When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
Dad has been gone since 1987, and there are days I miss him sorely. Like today. That quote from Twain really hits home; I never really appreciated him or his advice when he was around, and never took the opportunity to tell him how much he meant to me. He was never the kind of guy who would put his arm around one of his kids & tell them he loved them, and unfortunately that rubbed off on me to a large degree.
The funny thing (or sad thing) is that as I grow older, I remember more of what he said to me in years past. Little nuggets of wisdom dispensed by a guy with an 8th grade education. Totally dismissed by me at the time they were handed out — I was so much smarter than him — but were tucked away in long term memory for retrieval when they’re really needed.
Amazing how the human mind works.
I should probably add a few things about the photo above… Dad was born & grew up on a farm near Canton, SD. As a kid his family had only horse-drawn farm implements, and remembered clearly the time that they got their first tractor. When I was a kid, Dad bought a farm near Schindler, SD, hoping that we as a family would move there; the problem was that he hadn’t consulted Mom about it, and she wouldn’t have any of it. So Dad kept the place as a hobby farm, keeping some sheep, pigs, chickens, horses, and an occasional cow. The livestock & crops did bring in a little extra money, but with nine kids at home, Dad didn’t have a lot of money for equipment, so he would buy what he needed at auction sales. He was always on the lookout for old horse-drawn equipment, and was usually able to pick things up for a song.
The farm was always a point of contention between Mom & Dad, and finally in the late ’70’s he traded the property by Schindler for 40 acres near Hartford, built a new house, and we moved there. Mom wasn’t thrilled with that idea either — she wanted to live in Sioux Falls — but went along with it. She ended up hating it though, and when Mamma ain’t happy… But that’s another story for another time.
All his life Dad had a wish to farm as he did when he was young, with horses, and when he retired in 1981, he finally set to work to do that. I think it was in 1983 that he had it all together and actually did it. Earlier that year I had bought a decent 35mm SLR camera — a Canon T70 — and Dad asked me if I’d take some photos of him doing some cultivating, and that’s where the photo came from. The funny thing is that the cultivating showed him that there was a reason horses were replaced by tractors — it’s a lot of work! — and he had the corn harvested by a combine that fall.
I gave the photos to him after they were developed, he put them in a little album and carried them around to any and all family get-togethers, showing them to anybody who’d give him the time. But the negatives… Lord only knows where they ended up. I think I gave them to him with the photos, not realizing how important they’d become to me and the rest of the family, and now they’re nowhere to be found. So when I ended up with the original photos (in Dad’s little album) after he died, I scanned them in and did some Photoshopping on them. Not the greatest quality work, but the prints that I made from those doctored scans were a pretty popular item with the family. Dad was doing that day something that made him truly happy, and it’s good to have those photos to remember him by.