We’re all guilty of falling into self- pity on occasion,
believing we’ve worked hard all our lives, but don’t have enough to show for
it. Allow me to share a story, which might help to put things into perspective.
As a child visiting my grandfather, who lived in Arkansas, I
once chanced upon a conversation he was having with an old friend who’d dropped
by. Grandpa Luke didn’t talk much to us kids. He loved us. We could tell by his
gentle ways. But his words were few. He’d sit in an old wooden chair, its cane
bottom long since rotted and replaced with strips of rubber he’d cut from an
old inner tube – nothing went to waste around grandpa’s house – and smoke his
pipe, his eyes as distant as Pluto, his mind contemplating concepts far beyond
our reach.
The visitor talked of the old days when he and grandpa
worked together. Their job was to go into a valley, chop down a tree, clear it
of its branches and foliage, and drag it back up the hill. For each completed
log, they received ½ cent.
I don’t know how many finished trees a team could
successfully bring to the top in a day, but my guess would be not that many.
Even if you proved to be a human dynamo who could register ten trees, we’re
still only talking five cents, and that would have to be shared with your partner.
It’s easy to imagine why grandpa might be reluctant to drive into town and
spend that nickel on an ice cream cone.
It wasn’t just luxuries our ancestors did without, but even
simple pleasures that we hardly give a second thought to these days.
There’s more to the story. Later, grandpa walked the visitor
to the dirt road, which ran past grandpa’s property. I couldn’t tell what was
going on, but I’m pretty sure grandpa pulled out his wallet and gave the
visitor some money. When grandpa came back, he again sat in his chair and
resumed puffing on his pipe. Then he did something unexpected. He pulled the
pipe from his mouth, leaned over, and motioned for us kids to come closer.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s true I did that all right.” Jabbing the air with the stem
of his pipe toward the dirt road, he continued: “But he didn’t.”
I’ve mentioned Grandpa Luke before in another post. It’s sad
that I never realized until my adult years how much that old man meant to me,
and just how instrumental he was in shaping my character.
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