CAUGHT BETWEEN [Sat, 4-18-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Personal Reminiscences of An Old Man—CAUGHT BETWEEN [Sat, 4-18-26]

 

I have always felt caught between childhood and adulthood. I did not get to fill out my childhood years, so I’ve always been both child and grown up.

Moving to the farm at Oakland City was the best thing that happened to me. There I learned that I was competent. Not at farm work. Oh, I could do all that was required, even gathering eggs from underneath the hens. I didn’t like farm work, though, especially the egg gathering, because the hens, understandably, did not take kindly to having their eggs stolen and so pecked my hands and arms. We couldn’t afford gloves, so…

No, my competency came in friendship. I learned that I was good at relationships.

But the farm was also one of the worst things that happened to me, because I wasn’t ready to give up childhood and be a man. Even at ten, though, on a hard-scrabble farm, where there is no plumbing, so all water must be pumped and carried in and later carried out, and where the heating requires chopping kindling and carrying coal and ashes in and out, and there are little brothers and sisters to help care for, and weeds to be hoed, and pigs and chickens to be fed, and eggs to be gathered, and berries to be picked…oh, on a 19^th century farm, even though you are half-way through the 20^th century, even at ten, you have to be a man.

I enjoyed it in some ways. I felt useful. But I still wanted to be a kid. And I think I needed to be. I was only ten. I usually say that I was just a kid. But “kid” is an omnibus word. It covers a wide age range, like “college kids.” The truth is that I was just a child.

Suddenly, at ten, I was a farm child. Almost like a hired hand—chores all the time. Had I been a farm child from the beginning, it might have been okay. But I was a city kid. I could walk to school and movies and church. There were no eggs to gather or pigs to feed or gardens to weed or wells to pump water.

Farm life as a hired hand child was lonely. When you live five miles out of town, with no car, you’re isolated. Even in your family, where everyone is working hard just to get the daily work done. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child…”

I would look at the toys in the Sears catalog and feel so conflicted. I pined for a particular toy gas station shown there. It had doors that rolled up, and a lift for toy cars. I’d never had anything like that. It looked like so much fun.

But while I was yearning for that little gas station, I felt embarrassed and ashamed. The farm, and my parents, required that I be a man at all times. Be a worker. No time for toys or child things

I think that is why I liked sports so much, starting at ten. It was a fun thing, but it wasn’t a child thing. Especially when my bachelor uncle, Johnny Pond, would drive over from Francisco, five miles away, after closing his hardware store for the day, and hit flies to me in the south field, or shoot baskets at the hoop on the side of the barn.

I don’t think I’ve ever resolved that conflict, being caught between childhood and manhood. My transition was too abrupt. I needed more than a day to go from being a city kid to an [unpaid] hired hand.

Maybe that’s why I like children so much. There’s a bit part of me that still wants to be a child, to play with toys, to just have fun and let the grownups worry about getting the work done.

Yes, I know. There are plenty of folks who had shorter and harder childhoods than I did. But I can’t live their lives for them. I could still play with that gas station, though.

John Robert McFarland