CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—
I still get up every day thinking, “Today, I’m going to get it right.” I think I learned that from my father, although his first thought was more like, “Today, I’m going to…” For him, it wasn’t about getting it right, whatever “it” might be. For him, it was just about keeping going, for that was his only choice.
He was born with a bad eye. Not impossibly bad, but a nuisance. It was probably one of the reasons he didn’t like school, and dropped out halfway through his first semester in high school.
He liked learning, even though he didn’t like school. He was good at arithmetic. He read a lot, and taught Mary V, my older sister, to read, before she started kindergarten. But mostly he liked learning on his own, about animals and motors and machinery and the old West.
He didn’t teach me to read, the way he had Mary V, because when I was about five, he lost most of the rest of his eyesight in an industrial accident. A piece of steel flew into his good eye. He didn’t become completely blind until late in life, but from that point, he was legally blind, and his sight kept getting worse.
He endured a series of operations, where they put a needle right into his eyeball. He endured the disappointment of those useless operations. He endured job refusals because of his blindness. He endured the indignity of being on welfare. He endured his wife, our mother, who was not always very understanding. He did the only thing he knew how to do in response to what life had dealt him—become the hardest working man in the history of humankind.
Without eyesight, he
withdrew into himself. Not sullen, but just the silent man who worked hard and
said nothing. If you live on a farm, where no one else sees you, you can find a
myriad of ways to work around blindness.
He never lost his wry sense of humor, which showed up again after Helen joined the family as his daughter-in-law. She quickly became his favorite child. Also, Mother’s. She changed the dynamics of the family. We all began to be able to relate to one another in ways we had not before. She was that member every family needs, the “non-anxious presence.” Well, at least she was a less-anxious presence.
From my father--and from Mother, too, in her own way, which was much more vocal--I learned that you just keep going. That has served me well: in corn detasseling, in long distance running, in chemotherapy, in old age. I think it is why I don’t worry about death. On the day that I die, I’ll get up and say, “Today, I’m going to get it right…”
John Robert McFarland
A sharp-eyed reader noted
that my recent column on “Trees In Winter” is basically the same one I did back
in 2018. Remember, I grew up on a farm. I believe in rotating the crops, but
when you’ve rotated through them all, you have to come back to planting corn
again.
The photo above is not my father, nor is the horse Old Prince, but it is a close resemblance.
If your father was "the hardest working human in the history of mankind", mine was second. And, like you, I learned to work...mostly from the five years I spent on the cotton farm south of Ladonia, Texas. My Dad, at age 45 (mid-life crisis?) decided he didn't want to be a Kansas school administrator (coach, janitor, teacher, human relations expert) and moved the family to my mother's family farm. I spent some time in the hot Texas sun choppin' and pickin' as a pre-teenager. My parents had a strong interest in education. Mother was a teacher and Dad a superintendent. But it wasn't the parental influence that drove me to get educated. It was farm labor and Texas heat (and cold). After my first semester at IU, I was falling behind in some of my classes. If you will remember, IU sent "pink slips" back home to one's parents if the kid was falling behind. When Dad got mine, he wrote me a letter, which I still have in my files of important documents. He wrote, "Bob, if you don't think you can make it in college, we can always find something else for you to do." Translated he meant, "physical labor"...like farm hand. I got no more pink slips.
ReplyDeleteI never got a pink slip, but I remember the dread that time of the semester brought up. I never had to chop or pick cotton, either, but I put up a lot of soybean hay in the heat and humidity, with the attendant soybean itch dust down the backs and fronts of anything I wore. I think boys like we were are now replaced by machines, and that's okay.
ReplyDeleteYou're a better man than me. I couldn't handle corn detasseling. It's been said that it is a rite of passage for young men entering adulthood. Well, I failed an early adulthood test. Whether I quit or was fired is up for debate and inconsequential. I could make excuses, but we all know what excuses are like. I should have stuck it out. Your parishioner from Wesley United Methodist Church in Charleston, Illinois.
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