December 8, 2023 • 20 mins
Brent's back with a continued line of thoughts and observations on the value of instilling some old school ways into today's modern way of thinking. From recognizing the value of a good rope to tying a knot that's lasted 48 years, we think there's plenty in here to think about and enjoy. Gather up the family, it's time for Old School Part 2 on MeatEater's This Country Life Podcast.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Rieves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tail gate.
I think I got a thing or two. The Teaching
Old School Part two Old School Part two Old School,
also Old School. Here we go again, whatever you want
(00:48):
to call it, that's what we're talking about this week.
A continued conversation on things I found value in that
the world has generally passed on by I like innovation
and progress, but not just for the sake of change.
I'm a big fan of tradition and legacy and paying
respect to the folks that got us here by keeping
(01:08):
their customs and practices alive. Round two of Old School
is up next, But first I'm going to tell you
a story. In nineteen seventy five, I was nine years
old and had narrowed down the path my life would
take to either being a policeman, a cowboy, or a stuntman. Now,
(01:32):
looking back forty eight years later, I have to say
I pretty well called that career from the get go.
What little TV I watched that time was Adam twelve Gun,
Smoke Bonanza, A six Million Dollar Man, and Swat. Now
a lot of you probably never heard of those shows,
but I'm sure some will recall them anyway. We also
(01:54):
had a barn and a hay loft. Dad kept everything
that you associate with that barn in there, and it
was also a playground for us kids. Now, y all
hang on, because I'm going somewhere with all this. The
hay in the loft was used to build hideouts and
for playing hide and seek, and it was the headquarters
for a lot of the adventures we'd conjured up. It
(02:17):
was an army base, a frontier for it, placed to
hide chew in the back of cigarettes. It was anything
we needed it to be, and it was full of
tools hatchets, axes, hammers, anything a group of well intended
but poorly supervised kids could think of to use for
any activity other than their intended purpose. A hatchet turned
(02:40):
into a tomahawk, and trying to master the art of
chunk of one to stick in a tree. A claw
hammer made for a good pistol, and the many gunfights
said break out at a moment's notice. And there were
ropes cold and hung around, but they were big and rough,
except for the ones that hung with the plow harness
that belonged to my great grandfather. He passed away before
(03:03):
I was born, but he was my dad and my
uncle's father figure growing up because their father, my grandfather,
was killed in an industrial accident in a Navy shipyard
in San Francisco, California. He'd taking a job there during
World War Two. Like a lot of men with families
(03:24):
from our area, work was where you found it, and
supporting the war effort was number one on the list,
regardless of how far you had to travel to do it.
I'd seen Dad use those harness and our horse buck
many times to plow a garden or to skid logs
out of the woods that we'd cut for firewood. He'd
also used it to pull a ground slide that he'd
(03:46):
built out of rough cut lumber. Ground slide is a
decked platform of two to twelve is about ten feet
long and six feet wide that sat above the ground
on wooden skids. It's more or less a big sad
that had a single tree attached to the front and
without going plumb off the rails. Here, a single tree
(04:07):
is a wooden shaft, a little smaller and diameter of
a baseball bat, reinforced with a strap of metal running
from one end to the other. And in the middle
would be a ring that you would attach to the sled,
and on each end would be rings that would be
attached to the harness that was on the horse. The
(04:28):
harness on the horse had straps around the horse's chest,
along his back, and round his hindquarters that helped distribute
the load when he was pulling. On the horse's head
was a headstall and a bit that worked just like
a bridle on a saddle horse. Connected to the headstall
and bit was it plow lines or reins, and that
(04:49):
was the steering wheel, the brakes, and the gas to
drive the whole kitten kvoodle down the road. Those plow
lines were tightly woven cotton ropes. There were strong but
soft on the hands and easy to grip. Now where's
Brent going with this story? Well, I had to explain
all of that to explain this. That whole harness was
(05:11):
precious to my dad. My great grandfather had used its
skinning logs with mules for a living when my grandfather
was just a boy. He'd used it hauling out hogs
and deer they'd killed in the woods and plowing in
the garden for the food they grew outside of flour
meal and a few other things that they didn't grow,
(05:32):
raise or hunt. That harness that hung in our barn
had been an integral part of my father's very existence,
growing up in a tangible item that he could reach
out and touch, that connected him and the rest of
us to our past. My great grandfather and grandfather had
(05:52):
told and sweated holding those plow lines to survive, and
my father had kept the legacy alive by doing it,
not so much out of necessity, but more out of
the nostalgia and legacy and and the love that he
had for those two men. And that's about as old
school as he gets. So what does that have to
do with TV shows I was watching growing up or
(06:15):
the career path I chose at the tender age of nine. Well,
I'll tell you. In the opening credits of the SWAT
TV show, they introduced the actors in different action sequences.
Steve Forrest runs up to the corner of a building,
Robert Urick hurdles a picket fence like he was shot
out of a cannon. Rod Perry jumps head first through
(06:38):
a closed glass window into a tool shed. Mark Sheer
repelled down the side of a three story building, and
James Coleman jumped from one rooftop to another. Now I
was going to be one of those guys when I
grew up. I was gonna wear fatigues and a big
ballistic vest and tote a rifle, hunting bad guys and
making the world safer. But it was going to be
(06:59):
a long long time before I could be old enough
to do that for real. So now all I could
do was pretend I could run up to the corner
of a barn with my tomatoes stick M sixteen and
peek around to see if the coast was clear with
no issues. The only fence we had to hurdle was
either electric or barbed wire, and I wasn't built to
safely jump over either. According to my maternal grandfather, my
(07:24):
legs were barely long enough to reach from behind to
the ground. When I stood up, so that was out,
and jumping through a closed glass windows seemed dangerous to me,
and I was still at the age where I thought
comming deer in the family farm truck and passing the
school bus was a good idea. Y'all remember how that
worked out. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
(07:45):
skip back to episode one fifty seven. But I wasn't
about to jump through no glass window. The only roofs
around was the house in the barn, and they were
two hundred yards apart, and Spider Man couldn't jump that far.
But I did have a two story barn. All I
needed was some rope, and there was a lot of
it hanging up in there. That repelling scene was my
(08:09):
favorite anyway, even though I didn't know what it was called.
But that's what I was gonna do. I just had
to figure out how to do it. I went through
(08:29):
the barn, stuck a pair of slick palmed white mule
gloves and the bib of my overalls. I grabbed a
big cold rope that was hanging on the wall, through
it over my shoulder and headed up the ladder to
the hayloft. The rope was thick, heavy, and rough, and
it scratched the fire out of my neck. That was
a deal breaking kind the world? Was I supposed to
(08:50):
zip down the side of the bill didn't Looking like
a hero on a rope that was so rough Tarzan
would rather walk than swing on it. There had to
be something better, and I looked all around, and hanging
in the back corner, and hidden in the shadows, was
a coal of pretty gray rope my great grandfather's plow lines.
(09:13):
I crawled over an anvil and a box of used
horseshoes and stood before the harness the trace chains, and
I ran my hands across the smooth cotton braids of
strong rope, and my eyes got wide with excitement. That
was it. I had found the perfect rope. This mightn't
be what that swat man on TV was using. Maybe
(09:35):
his daddy had a harness in his barn. I unhooked
each end from the bit, I threw it over my
shoulder and smiled as it lay perfectly without feeling like
I had a bobcat and a headlock. I climbed the
ladder to the loft, anchored one end of the rope
by tying a square knot on the flour or four post,
and I chunked the other end out the loft door,
(09:55):
where we pitched the hay bells in. I put on
that pair of slick, white mass gloves, I grabbed the
rope and bailed out of the door like I knew
what I was doing. I did not. Swinging out into
space and squeezing that rope with all my strength did
nothing to counteract the force of gravity that was pulling
meat down that rope like a falling yard dark. I
(10:18):
repelled the last four or five feet freestyle after turning
that rope loose. When my gloves heated up hot enough
to bake biscuits in slamming into the ground went unnoticed
as I contended my concentration on the smolding pair of
gloves that was still adorning my twice baked hands. I
let my hands cool off as I pondered on how
(10:38):
that went sideways and what I could do to fix it.
In the days before Google, you had to use your
own nogging and not somebody else's to scope the correct
procedure out through in my case, at least a series
of bad decisions. That's called trial and error, or is
it applied to me? Trial and injury. Back up to
(10:59):
the loft I went. But this time it was going
to be different. Now I had to figure out how
to stand on the side of that building like that
cat on TV did. Must have had a knot in
his rope. I measured out what I thought would be
long enough to have me about halfway down the barn
wall and tied me a loop that I could sit in,
and in it I sat. I stepped up to the
(11:22):
edge of the loft door, made a wrap of rope
around my arm, and with all the strength I could muster,
I squeezed it tight. I backed up to the edge
and walked down the side of that barn, holding that
rope as tight as I could until I got to
the end of the slack. Now in my mind I
had just repelled. What I'd actually done was sat down
(11:44):
in the loop of my great grandfather's plow line and
hung myself on the side of the barn like a
Christmas decoration. I just sitting there, looking around, feeling accomplished,
and eventually wondering I was going to get down going
to be real easy. But at that time I didn't
know how easy it was going to be. But I
(12:05):
was more or less, just stuck above Mother Earth at
an altitude of about six feet it might as well
have been six hundred. The loop I tied in that
road wasn't big enough for me to slide through feet first,
so I was just dangling in the sun on the
side of our barn like an idiot. After some time,
(12:25):
I heard the dogs barking across the road in the pen.
I knew Dad was over there feeding them, and it
was only then did I started calculating my folly. I
watched him from one hundred and fifty yards away, just
doing his chores, walking back and forth, pouring out feed,
changing out the water, just doing dad stuff, and I
saw him start looking around. I figured he was looking
(12:48):
for me, and I got the feeling I should not
be hanging on the side of the barn when he
found me in Grandpa's plow lines. But alas, there was
nothing I could do but literally just hang around until
he saw me and got me down by his measured
and purposeful walk. I realized the moment he saw me.
As he got closer, I can see the confusion on
(13:11):
his face of how I had gotten where I was,
and when he got close enough to realize I was
hanging on the side of the barn, holding onto a
knot the sides of an orange that I tied in
Grandpa's plow lines. I saw that look of confusion turned
to fission, as a nuclear fission, as in how an
atomic bomb goes about being an atomic bomb. His face
(13:37):
flushed red, his jaw tightened up, and I could feel
his eyes burning me hotter than the rope head earlier.
When I slid down it like a zip line? Is
that Grandpa's plow lines? Not what are you doing hanging
on the side of the barn, Not are you stuck?
Not do you need help? No, it wasn't none of that.
(13:58):
But he was now standing under me. And when I
answered him, I don't think I got to the pronunciation
of the letter R in yes, sir. When he grabbed
me by the collar of my shirt and snatched me
out of that loop I tied in the lines. He
didn't say a word, he didn't whoop me. He never won,
(14:20):
not once. So if y'all are thinking, one of these days,
Brent's gonna tell a story about how his dad finally
reached his limit and beat the ever loving pudding out
of him, You'll still be waiting when Jesus comes back,
because there ain't gonna be one of them stories. There
should have been, but there wasn't. And I don't want
(14:40):
you to get the idea that my father wasn't strict,
or that he just let me run wild. You'd be
wrong thinking that had I done anything remotely to anyone
else like the things I did to him or his things,
i'd be telling you this story from Reeve's cemetery. What
he did do was give me stern les and what
(15:00):
it was to be a man, to stand up for
what I believed in, to respect others, to be courteous,
to defend the weak, and to stand up to the strong,
even though I might be scared when I did it.
He also taught me to deal with what life dealt
me and go on. Maybe that's why I ain't never
(15:22):
tried to get that knot out. He just cooled the
lines back up and hung them in their place on
the wall with the rest of the harness. Now, I
certainly deserved a whooping, and I got my share of
him from my mama, but never from him. The disappointment
that I could see in his face when I had
done something out of line was way worse than any
(15:43):
other punishment that I could have ever received. Now, first
of all, I wasn't a malicious child. I didn't do
things out of meanness or with harmful intent. And I
guess he knew that I was bumbling my way through life,
and he was giving me enough slacking my own range
to just go about my business and make my own
decisions about things and learn from myself. A tried and
(16:09):
true old school concept that is not popular in a
lot of places today. Helicopter parents. They're called just hovering
around waiting for junior to come up against some kind
of adversity so they can come in and fix it
for them and make it easier. You know the saying
about glasshouse as well. I ain't gonna start chunking rocks
(16:29):
because I'm as guilty of it as anyone, But I
try not to be Alexis. And I want Bailey to
grow up and be a responsible adult who makes informed
decisions based on our faith, teachings, and her knowledge and
belief in what we've taught her to be true. We
also want her to face adversity, and as hard as
(16:50):
it is to witness, she has to lose sometimes, and
she has to feel rejection and disappointment because life, real
life is full of that, and that's where the good
folks come from, the ones that get knocked down and
get back up with the risk of getting knocked down again.
Intestinal fortitude, guts, gumption, whatever you want to call it,
(17:13):
you got to have it to make it, especially in
a world where everyone's an expert and has an opinion
that they can hide behind the user name when they
give it. I was talking to Pat Dirkin the other
day about a recent article he wrote. Pat's one of
my favorite contributors of the written word and has a
ton of interesting articles on the media to website. We
(17:37):
were talking about how people were reacting to a guy
killing a mountain lion that had approached him. I don't
care what your opinion of it is, and I'm not
going to belabor you with mine because it's been adjudicated
and it's over. Plus, I wasn't there. What we were
discussing was the ration the fertilizer that guy was getting
pumbled with online. That was the topic of our conversation.
(18:00):
I told Pat that so called social media should have
a rule that when you run your mouth about something,
especially something that you don't know anything about you should
have to post your address with it as well. We
both figured there'll be a lot less of it if
that was the case. Regardless the practice of not saying
anything if you didn't have something good to say, it's
(18:22):
an old school lesson we should all get behind, except
when it comes to possums and rats. I don't care
if you're in church, on the radio, or both. Let
it rip and give them no quarter. Now. I talked
about how my father had taught me to be a man,
how to be strong, how to learn from adverse conditions
and do the right thing. Well, those attributes ain't confined
(18:46):
to boys. And while a lot of what he was
teaching me was the building blocks of manhood, that the
same lessons I'm teaching Bailey. Some of the strongest people
I know and look up to a women and it's
my nightly prayer that we're raising the other one. Great
a quote the other day that said, adversity shakes the
foundation of our character to see if what we believe
(19:09):
in value is really worth standing for man. I like that.
I find a lot of truth in it, you know,
I'm reminded of a portion of my father's adversity every day.
When I look at a coil of rope hanging in
my garage, it's smooth and gray rope that you can
tell a strong when you run your hands over. On
(19:30):
each end. There is a set of snaps that were
used long before eye or my father was born, to
attach the ends to a horse's bit. Somewhere between those
two lines is the not about the size of an
orange of a nine year old boy tied. Y'all keep
(19:59):
your outline straight, and thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to visiting with you next week. And
until then, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be
careful
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Rieves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tail gate.
I think I got a thing or two. The Teaching
Old School Part two Old School Part two Old School,
also Old School. Here we go again, whatever you want
(00:48):
to call it, that's what we're talking about this week.
A continued conversation on things I found value in that
the world has generally passed on by I like innovation
and progress, but not just for the sake of change.
I'm a big fan of tradition and legacy and paying
respect to the folks that got us here by keeping
(01:08):
their customs and practices alive. Round two of Old School
is up next, But first I'm going to tell you
a story. In nineteen seventy five, I was nine years
old and had narrowed down the path my life would
take to either being a policeman, a cowboy, or a stuntman. Now,
(01:32):
looking back forty eight years later, I have to say
I pretty well called that career from the get go.
What little TV I watched that time was Adam twelve Gun,
Smoke Bonanza, A six Million Dollar Man, and Swat. Now
a lot of you probably never heard of those shows,
but I'm sure some will recall them anyway. We also
(01:54):
had a barn and a hay loft. Dad kept everything
that you associate with that barn in there, and it
was also a playground for us kids. Now, y all
hang on, because I'm going somewhere with all this. The
hay in the loft was used to build hideouts and
for playing hide and seek, and it was the headquarters
for a lot of the adventures we'd conjured up. It
(02:17):
was an army base, a frontier for it, placed to
hide chew in the back of cigarettes. It was anything
we needed it to be, and it was full of
tools hatchets, axes, hammers, anything a group of well intended
but poorly supervised kids could think of to use for
any activity other than their intended purpose. A hatchet turned
(02:40):
into a tomahawk, and trying to master the art of
chunk of one to stick in a tree. A claw
hammer made for a good pistol, and the many gunfights
said break out at a moment's notice. And there were
ropes cold and hung around, but they were big and rough,
except for the ones that hung with the plow harness
that belonged to my great grandfather. He passed away before
(03:03):
I was born, but he was my dad and my
uncle's father figure growing up because their father, my grandfather,
was killed in an industrial accident in a Navy shipyard
in San Francisco, California. He'd taking a job there during
World War Two. Like a lot of men with families
(03:24):
from our area, work was where you found it, and
supporting the war effort was number one on the list,
regardless of how far you had to travel to do it.
I'd seen Dad use those harness and our horse buck
many times to plow a garden or to skid logs
out of the woods that we'd cut for firewood. He'd
also used it to pull a ground slide that he'd
(03:46):
built out of rough cut lumber. Ground slide is a
decked platform of two to twelve is about ten feet
long and six feet wide that sat above the ground
on wooden skids. It's more or less a big sad
that had a single tree attached to the front and
without going plumb off the rails. Here, a single tree
(04:07):
is a wooden shaft, a little smaller and diameter of
a baseball bat, reinforced with a strap of metal running
from one end to the other. And in the middle
would be a ring that you would attach to the sled,
and on each end would be rings that would be
attached to the harness that was on the horse. The
(04:28):
harness on the horse had straps around the horse's chest,
along his back, and round his hindquarters that helped distribute
the load when he was pulling. On the horse's head
was a headstall and a bit that worked just like
a bridle on a saddle horse. Connected to the headstall
and bit was it plow lines or reins, and that
(04:49):
was the steering wheel, the brakes, and the gas to
drive the whole kitten kvoodle down the road. Those plow
lines were tightly woven cotton ropes. There were strong but
soft on the hands and easy to grip. Now where's
Brent going with this story? Well, I had to explain
all of that to explain this. That whole harness was
(05:11):
precious to my dad. My great grandfather had used its
skinning logs with mules for a living when my grandfather
was just a boy. He'd used it hauling out hogs
and deer they'd killed in the woods and plowing in
the garden for the food they grew outside of flour
meal and a few other things that they didn't grow,
(05:32):
raise or hunt. That harness that hung in our barn
had been an integral part of my father's very existence,
growing up in a tangible item that he could reach
out and touch, that connected him and the rest of
us to our past. My great grandfather and grandfather had
(05:52):
told and sweated holding those plow lines to survive, and
my father had kept the legacy alive by doing it,
not so much out of necessity, but more out of
the nostalgia and legacy and and the love that he
had for those two men. And that's about as old
school as he gets. So what does that have to
do with TV shows I was watching growing up or
(06:15):
the career path I chose at the tender age of nine. Well,
I'll tell you. In the opening credits of the SWAT
TV show, they introduced the actors in different action sequences.
Steve Forrest runs up to the corner of a building,
Robert Urick hurdles a picket fence like he was shot
out of a cannon. Rod Perry jumps head first through
(06:38):
a closed glass window into a tool shed. Mark Sheer
repelled down the side of a three story building, and
James Coleman jumped from one rooftop to another. Now I
was going to be one of those guys when I
grew up. I was gonna wear fatigues and a big
ballistic vest and tote a rifle, hunting bad guys and
making the world safer. But it was going to be
(06:59):
a long long time before I could be old enough
to do that for real. So now all I could
do was pretend I could run up to the corner
of a barn with my tomatoes stick M sixteen and
peek around to see if the coast was clear with
no issues. The only fence we had to hurdle was
either electric or barbed wire, and I wasn't built to
safely jump over either. According to my maternal grandfather, my
(07:24):
legs were barely long enough to reach from behind to
the ground. When I stood up, so that was out,
and jumping through a closed glass windows seemed dangerous to me,
and I was still at the age where I thought
comming deer in the family farm truck and passing the
school bus was a good idea. Y'all remember how that
worked out. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
(07:45):
skip back to episode one fifty seven. But I wasn't
about to jump through no glass window. The only roofs
around was the house in the barn, and they were
two hundred yards apart, and Spider Man couldn't jump that far.
But I did have a two story barn. All I
needed was some rope, and there was a lot of
it hanging up in there. That repelling scene was my
(08:09):
favorite anyway, even though I didn't know what it was called.
But that's what I was gonna do. I just had
to figure out how to do it. I went through
(08:29):
the barn, stuck a pair of slick palmed white mule
gloves and the bib of my overalls. I grabbed a
big cold rope that was hanging on the wall, through
it over my shoulder and headed up the ladder to
the hayloft. The rope was thick, heavy, and rough, and
it scratched the fire out of my neck. That was
a deal breaking kind the world? Was I supposed to
(08:50):
zip down the side of the bill didn't Looking like
a hero on a rope that was so rough Tarzan
would rather walk than swing on it. There had to
be something better, and I looked all around, and hanging
in the back corner, and hidden in the shadows, was
a coal of pretty gray rope my great grandfather's plow lines.
(09:13):
I crawled over an anvil and a box of used
horseshoes and stood before the harness the trace chains, and
I ran my hands across the smooth cotton braids of
strong rope, and my eyes got wide with excitement. That
was it. I had found the perfect rope. This mightn't
be what that swat man on TV was using. Maybe
(09:35):
his daddy had a harness in his barn. I unhooked
each end from the bit, I threw it over my
shoulder and smiled as it lay perfectly without feeling like
I had a bobcat and a headlock. I climbed the
ladder to the loft, anchored one end of the rope
by tying a square knot on the flour or four post,
and I chunked the other end out the loft door,
(09:55):
where we pitched the hay bells in. I put on
that pair of slick, white mass gloves, I grabbed the
rope and bailed out of the door like I knew
what I was doing. I did not. Swinging out into
space and squeezing that rope with all my strength did
nothing to counteract the force of gravity that was pulling
meat down that rope like a falling yard dark. I
(10:18):
repelled the last four or five feet freestyle after turning
that rope loose. When my gloves heated up hot enough
to bake biscuits in slamming into the ground went unnoticed
as I contended my concentration on the smolding pair of
gloves that was still adorning my twice baked hands. I
let my hands cool off as I pondered on how
(10:38):
that went sideways and what I could do to fix it.
In the days before Google, you had to use your
own nogging and not somebody else's to scope the correct
procedure out through in my case, at least a series
of bad decisions. That's called trial and error, or is
it applied to me? Trial and injury. Back up to
(10:59):
the loft I went. But this time it was going
to be different. Now I had to figure out how
to stand on the side of that building like that
cat on TV did. Must have had a knot in
his rope. I measured out what I thought would be
long enough to have me about halfway down the barn
wall and tied me a loop that I could sit in,
and in it I sat. I stepped up to the
(11:22):
edge of the loft door, made a wrap of rope
around my arm, and with all the strength I could muster,
I squeezed it tight. I backed up to the edge
and walked down the side of that barn, holding that
rope as tight as I could until I got to
the end of the slack. Now in my mind I
had just repelled. What I'd actually done was sat down
(11:44):
in the loop of my great grandfather's plow line and
hung myself on the side of the barn like a
Christmas decoration. I just sitting there, looking around, feeling accomplished,
and eventually wondering I was going to get down going
to be real easy. But at that time I didn't
know how easy it was going to be. But I
(12:05):
was more or less, just stuck above Mother Earth at
an altitude of about six feet it might as well
have been six hundred. The loop I tied in that
road wasn't big enough for me to slide through feet first,
so I was just dangling in the sun on the
side of our barn like an idiot. After some time,
(12:25):
I heard the dogs barking across the road in the pen.
I knew Dad was over there feeding them, and it
was only then did I started calculating my folly. I
watched him from one hundred and fifty yards away, just
doing his chores, walking back and forth, pouring out feed,
changing out the water, just doing dad stuff, and I
saw him start looking around. I figured he was looking
(12:48):
for me, and I got the feeling I should not
be hanging on the side of the barn when he
found me in Grandpa's plow lines. But alas, there was
nothing I could do but literally just hang around until
he saw me and got me down by his measured
and purposeful walk. I realized the moment he saw me.
As he got closer, I can see the confusion on
(13:11):
his face of how I had gotten where I was,
and when he got close enough to realize I was
hanging on the side of the barn, holding onto a
knot the sides of an orange that I tied in
Grandpa's plow lines. I saw that look of confusion turned
to fission, as a nuclear fission, as in how an
atomic bomb goes about being an atomic bomb. His face
(13:37):
flushed red, his jaw tightened up, and I could feel
his eyes burning me hotter than the rope head earlier.
When I slid down it like a zip line? Is
that Grandpa's plow lines? Not what are you doing hanging
on the side of the barn, Not are you stuck?
Not do you need help? No, it wasn't none of that.
(13:58):
But he was now standing under me. And when I
answered him, I don't think I got to the pronunciation
of the letter R in yes, sir. When he grabbed
me by the collar of my shirt and snatched me
out of that loop I tied in the lines. He
didn't say a word, he didn't whoop me. He never won,
(14:20):
not once. So if y'all are thinking, one of these days,
Brent's gonna tell a story about how his dad finally
reached his limit and beat the ever loving pudding out
of him, You'll still be waiting when Jesus comes back,
because there ain't gonna be one of them stories. There
should have been, but there wasn't. And I don't want
(14:40):
you to get the idea that my father wasn't strict,
or that he just let me run wild. You'd be
wrong thinking that had I done anything remotely to anyone
else like the things I did to him or his things,
i'd be telling you this story from Reeve's cemetery. What
he did do was give me stern les and what
(15:00):
it was to be a man, to stand up for
what I believed in, to respect others, to be courteous,
to defend the weak, and to stand up to the strong,
even though I might be scared when I did it.
He also taught me to deal with what life dealt
me and go on. Maybe that's why I ain't never
(15:22):
tried to get that knot out. He just cooled the
lines back up and hung them in their place on
the wall with the rest of the harness. Now, I
certainly deserved a whooping, and I got my share of
him from my mama, but never from him. The disappointment
that I could see in his face when I had
done something out of line was way worse than any
(15:43):
other punishment that I could have ever received. Now, first
of all, I wasn't a malicious child. I didn't do
things out of meanness or with harmful intent. And I
guess he knew that I was bumbling my way through life,
and he was giving me enough slacking my own range
to just go about my business and make my own
decisions about things and learn from myself. A tried and
(16:09):
true old school concept that is not popular in a
lot of places today. Helicopter parents. They're called just hovering
around waiting for junior to come up against some kind
of adversity so they can come in and fix it
for them and make it easier. You know the saying
about glasshouse as well. I ain't gonna start chunking rocks
(16:29):
because I'm as guilty of it as anyone, But I
try not to be Alexis. And I want Bailey to
grow up and be a responsible adult who makes informed
decisions based on our faith, teachings, and her knowledge and
belief in what we've taught her to be true. We
also want her to face adversity, and as hard as
(16:50):
it is to witness, she has to lose sometimes, and
she has to feel rejection and disappointment because life, real
life is full of that, and that's where the good
folks come from, the ones that get knocked down and
get back up with the risk of getting knocked down again.
Intestinal fortitude, guts, gumption, whatever you want to call it,
(17:13):
you got to have it to make it, especially in
a world where everyone's an expert and has an opinion
that they can hide behind the user name when they
give it. I was talking to Pat Dirkin the other
day about a recent article he wrote. Pat's one of
my favorite contributors of the written word and has a
ton of interesting articles on the media to website. We
(17:37):
were talking about how people were reacting to a guy
killing a mountain lion that had approached him. I don't
care what your opinion of it is, and I'm not
going to belabor you with mine because it's been adjudicated
and it's over. Plus, I wasn't there. What we were
discussing was the ration the fertilizer that guy was getting
pumbled with online. That was the topic of our conversation.
(18:00):
I told Pat that so called social media should have
a rule that when you run your mouth about something,
especially something that you don't know anything about you should
have to post your address with it as well. We
both figured there'll be a lot less of it if
that was the case. Regardless the practice of not saying
anything if you didn't have something good to say, it's
(18:22):
an old school lesson we should all get behind, except
when it comes to possums and rats. I don't care
if you're in church, on the radio, or both. Let
it rip and give them no quarter. Now. I talked
about how my father had taught me to be a man,
how to be strong, how to learn from adverse conditions
and do the right thing. Well, those attributes ain't confined
(18:46):
to boys. And while a lot of what he was
teaching me was the building blocks of manhood, that the
same lessons I'm teaching Bailey. Some of the strongest people
I know and look up to a women and it's
my nightly prayer that we're raising the other one. Great
a quote the other day that said, adversity shakes the
foundation of our character to see if what we believe
(19:09):
in value is really worth standing for man. I like that.
I find a lot of truth in it, you know,
I'm reminded of a portion of my father's adversity every day.
When I look at a coil of rope hanging in
my garage, it's smooth and gray rope that you can
tell a strong when you run your hands over. On
(19:30):
each end. There is a set of snaps that were
used long before eye or my father was born, to
attach the ends to a horse's bit. Somewhere between those
two lines is the not about the size of an
orange of a nine year old boy tied. Y'all keep
(19:59):
your outline straight, and thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to visiting with you next week. And
until then, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be
careful
Host
Clay Newcomb
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