Opinion & Comment

Old men need to be reminded of youth, wonder of world

APPALACHIAN NOTEBOOK - Steve Oden

Every old man needs a boy to keep him straightened out.

Mine is a five-year-old-going-on-25 named Jake. He struts around like a bantam rooster, hands on hips and eyes examining every nook, cranny, screw, and bolt to make sure “Mister Steve” is doing it right. I told him one day he might have a promising future as a construction site safety inspector.

“Does that guy ride a horse and arrest people?” he wondered, his main interest now being that of a career in the Texas Rangers.

“Sort of,” I said. “The inspector writes them up if they don’t do the job right.”

He shook his head: “I don’t know how to write yet.”

Jake keeps me honest. He lives on a nearby farm, the youngest of a pair of fine sons whose parents also raise cattle, horses, and chickens. It’s not far between our places. I look forward to seeing Jake often.

He’s still wearing the same pair of rubber boots that he had on the first time we met… only this time of year he’s swapped jeans for shorts and a T-shirt. I know his mother wants to get her hands on those boots. They are quite smelly after a year or two of being on Jake’s feet. The boots were big when he first put them on, but he has grown into the footwear. I suspect he sleeps in his boots, like a real Texas Ranger, for fear of what his mother might do.

Jake clumps around in his boots and looks over my shoulder. His father is a wizard with mechanical devices, a requirement of being a real farmer. I am a fumbler, a trial-and-error mechanic. Jake seems to find comic relief in my tentative attempts to change the wheel bearing on a trailer or repair a well pump, especially if something breaks or I skin my knuckles and holler.

This forces me to watch my language around him. When I whammed my index finger with a sledge hammer and hopped around the tool shed, stifling curses, Jake laughed appreciatively.

But, he knows his tools and is good at fetching things. Another of Jake’s qualities is that he runs wherever he goes. He can really pick up those rubber boots and put them down. One day, I saw Jake chasing his pet goat around the corner of the house, seeming to fly in those boots. Seconds later, the chase was reversed, with the goat pursuing Jake. This went on for 10 minutes until the goat, named “Emmy,” and Jake were tuckered out.

Jake and his older brother presented my wife and I with a gift set of chickens recently. The Buff Orpington pair was the start of our new layer-meat chicken flock. Jake had overseen my repairs of the old chicken house by the creek. When the carpentry work met his muster, the chickens were brought to their new home.

Jake had named them: “Mister Steve and Miz Charla.” The hen lays an egg a day; the rooster dutifully crows when it happens. I guess the names will stick.

My wife also received advice from Jake on butchering chickens for the freezer.

“Nuttin’ to it!” he declared. It is Jake’s job to catch the birds, according to his mother, when they harvest from their flock. They don’t let him get loose with a sharp ax, but he’s not squeamish about what has to be done to produce fried chicken.

“You stretch their necks out in the fork of the tree,” he told my wife, pantomiming the executioner’s ax swing, “and WHOP! Nuttin’ to it.”

Jake’s not particularly blood thirsty. He’s just a little boy growing up on an Appalachian farm. Soon, he will be in school, then 4-H and Future Farmers of America. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him go off to an agricultural-technical university, serve a stint in the military, and come home to take over the family farm or start a new one.

Kids like Jake and his brother give me optimism that the tenets on which our nation was founded continue to have meaning among families in Appalachia. Parents still teach their kids to love the Lord, work hard, tell the truth, and look out for old folks.

Jake doesn’t sit in the house, glued to the TV or a video game. He is tanned as a hickory nut and lean as a whip. He’ll be a tall, rangy kid in a few years, probably make a good tight end. He’ll learn how to shoot and clean a rifle and shotgun, sharpen a knife, and navigate in the woods after dark.

I figure he’ll be driving his father’s Massey Ferguson tractor in a few years, too.

In the meantime, it’s nice to know that Jake is watching out for me. Every old man needs a boy around to remind him of the wonder of the world, the beauty of the moment, and the fact that the passing of time occurs at different speeds, depending on the side of 50 years from which you are looking.

Jake can stretch time out, make a day last 25 hours, and wake up the next morning with dreams of what is to come. For an old codger like me, an hour runs like sand between my fingers; I can’t catch it or save it. The calendar seems to speed up, and I wonder why. I dream of things that were: of youth, legs that could run all day, bicycles and ice-rimmed cream churns, wading in the creek and hunting frogs, and of looking over an old neighbor man’s shoulder as he carved me a sling-shot.