Words of Wisdom

I was about 500 words into an a column couple of years ago, when I stopped to get a cup of coffee. When I came back and glanced over what I'd written I realized that it was awful -- so awful that it could tarnish the reputation of all poorly thought out drek. As I stared at it trying to decide whether I should attempt to repair it or throw it away, I flashed back a few decades to the time I helped my Great Uncle Rudy build a fence. I held the boards, he drove the nails.

After a while he hit a nail wrong and bent it. He straightened it and tried again. It bent again. He straightened it and bent it twice more.

“Why don't you just get a new nail?” I asked.

He stood up, braced one hand against the fence post, stared at me from beneath his magnificent, bushy eyebrows and said, “Anyone can drive a straight nail. It takes a carpenter to drive a crooked nail.”

“I wish I'd said that,” James Whistler once told Oscar Wilde.

“Don't worry, you will,” replied Wilde.

For me, a perfect phrase, is a breath stopper. The best are re-quoted so often they become cliches.

I am not a carpenter, so instead of trying to straighten out the column, I decided to assemble some of my family's words of wisdom that have not yet become cliches.

Don't feel like you're making progress just because you're moving forward. My grandfather said this after watching my brother trying to mow the lawn. He had taken the blade off the lawnmower to sharpen it and accidentally bolted it back on backwards. The mower was flogging the hell out of the grass, but it wasn't mowing.

You don't follow a furrow that's crooked as a hound's leg. I was about 12 years old and my grandfather had put me on a tractor and told me to disk up a part of a field that he wanted to plant. I tried to keep a wheel right next to the previous furrow, as he'd told me to; but by the time he came back to check on me, my furrows were looking like a longitudinal graph of President Obama's approval ratings.

If they could suck as hard as they can blow, they wouldn't have a problem. That was my father's reaction when I told him I'd attended a meeting of governors from southwestern states that wanted to pipe irrigation water down from Canada. The problem: The cost of pumping it over the Rocky Mountains.

Be cautious, but don't live in fear. This came from my mother-in-law. I don't know the original context, but I love it. I tend to repeat it whenever someone suggests that we Americans need to compromise our values so we can protect ourselves from people who hate us. Perhaps they hate us because we keep compromising our values.

Just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. My wonderful, octogenarian Aunt Daphine, down in rural South Georgia, said she does that when her daughter calls at night and says she's home alone and hearing funny noises. Aunt Daphine isn't speaking metaphorically; she actually grabs Grandad's old pistol, climbs into her golf cart and heads over to her daughter's farmhouse half a country mile away. Daphine has been living alone on the old family farm ever since Uncle Ben died a couple of years ago, but she claims she doesn't worry about her safety. “Everybody knows I'll shoot,” she says. I believe her.

You can sleep when you're dead, old man. When my daughter was still in elementary school, she used that line to get me out of bed on Saturday mornings and to keep me from napping on Sunday afternoons. It's the perfect antidote to my grandfather's observation: If you just lie down for a few minutes, the notion that you need to run out and do something will pass.

I'll close with one of my own, the shortest of the lot.

It's my ball! I screamed that at the top of my lungs during a high school football game. It was late in the fourth quarter, we were close to the goal line, I hadn't caught a pass all night and the oversized kid who'd been kicking my butt since the opening whistle had my jersey in one hand and the pass I should have caught in the other. Then came an Incredible Hulk moment. I shouted, “it's my ball”, tore the ball away from the kid and carried it and him into the end zone. Forty-plus years later, saying “it's my ball” still seems to help when I confront a challenge. Shouting it seems to help more.

So as the new year rolls out before us like a blank canvas, I humbly offer these few words of wisdom:

As you move through the year, don't feel you are making progress just because you are moving forward; look ahead and make sure the furrow you are following isn't as crooked as a hound's leg. Be cautious, but don't live in fear. If you do become fearful, just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. Everyone needs to know that you'll shoot.

Have a great 2013. It's your ball.