The Old Man stood at the kitchen sink and looked out 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.
The weather had rolled in just after we’d finished tinkering with several jobs on the trotline boat, a 16-foot square bow with a flat bottom. Our task that day had been no major project, just replacing a battery terminal here, fixing a trailer light there. Straightening up a few odds and ends. While doing it, I had flipped over a bucket to sit on while addressing the trailer light, and the bucket had contained a finished trotline which instantly transformed from graceful nest to ruthless snarl, so I’d have that to sort out once we were done.
The Old Man had hummed to himself as he moved about the boat. Anytime he was working he almost always hummed a random, rhythmless tune. After a while he stopped humming and looked thoughtful, though his hands kept pace with the job.
“Something has slipped inside my mind,” he said casually.
I glanced at him from the corner of one eye and he seemed fine. He hadn’t stopped puttering around the boat, so I assumed he didn’t mean for me to respond any particular way, so I just said, “Oh?,” and kept listening.
“Things I’d have once considered very important, I find I don’t get worked up about anymore,” he said. “Other things less important than those? I might not notice them for months, or at all.”
He tightened the cables on our battery and slid it away.
“That’s why it’s important to keep fishing,” he said. “On the water, values and goals never change. As long as we’ve got that for a point of reference, we can decide what to make of everything else.”
Now we were inside, out of the weather and in from the rain. I sat in a chair pulled from the kitchen table. The knot of tangled trotline at my feet covered most of the floor and looked like a task from Greek mythology. I knew there wouldn’t be any quick magic or clever solutions to be found. I had caused the mess by dumping it out through sheer laziness.
“Cleaning up your own mistakes is part of being a man,” the Old Man had said, leaving me to my work with no more than that. The task would make his point better than he could, anyway.
“Never be afraid to do something a different way just because it’s not how you’ve been doing it before,” he said, facing back out the kitchen window. I looked at the recipe for insanity in my hands and decided he didn’t mean the trotline, so I kept at my tedium.
“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 all that experience 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, 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.”
At my feet, the trotline’s bucket was again getting full. The job was proceeding more quickly than I’d imagined it would, but I didn’t let myself get too happy about it.
While I continued picking at waxed nylon, he began shelling a batch of butterbeans he’d picked to give to a family whose father had taken ill.
Before he got done with that, the phone rang. He stood in the hall and I listened to his end of the conversation as he listened to a complaint from a customer on the community’s water system. He helped manage the system, a dreary and thankless job, and he patiently fielded all complaints whether he could affect the given issue or not.
As he returned to his shelling, the pastor of his church drove up to ask him, as one of its deacons, what he thought about a building project. By the time that conversation wrapped up I had most of the line sorted out, but I knew better than to ask for a break. Instead, in the silence that followed the preacher’s departure, I asked him how he’d learned to be grown up. He thought about that for a minute.
“Growing up happens on its own,” he said. “What you grow up into is what you learn. Some things you figure out for yourself, but mostly you turn into what you see every day. That’s one thing I’d want you to remember when you’re grown up. Even when you’re not meaning to set an example, there’s probably someone who admires you watching.”
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 24 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
