They don’t recognize the twinkle, because they deny the twinkle’s cause. I can only extend prayers for them.

I am no better than any other man, but I stand convinced by what I have seen and experienced.

I earn my living as a mechanical and electrical troubleshooter. Every day I witness a lot of mighty small things working together to make mighty powerful things happen.

The mighty small are the twinkles that become the mighty powerful. That’s how things work in God’s Grand Engine.

It is astounding to be chosen to participate in God’s Grand Engine. It’s amazing how often such a small thing we do -- or don’t do -- has such a great affect on others. We’re probably lucky we don’t know half of it. God uses our pebble tossed in the pond to make the ocean move.

We never know who’s having a terribly difficult time. A kind word or encouraging hand on another person’s shoulder can make all the difference to them. Simple acts made a huge difference for me in the past. I have faith God uses me to do the same for others.

It’s God’s Grand Engine. I am just a mighty small piece of it.

This kind of thinking didn’t really register with me until Mama forgot my name. It slammed into me again when Daddy suddenly died. These two mighty events composed the world crashing down around me. The Lord moved through small but vital acts done by others. God’s mighty powerful movement was sometimes nothing more than a mighty small candle twinkling in my mighty dark canyon.

I learned much about what “mighty” means.

Why did God use those people to lift me up? It’s mighty simple: So I could hang on long enough to be of real service to others. An old man told me: “The training was terrible, but the work inside required it.”

I have learned that when I’m willing, God uses me. I don’t have to know how or why -- it’s God’s Grand Engine.

When I’m not willing and prayerful, my day usually goes off the rails. It happens to all of us, but we just pray ourselves back onto the rails again and try to be a little more attentive.

Remember when we were kids? The preacher talked about “that still, small voice inside.” The small voice is still speaking. It’s up to us to quiet things down. It’s a good reason to not be “outraged” at everything all the time. Anger is an internal and infernal racket that drowns out the still, small voice.

Keep on praying. Sometimes our faith is just a twinkle, but mighty little twinkles make up God’s Grand Engine.

***

His Father left in ‘25, leaving a Mom and six younguns.

Daddy used to sit at the dripline of a building we called “The Garage,” which was Daddy’s space. I spent Saturdays out there as he piddled. He’d give me a few small boards and let me piddle, too. I’d ask what he was doing while he watched the rain. “Watching it rain, son.” Finally around the time I turned 12, I asked: “Why are you watching it rain?”

“Son, when I was just a little older than you are now, it stopped raining and it didn’t rain for three years. Nobody told us as it rained the last time before it stopped that it wasn’t going to rain anymore after that. We didn’t know it, but the Dust Bowl had begun.”

That gave me something to think about.

A year or so before Daddy died in ‘99, we had lunch at a buffet restaurant. One of the choices was Navy Beans. “Oh, John Brown, Navy Beans.” Daddy scooped a helping and put them on his plate.

I noticed as he took a bite of Navy Beans that he got a faraway look in his eyes. Those were not just any old beans he was eating -- there was something else going on inside his mind.

“Daddy, tell me about Navy Beans. What are you thinking as you’re eating them?”

He took another bite and sort of leaned back in his chair. “Well, son, you know it quit raining back in the early 30’s. We always had a little garden and that really helped us get by with milk from the cow and a few eggs. But we had no garden in that drought. It was tough times. And then they got worse.

“One day, a man in town who had a mercantile store where Mom had worked for a while drove up in a truck. He had just gotten a boxcar full of new stock, and part of what he got was Navy Beans. He respected my Mom and knew she was having a tough time, so he brought Mom a keg of Navy Beans into the house. Back then a keg was 35 pounds. She soaked a batch of Navy Beans overnight and served them up the next evening. They were delicious. She served them again on the second night, and we turned up our nose at Navy Beans. So she scooped the beans back into the pot. She threw the whole potful out to the chickens and sent us to bed, because there wasn’t anything else. She served Navy Beans the third night, and we ate them right down. We were hungry. We ate Navy Beans every night for a year after that. Navy Beans kept us alive, and we wouldn’t have made it without them.”

He held a scoop of beans as a toast: “Yessir, it’s worth remembering that I’m living proof you can do just fine on nothing but Navy Beans.”

***

We’d probably also agree much of what we learned could be described as “shocking” or worse.

It’s often a troublesome trait to seek the positive aspects of any given situation. This viewpoint goes against the grain of the National Pastime of Constant Outrage.

It’s quite interesting to consider a free and noble people being “locked down” in one way or another. The only times I’d previously heard that term used was in dealing with incarcerated inmates.

When that period began, my wife and I discussed older neighbors. They weren’t allowed to go to church. Their kids lived far away. My wife said: “We should call and check on them.”

The first was 80-something Miss Elaine. Her husband died twenty years ago, and her kids live in another state. She answered cautiously. “Miss Elaine? I wanted to call and see how you were doing.”

She got a little huffy. “Well, I’m doing just fine. Just because I’m 86 years old doesn’t mean I’m havin’ a hard time.”

“Yes, ma’am. It sounds like you’re busy, but I just wanted to see how you were getting along. I’ll let you go back to what you were doing.”

“Well, hold on a minute there. All I’ve been doing is getting my garden ready, checking on my lawn mower to make sure it’s ok, trimming some bushes, and doing a few other things.” She proceeded to list other things, asked how we were doing, and said she didn’t need anything but she sure appreciated me calling, and she hoped I would call again real soon.

The next was Mr. Gene, who was pushing 89. He was getting along fair, he said, but real curious as to why I was calling. “Well, Mr. Gene, we just thought of you and your wife all holed up over there and can’t get out anywhere and wanted to see if you needed anything.”

He softened right up and we talked for fifteen minutes.

After another call to a disabled Vet, I had whittled away much of an hour and had the best feeling inside I’d had in a long time.

The next day I called three more people, and again the day after. Each time the people were glad to hear from someone. It made them feel good, and it made me feel good.

It’s the simplest thing in the world and all it takes is a few minutes. But everybody has convinced themselves they’re “so busy” and so they don’t take the time to do these things.

My old friend Ed said the most important words Jesus ever said was to ask “How are you getting along?” And then Jesus actually listened to the answer.

Ed said: “It’s not hard, but nobody ever does it.”

A good thing learned during “The Crisis” was that it was easy to do something good for someone by just listening. All it takes is time.

Make time.

***

He said: “Dern, there’s a lot to know. Last year was my first garden, and I figured out I needed a little help.”

I said: “Yep, nobody’s born knowing this stuff. You’ve got to learn it, but you’ll be fine.”

Folks are funny about gardens. Most everyone admires a pretty garden. But they’ll tell you they can buy food cheaper than they can grow it, and that’s true. They’ll say it’s too dang much work, and that’s a fact. They can’t stand the heat, or the gnats, or the way a hoe handle fits their hand. They’ll say they ain’t worried about having a garden. “I’ll just get my food at the grocery store.”

But watch a man in his mid-fifties marry a lovely woman who brings along two young grandkids to raise, and he knowingly signs up for all that entails. And then you throw in a little toilet paper shortage along the way, and pretty soon that man who signed up to be a good husband is pondering what he will do on the off-chance something goes wrong with the food supply.

It’s a pretty strong thing to have a man approach you and say he’s concerned about much of anything, because men just don’t easily do that sort of thing. But it’s a whole ‘nuther level for a man to approach you and say: “I’ve got to be able to feed my wife and those kids no matter what happens. Will you help me understand how to make this garden work?”

I visited my friend’s garden yesterday. I took him some broccoli plants to set out. He and his wife planted two rows of potatoes ten days ago, but they aren’t up yet. He took the little bucket of broccoli plants and the three of us looked at the garden. We could hear the younguns playing across the yard.

She said: “Well, it sure doesn’t look like much.”

I said: “Man, look at it! It’s neat as a pin, and you got good weather coming. One thing’s for sure -- you’ll eat this year.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what Daddy always said every time he’d come to see my garden in early spring.”

“Why did he say that?”

“Well, he talked about growing up in Kansas during the Dust Bowl in the ‘30’s. It didn’t rain for three years. Nobody had anything. He said it was the simplest time of his life.”

My friend said: “How could that have been simple?”

Daddy said: “Son, you’d be surprised how simple things are when you’re really hungry. We only worried about one thing every day -- whether we were going to eat that day. Not WHAT we were going to eat, but IF we were going to eat.”

My friend’s wife let out a deep sigh and said: “Well, that makes it pretty clear, doesn’t it?”

***

I’ve learned that people get excited about raised beds because they’ve seen them in magazines or youtube videos. I believe people inherently love constructing things of beauty, and the gorgeous raised beds one sees in magazines are gorgeous in every way. Bear in mind most people who have gardens featured in magazines are people with money, and they pay people to build and keep their gorgeous garden -- that’s why they’re in magazines and normal people aren’t.

But the simple answer to the question: No. Don’t do it, unless you have a lot of extra time and money on your hands.

Why?

The simple answer is because for every dollar and every hour you spend messing around with lumber and buying soil and making and mixing, you could have spent that same time and less money on improving the soil where you want to have the beds.

There are other reasons.

You can make a raised bed of some depth, let’s say 12” of gorgeous store-bought soil whose pH and analysis you have no real knowledge of, but it is nice and light and fluffy and gorgeous (often because it’s largely composed of peat moss or tree bark). By the end of the season it will have sunk down to the level of the ground below it, because that’s what light and fluffy store-bought soils or compost made of peat or tree bark do. They decay and become dirt, usually reducing to about 10% of their original volume. So you end up with a big empty box sitting on top of the ground. Then what? This is “sold” by the magazines as being sustainable, but anything you’ve got to renew every year at stiff cost of money and time isn’t sustainable. These articles are written to sell magazines and potting soil, not to help people with gardens.

If you had simply improved the same square footage of ground on ground level, you could run your tiller over it or spade it up and go again. Good luck getting your tiller inside a box. It can be done, of course. But why? We won’t bring up stubbing your toe or banging your shin on the bed frame, because you’ll learn about these features soon enough.

One also fails to take advantage of the nutrients and microorganisms in one’s subsoil because it’s too far removed from the root zone of the raised bed. This is a mistake and a waste, because these deeply held nutrients and microorganisms take years to develop and in my opinion it is foolish to ignore them.

Speaking of the box: one will build this box out of what material? The ideal wood for contact with a wet environment is treated lumber. Do you really want that treatment in your soil and your food? Really?

Pick your spot. Get the sod out of the way -- a shovel and elbow grease works wonders and you can pile it upside down with leaves amd grass clippings and start your compost pile.

Spend some of the money you saved not buying materials for a box and peat moss on a soil probe. You can get one at A.M. Leonard. Call your County Agent and have him come give you a lesson in how to sample soil properly. Do a soil test on the patches you intend to garden. Amend your soil accordingly, deal with the almost certain bad pH and low nutrients, and go to it. If you want to buy compost, do it, and incorporate it into your soil. You’ve got to resample your soil if you add store-bought materials, though.

No amount of effort spent on raised beds will take the place of improving your natural existing soil. The original soil took 40 blueZillion years to make, and was made by the hands of God. Take advantage of it. Work with what you’ve got.

When everyone else is still constructing their boxes, you’ll be sitting in the shade drinking cool water watching your seeds sprout.

***

I watched close. He wasn’t joking.

I remembered being nine years old and watching Daddy sit at the edge of what we called The Garage, and he’d stare at where the rain was dripping a line into the dirt.

“What you doing, Daddy?”

“Watching it rain, son.”

This story repeated at each rain. My Daddy was crazy.

I turned twelve and questioned everything. “But why are you watching it rain, Daddy?”

“Well, son, when I was your age, it stopped raining. It didn’t rain for three years. Nobody told us the last time it rained was going to be the last time it rained.”

I was floored by this. How could it not rain?

Daddy described the Dust Bowl in western Kansas and how dust and drought and starvation stretched from the panhandle of Texas up to Nebraska.

Daddy said several classmates starved to death in their beds along with their families.

The house Daddy grew up in had no glass in the windows. They’d just pull a little door over the window to shut it. He said you could lay in bed and see stars through the roof. He also said they swept six inches of dirt out of the house every day for three years.

Cows died, and when they cut their stomachs open, their stomachs were filled with dirt.

Babies died, choked on the dust.

Finally, it began raining. Everything greened up. Everybody planted a garden. Daddy’s Mom had corn chest-high and everybody was feeling good.

Then they saw another big, black cloud to the north, just like the big dust clouds they’d seen earlier. The next day they heard a strange buzzing sound. The day after that they woke up and everything green was gone. Daddy’s little brother Deean had left a shovel in the garden the day before. He busted into the house crying: “Somebody stole the shovel!” Upon closer inspection, they found the shovel in the dirt, but the locusts that had eaten everything else had eaten the shovel handle, too.

Several people in town killed themselves that day. They just couldn’t take any more bad news.

One thing Daddy said 55 years ago still sticks with me: “Hard times can come anytime, son. It didn’t affect us as bad as you might think, because we’d never really known good times, so we didn’t know any better. But you’ll see hard times before your life is over, son, and it’s liable to affect your generation alot harder than it did us. Because you’ve had it better, and you won’t know how to cope when things go wrong.”

Daddy’s stories and lessons were several layers deep. He learned early how to cope with bad news, because that’s mostly all they got. And he learned to appreciate deeply any rare speck of good news.

Count your blessings. Name them one by one. Give thanks to God.

***

It began one Sunday when the preacher told us “God is no respecter of persons.” On the way home I asked Daddy what that meant. Daddy looked at me in the rear view mirror. “What it means, son, is nobody’s better than you, and you’re no better than anyone. Every man puts his pants on one leg at a time just like you do.”

“His eye is on the sparrow” was made personal: “God has a plan for your life, son.”

Daddy illustrated the Good Samaritan story when he stopped the car to move a turtle out of the road. “Always help someone when you can, son. You never know when you might need help yourself.”

I “went riding” for the first time at 14 with my friend Steve who’d turned 16. Daddy let me go because he knew Steve’s parents. Before we left, Daddy shook my hand. “The Devil never sleeps, son. Remember the Lord has a plan for you. Think about what you’re doing. Have fun. Be home at nine.”

Daddy shook my hand because he was sending me off into the wild for the first time. He knew he might not see me alive again. He also knew if we thought of getting into any trouble -- which we weren’t -- that his comments would be sticking in my craw the whole time -- which they did.

When I was 18 and worried about something out of my control, Daddy told me to pray about it. I said: “I’ll be praying all the time!” Daddy said: “That’s not a bad thing, son. Jesus told us to pray without ceasing.”

He told me to pray for patience. Small but bothersome things began happening, but I indeed grew in patience. One day I calmly told Daddy of a dead battery or similar nuisance problem. Daddy said: “Son, did you pray for patience like I told you to?” I told him I had. “Well, son, you’re learning patience. Stop praying for patience and trust God.”

On my 40th birthday in May of 1999, I asked Daddy if he remembered the old preacher’s sermon called “Life Begins at 40.” Daddy said: “Yep, sure do. That’s right now, ain’t it, son?”

He died the following October.

We’ve all observed the old Scripture verses we’ve read for years reveal more meaning because we’ve grown.

As I’ve gotten further and further from Daddy’s physical presence, I’ve gained a increasingly deeper understanding of the simple things he said over the years. His small, wiry frame casts a steadily growing shadow.

Growing up I was blessed to have received the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But I stand in grateful knowledge in the gray hair of today knowing the greatest blessing of all was The Gospel of Ol’ Joe.

***