Lear's Fool

Lear's fool chided the king, "Thou shouldst not have been old, till thou hadst been wise."
As we close on 40, our aim is to prod wisdom to catch up with age. We leave it to the reader to judge our success.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

A Note to Fathers

It's not yet so cold here in Texas that one can't get some work done outdoors; so this week I've been preparing a few more beds in my garden - which for now consists of turning the soil and removing the occasional Bermuda grass runners. This garden plot has sat dormant for several years, mostly in annual weeds, which make a good soil additive when tilled under. (I know, I know... the Old Law said to farm the land for six years and let it rest on the seventh, not let it rest for six years and farm it the seventh. :-))

The previous tenant had tilled it with a roto-tiller, which turned the top eight inches or so. My shovel, on the other hand, turns up another few inches, most of which is hard-packed clay. It often takes a good tug to break that clay loose, and I'm always afraid the old wooden handle is going to finally lose the battle and break.

Tilling by hand is slow work, but it's good work. It's quiet; I can listen to the winter birds sing. It works my body, which would otherwise be sedentary this time of year. It's at my own pace, not dictated by a machine. Best of all, it's not mentally taxing, so I can do some thinking. For what it's worth, here is some of that thinking:

I recall working on our small family farm when I was a boy, doing some of the same kind of shovel-work in soil that was awfully hard during dry periods. Sometimes you'd have to really pull on that shovel handle to break the soil loose, it was packed so hard. My father must've been afraid, too, that the handle was going to lose the battle and break, because he would tell me to take it easy.

I was just a kid - a skinny beanpole of a kid at that. I couldn't imagine any shovel handle could break under my strength; it was merely a battle between me and the ground, and I wanted to win. I was growing to the point of needing challenges. (Not "challenges" as the word is misused in modern SoftSpeak - where no one has problems, only "challenges"; where no one is disabled, only "differently-abled"; where "positive" doesn't mean definite, absolute or indisputable, but rather beneficial or cheerful; where the "exceptional" individuals are not the bright, gifted and hard-working, but rather those whose mental and physical development was retarded in some way.)

What I needed were real challenges, tasks, labors, tests, trials, dares. Some defiant obstacle to test myself against, to prove myself... or be defeated and return again later with increased strength and tenacity. How else can a boy discover what is lacking in himself and work to remedy the area of weakness? How else can he come to know himself? How else can he grow into what he ought to be: a man?

My brother John (a year and a half older) was no doubt also struggling to prove himself during those years. Fortunately for us, our father was not oblivious to our struggles. Also fortunately, a farm provides many opportunities for boys to grow toward manhood. (I pity those unfortunate boys who live in plush cities. What poverty!) My father devised the perfect challenge one summer when we boys were out of school: "We need a well!"

So we hired someone to come out and drill us a well. Just kidding! No, instead he picked out a spot, marked off the diameter, handed us a shovel, and went off to work. (He was a bricklayer at the time, and was often gone from Monday to Friday on out-of-town jobs.) So John and I set to digging.

But my father knew we didn't have the knowledge - nor many of the tools - to complete the task alone. One of his friends was an old fellow who seemed to have in his workshop every hand tool known to man, and in his brain the knowledge of how to use them. He came over that first afternoon with everything we would need to dig that well, and with the instruction and encouragement we would need to address the task.

And what a task it was! I was 13, John was 14. This was in 1980, which Texans will remember brought a record-breaking summer heat wave. Afternoons seared in 110-degree-plus heat. The elderly poor in Dallas/Ft. Worth were dying without air conditioning. Roofers were being rushed to hospitals suffering from heatstroke. My father was laying brick from 7:00am to 3:30pm, getting the day's work done before the heat was at its worst. And my brother and I were digging a well with pick and shovel.

It was hard work, work a boy can test himself against, work he can throw everything he's got at, work he can grow with.

That well was some 26 feet deep before we were done, six feet in diameter. At around 22 feet, the pick became useless against the sandstone. Instead we had to use this long steel bar (I forget now what it's called) to break up the rock. It was some seven feet long and 1 1/2 inches in diameter, pointed on one end and flattened to a blade on the other - a rock-breaker, essentially. You would lift it up and slam it down into the rock until you could break off a piece.

The work went from being hot, dry and dirty (before we hit water) to being muddy and wet (after we hit water). My father's bricking job was finished a few weeks into the summer, and we three dug that well six days a week. There were no fears of us boys breaking tools testing ourselves. The only thing we might break would be ourselves - and, intentionally or not, that's what this test was all about.

I wouldn't call this exercise a "rite of passage" in the classic sense. It lacked at least one essential element: the community's indisputable acknowledgement that these former "boys" are now men. (Nor am I suggesting we were transformed from boys to men by this trial.) But like so many other tests and dares my brother and I came up with on our own, it presented a challenge to be met head-on, win, lose or draw. As someone once said about boys and sports: Sports are a chance for us to have other human beings challenge us to excel. Well this was John's and my chance to excel, to test ourselves, to find the limits of our strength and struggle to gain more, to prove ourselves if only to ourselves.

And so we did. And so ought every boy have such opportunity. A note to fathers, therefore: See to it that your sons have such opportunities.