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Show Me (Vol. 4, No. 14)

Returning from a business trip, I crossed Stag Creek just thirteen miles southeast of Rising Star and suddenly thought of Jack.

We had traveled this road countless times.  Trips to Comanche for tractor parts.  Family outings to Cook’s Fish Barn.  Once we just drove out this way so that Jack could “show me a few things.”

My father-in-law was always showing me a few things.  But he never set out to show me too much.  It’s as if he knew that he would have time to introduce me to all I needed to know about his farm, his family, and especially his daughter.

Jack didn’t show me much when it came to chores.  Instead, he’d matter-of-factly point me to an axe, a timber saw, a shovel – or even a tractor – and quietly describe the result he was looking for.  One summer, he dropped me off at a wooden frame back on the Parker place.  Corrugated metal sheets of various sizes and degrees of corrosion were scattered about the structure.  A ladder leaned crookedly against one of the center poles.  Jack handed me a hammer and pulled a box of nails off the back of the pickup.

“This is going to be a hay barn,” he said quietly.  “I’m going into town, can I bring you a coke?”

Watching him drive off, I realized that I had just been shown how to build a hay barn. 

Over the next few days, I pounded nails into metal.  By noon on the first day, I had also pounded most of the feelings out of my thumbs.  At the end of a week, I was able to show Jack a mostly-completed hay barn.

During the first few years of courting Nancy, I knew I was an intruder in Jack’s family.  Like the time I carried her suitcase to the door after she had spent a week with my family at the lake.  When the door swung open, his face brightened.  He gave Nancy a big hug and pulled her inside.  As the door slammed behind them, I heard him tell her that he would have never have let her go if he had known it was for a whole week.  Eventually, Nancy’s mom came to the door and invited me in.  Jack never left Nancy’s side that night.  I was convinced that I would never be allowed to see her again.

But I did.  And for over thirty years, whenever Jack and I were alone, he’d tell me stories about Nancy.  How she would go with him everywhere.  How he would bundle her and Frank and Mary into the pickup and head off to Abilene for the Taylor County Fair – and maybe a quarter or two of the Abilene High game that same afternoon.

Jack showed me how a father loves his children in the time he spent with them and the hours he thought about them and prayed for them.  Then he let me work through the details of fatherhood.

Years later, when Ileta, the love of his life, was engulfed in the murkiness of Alzheimer’s, Jack showed me a few things I’ll never forget. 

Jack showed me his true colors when he became her caregiver.  For more than five years before her death, Jack talked to her, coaxed her to take her medicine, walked her to the table for meals, laughed with her – and thought about her constantly.

Pulling up to the stop sign in Rising Star, I fought the urge to swing south toward the farm.  I was saddened by my memories from Christmas Eve last year, the day Jack died.

Then I realized that he had shown me through his quiet life how things ought to be between a husband and wife and then, true to his pattern, he left me alone to work through the details.

"Show and Tell" is a wonderful educational method.  But "Show Me" is a life-changing experience.

Shine On!

copyright 2004 Joe L. Cope