The Old Man stood at the kitchen sink and looked through the window. A slow rain dripped from the roof. It soaked the bark of the big pecan tree in the yard, making it a darker shade of gray. Low clouds promised more of the same.
Pale blue light filled the lines on the Old Man’s face. The gray in his eyebrows and whiskers glowed in the cold. It was the kind of day that put him in a philosophical mood.
“Never be afraid to do something a different way just because it’s not how you’ve been doing it before,” he said, to me, I guessed, although it may have been to no one in particular.
I sat behind him at the kitchen table and listened.
“You might think it means admitting you were doing it the wrong way before, for years even, but what’s past is gone,” he said. “Yesterday is just as gone as 50 years ago and, if you can’t keep learning as you go, what’s the point?”
I was still pondering this one when he spoke again.
“At the same time,” he said, “that means what happened 50 years ago is just as relevant as yesterday. It’s all part of the same experience. Life strings out over years because that’s how we experience it, but that experience all piles up in the same place and works together. The things my grandaddy taught me are just as relevant as the things I’ve figured out for myself when I’m showing one or the other to you. Some things go out of style, but not everything. We don’t plow the garden with a horse or mule anymore, but you’d still use a shovel to dig a hole.”
I asked him what he meant.
“Wouldn’t more recent things be more important?” I said.
“If I tell you to fill up a bucket of water and bring it to me, because I need a five gallon bucket of water for some reason, let’s say you run a hose into the bucket until it fills up,” he said. “When you bring the bucket to me, sloshing back and forth, some of what’s in there was the first water you put in, and some was the very last, but if I need the whole five gallons I’ll use it all at once. That’s what accumulated experience means. The wisdom of age.
“What I’m rambling around to say, I guess, is, don’t forget about old things just because they’re old, and don’t avoid learning new things because they’re new. If you do either one, your bucket won’t ever get full.”
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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