His mind comes and goes. One moment he will be talking in complete awareness, fully comprehending and making sense and in the next he’s going to milk the cows he hasn’t been around in over forty years or drive the tractor up the chimney to cut the hay on the roof.

He spends most of his time in his bed. An occasional short walk outside will leave him weak, barely able to walk back into the house. The pride of his life has been independence, often using his mind to figure out how his body could accomplish some task that most carpenters would need the help of one or even two others to do. He put up rafters by himself at times, hoisting up one end and tying it off with a rope, then pushing the other end up the ladder and heaving it into place. Then on to the next one.

I knew that he’d worked as an independent electrician in the initial years of TVA, often installing their first ever electrical service for the families in whose homes he worked.  He’d also done carpenter work during and after owning the dairy farms on which I’d grown up in southern Kentucky. He’d built the stock barn on the farm in Todd County. Through all those years, he’d preached, continuing up until a few months after his ninety-fifth birthday.

Having no memory of him having a “regular” job, I asked him a few years ago if he’d ever worked for anyone else. “I worked at a Kroger store.”

“When was that?”

“Back when I was in my twenties.”

“How long did you work there?”

“Oh, for a couple of weeks. Then I quit.”

I leaned forward toward the table, looked at him more closely and asked why he’d quit. He hesitated, looked down for a couple of seconds and then confessed, “I didn’t want someone else telling me what to do.”

Through the farming, the preaching, building houses for sale and most of all of the other things he’s done throughout his life, he’s managed to avoid that very thing. I see a good bit of that in myself and varying degrees of it in each of my siblings. The drive to accomplish things on our own, to invest whatever degree of effort it takes to finish a thing and to do it well. The same trait that makes us occasionally annoying to live with, occasionally too stubborn to listen to others, occasionally too willing to do a thing alone. Like the blade of most traits, it cuts on two sides.

I think about Dad now, relying on others to get him out of bed, to help him dress, sometimes needing help to even find the bathroom. Eventually, every pride comes home to a nest with no feathers.

H. Arnett
7/15/09