I ain't never had too much fun
By Bill Stork, DVM
It was 9:00PM on a sweet spring evening as we sat around the fire pit. My son Calvin asked for $10, so he could bowl a couple of games.
I enthusiastically responded, “Sure!”
He dropped his head, and then his shoulders. I pointed to the concrete pad, minus the one-car garage that once stood over it, covered with ¾ of a load of split oak. His ski buddy, Tim, was with him.
"With two of you, and the tractor, it should take about a half an hour," I continued. "Paid in cash, free from deductions, you’d be doublin’ your money from the DQ."
“You just don’t care about having fun, and besides, you could make that money in ten minutes,” was the less-than-calculated response from the otherwise intelligent young man.
“You just don’t care about having fun.” Those words would set into motion a hundred miles of "phone-on-the-dash, radio off" kinda thinking. With my 50th birthday within shootin' distance, this was not my first negative performance review.
I have evolved the notion that when presented with a criticism, embrace it. React for as long as you must, ignore the context, dispense with the excuses and internalize the validity within their words.
If you should find yourself sharing tea and Triscuits with Atila the Hun who points to his mouth, then don’t talk with food in your mouth. If your boy says you work too much, you ought to pull up a stump and put your chin in your hand.
A fine piece of barnyard pop-psychology, if I’ve ever written one. Like a Bo Ryan point guard who just committed a turn-over, the boy was about to get ten minutes on the bench and a talkin’ to. I have worked really hard to never start a sentence, “when I was your age,” mostly so my kids could never accuse me of saying, “when I was your age.” I’m pretty sure I've adhered to the rule; they might roll their eyes. The choice to verbalize his frustrations bought Calvin an impromptu lesson in economics 101; macro, micro and veterinary.
My barely controlled diatribe was void of profanity, save a few “softies” for emphasis. I began by describing driving west on Highway 16 in September 2007; he was 11. I listened in horror as the newscaster broke into U-2’s "Pride in the Name of Love" to chronicle the near crash of the stock market. My odometer read 200k, fuel gauge below a quarter tank, and his sister Paige was seven years from starting college. It was all I could do not to pull over and deposit my breakfast in the ditch.
Calvin’s biggest concerns at the time were showing his work on his multiplication by the partial sums method, and playing hockey from St. Louis to Minneapolis. Meanwhile the adult-type folks were scrappin’ hard just to keep our nostrils above water.
“You can make that money in 10 minutes,” said Calvin.
We went on a field trip from the fire pit to the driveway. I dropped the end gate on my old Dodge and pulled out a pile of clothes. “Tide” may get out the dirt KIDS get into, but an hour face-down in a calving pen will leave a guy explaining to Dodge County’s finest as to why you’re driving home at 1:00AM in your boxer briefs. My Pella green coveralls were supersaturated with placenta, blood and enough manure to make the Maytag Man turn tail.
I dropped the wad on the blacktop with a “splat”. “I made $10.00 in ten minutes, at midnight, last night lying face down and armpit deep, pulling a deformed calf from a cow. How was your night's sleep?"
"Not to mention, I spent the better part of ten years cleaning dog poop out of stainless steel cages, and pig piss out of "Smiley" hog feeders, at a rate of $10.00 per half-a-day, in order to earn the right to do so." (Notice the artful omission, yet obviously implied, non-use of "when I was your age.")
At the time of this little father and son chat, he was still sporting the “goggle tan” from a week of spring skiing in Breckenridge. I did some “dad math”. If he were to cash flow his skiing career working eight hours a week making Blizzards, he’d be afoot; just short of Omaha.
I could not help but invoke the all-encompassing wisdom of the Web Wilder Credo: Work hard, rock hard, eat hard, sleep hard, grow big… and wear glasses if you need ‘em. I’m no dairy farmer, but I am not prone to sitting around or backing down from a double cheeseburger. I couldn’t find my backside without my bifocals and 36x34 britches strike me about mid-ankle.
I reminded the boy that on the days designated for fun, I played second fiddle to none.
For the past 25 years on a given September Saturday evening, the population of otherwise peaceful “Stork Valley” swells a hundredfold. Barbecue, pork and brisket waft amongst the laughter of kids on the Joust House and zip line (largely thanks to Calvin, who chaperoned for two hours last year). Big city attorneys have their manicured hands engulfed by farmers known as much for their friendly demeanor as their third generation dairies.
As the sun sets on the whole scene, the barn radio stuck for a year on “Outlaw Country” gets drowned out by a W.C. Handy award-winning Old-School Chicago Blues Band. Dad’s sore knee saunter turns to west coast swing, and the Red Wings work boots are dancin’ shoes.
As I watch the budding oak leaves split the morning rays, there comes a revelation. There are three generations of Storks I can personally account for, and we have a requirement. Whether you are hunting, fishing, cutting firewood or putting a roof on the neighbor’s garage, you’re at it by sunrise. I don’t mean thinking about putting the coffee on, fryin’ eggs or on the throne with last Sunday’s comics.
I grew up with, and adhere to the notion you can never catch a fish, lest you have a line in the water when the sun cracks the horizon. It also does not matter if the fence line you’re clearing for firewood or hunting rabbits out of is in Brazil. You leave early enough to get there, get your guns out or sharpen your saws, by sunrise.
What Calvin and I didn’t know is that things come around like clockwork, once a generation. Sitting around the dinner table under the genuine oil reproduction of The Last Supper with my parents, I asked, “Can I use the truck tomorrow night?”
Not for lack of trying, I had no girlfriend. At 6 foot 3 and 165lbs, with hair Ronald McDonald red, my chances were dramatically improved in “The Brown Bomber.” The Bomber was a 1976 ¾ ton Ford. She was spotless with metallic brown paint polished four times a year, an orange accent stripe and aluminum mag wheels.
“Sure," Dad responded, between bites of meatloaf and gravy, “soon as it’s empty.”
It was sitting just outside the dining room window with nothing more than a tool box, a log chain, and a come-a-long, but that’s not what he was talking about. Sixty miles south, our 5’2” carpet-layer friend Jim Adkins, who farmed for relaxation, had a fence-line that was overgrowing a bean field. As soon as those volunteer elms and box elders were cut, split and stacked under the pine trees in the back yard, I was free to address the “date deficiency dilemma.”
I’m pretty sure I was no more excited about spending a day cuttin’ and stackin’ wood than Calvin was spending half an hour. The thought of complaining never really crossed my mind; some days Dad said we're cutting wood; some days we fished.
A decade later, clearing trees on the lot where we would start a family of our own, I paused to fuel and oil the Stihl Super 028. Dad had bought the saw after I barked my shin with our old McCulloch. I had violated the first rule of “felling” a tree, but it didn’t have a back stop. He wasn’t keen on spending $80.00 for the nice Korean doctor at the country hospital in Shelbyville to put 68 simple interrupted sutures in my knee. In addition, he needed an explanation for Mom as to why it would never happen again.
I looked west over Korth Park, and thought of a dead apple tree in a friend’s back yard in Decatur. I had a hatchet you could shave with, and a homemade guard of cardboard and duct tape. The handle was red from the head to the grip. A generation or two before had worn the handle to bare ash. Dad ran the chainsaw. He put the tree on the ground, right between the chainlink fence and the telephone line. I stayed ahead of him with the hatchet, taking out the small branches and keeping his feet clear.
Somewhere past my 10th birthday, I still had “ten and ten” and had swung the hatchet long enough to clean the branches tight to the trunk and chunk the brush up small. The firewood stacked straight as a game of Jenga, and the brush pile lit with one match and a Sunday paper.
As Dad was half way up the trunk of the gnarly old apple tree, the saw went wuhumph… like it had been thrown in the lake. Out of fuel. Class was in session: Chainsaw 101: always start it with your foot through the handle, never cut toward yourself, make sure your feet are clear and always fill the bar oil when you fuel. Dad put the old yellow war horse in my hand, and pointed.
He picked up the hatchet and went to work. A tap on the shoulder reminded me to keep the butt of the saw low, and cut away from myself. With a creased brow and a wave he reminded me not to pinch. My feet disappeared under the shavings, and Dad was dragging brush and loading logs.
As I shook my head clear of the memories, finished my Dr. Pepper and started back to work, I sighted down the naked trunk of the white pine. Twenty years on from the apple tree, I realized Dad could have cleaned those little branches that I hatcheted in a breath, with the chainsaw.
Even in my warmest memories I would not use the word “fun”, but those were the days when you didn’t question. Parents will get mad at their kids. We are well served to filter our fury through the realization that in so many cases, it is knowing that we have let them down.
What my dad did for me is to draw a clear line between “Dad said so” and a day on the lake. Decades later, in trickles and waves, the lessons learned in the woods are still washing ashore. Feeling a chain saw chew through an old dead apple tree would be less, had it not been for a couple years on the hatchet.
Calvin is a free-style park skier. A Misty 540 or a K-fed filmed on a buddy's Go-Pro and posted on “you gram” will get him 200 hits.
Throwing the saw and bar oil between the stacks in the bed of a ¾ ton Ford squattin’ on the overloads will give you a perspective for life.
Dad climbing into the passenger seat, and the sound of a 460 4-barrel growling through the hollows of Southern Illinois, tugging 6 chords of winter warmth, will square up your 13-year-old shoulders.
Twenty years on, you realize it’s kid earning and dad bestowing… trust.
Wrapping the truck and trailer in the corner of the gravel lot and slapping the sawdust from our jeans and boots is not exactly frat boy fun. Yet to this day, I recall the double cheeseburger and Coke "from the gun" at Mugshot's Bar and Grill on County Highway 11, between Cowden and the Kaskaskia River.
An accomplished artist and potter named Rick LaMore once said, “Following your dreams is a noble notion, but it makes damn thin soup.”
We all have to spend a lot of time doing what we have to, en route to the things we want. If we learn the reward of a lawn mown clean and trimmed tight, or a cow fence straight as a sunbeam and solid on the corners, the white lines between “fun” and “work” will forever merge.
Calvin, as for the accusation that I work too much, guilty as charged. Being known as a hard worker is admirable. Being defined as such is dangerous. Only being comfortable when you’re productive is pathologic. Let’s go golfing.