I remember the days of driving into town with my grandfather many years ago, sometimes on a Saturday morning to the lumber yard or over to his church to mow grass; he would often comment on the people he waved to from the rolled-down window of his pick-up.
He would tell stories associated with the folks I saw from the front seat of that old truck, and often they’d wave back and yell some unintelligible remark from the street corner they stood on or the front porch they swept or the bench from which they spit. Most were, as I saw them, anyway, ancient.
Nearly always, my granddad would point to a particular old fellow in overalls and straw hat and say, “He’s a rough old bird; worked in the mines for years,” or to some other equally aged resident: “I’ve known him for 50 years…” I couldn’t imagine knowing anyone a half-century; it was unfathomable to me then.
Now, when I think of the people who have had strong influences on my life, I reach backward toward the old men who crossed paths with me in my journeys. By the time we met, most had reached a point in life where they felt it unnecessary to make big jumps, particularly when a small hop or two would do. They were comfortable in their skins in spite of their liver-spotted hands and rheumy eyes and thinned hair.
I am thankful for these old characters, men who were as real as the soil under my feet and the air that I breathed; they were men without pretension … genuine and honest.
The first of those old birds was, of course, my grandfather, himself, but I’ll not talk anymore of him today. I have already said much about him in the past and have placed the memory of him high on a shelf where others don’t seem to be able to touch him anymore. I’ve mentioned Salty Seamon, too; I grew up near his place out on the County Line Road, but I have already devoted stories to him and his paints, as well.
I haven’t, however, mentioned two others in this space before: Les Powers and Don Scheick.
I met Les in my first year of college. I worked with him for an entire summer at a local elevator. He was, I think, over 80 then, and he spent his day sitting on a stool writing out sales tickets to customers who drove through a long garage to pick up horse feed and straw bales and rabbit pellets. Les was the brains of the outfit, and I supplied the muscle, since I was apparently too stupid then to believe there was anything I could not pick up or move.
Les was a wonderfully kind old guy. In the early afternoons, after the traffic slowed and I had swept the garage from one end to the other and made the place as neat as a pin, we’d sit a while in the air conditioning of his booth and talk and slug down Orange Crush, wiping the backs of our hands across our mouths as if we’d taken a bracing shot of rye. We never broached heavy subjects; I wasn’t picking an octogenarian’s brain for the meaning of life. I just found him interesting, I guess. He’d lived a good life and seemed happy, and in a sense I already knew, even at that age, that he had just about everything I wanted by the time I reached his age.
After that summer, as other jobs came, along with a college degree and a wife, I would still walk into the mouth of the drive-through to see Les, until, eventually, he was gone and had given up working for good. I saw him one more time, past 90, in a discount store lobby. He remembered me and was as kind to me as the first day we met; he died just a few years later.
Dr. Donald Scheick — I have a hard time calling him by his first name even now — like Les, was one of the best men I ever knew. He was a professor of history at Indiana State for decades before he taught me, first in a History of American Colonization course, then later in graduate school. I eventually became his grad assistant and worked side-by-side with him in his cramped, but always neat, first-floor office in Stalker Hall.
The first time I met Dr. Scheick, as a sophomore, was not so pleasant; he scared me to death. I walked into his basement classroom in Holmstead Hall, unintentionally, but according to Scheick, inexcusably late. Slow-moving trains would not have stopped me had I been driving into town closer to 7 a.m. than the 8 a.m. starting time of the class, he said. From that very first day, he knew my name, and assigned a special seat just for me.
“Your seat, Mr. Lunsford, will be next to the door. It is the seat for students who apparently have trouble knowing the time. It is the ‘late seat,’” he said as he adjusted the thin tie that disappeared beneath his cardigan sweater.
Don Scheick expected students to work, to listen, to truly earn his credit. I think I did that in his class, and did it again a few years later when I arranged a special course on Thomas Jefferson with him for graduate school. For that class, I met Scheick in the basement den of his eastside home. A clock would dryly tick behind him as he looked over my work, adjusted his eyeglasses, and asked me to explain my reasoning, or checked off the titles of books he wanted me to have read by the next time we met.
But the glacier that I first thought grew around Don Scheick’s heart slowly thawed as I got to know him, and as he began to know me.
In fact, it was never really there. He didn’t suffer stupidity well; he was upset that academic standards were slipping lower and social graces were disappearing, but he was never a prude. Every so often, when the files were filed and the essays graded, we’d push our chairs back to talk, and I soon saw that Don Scheick deeply cared about his teaching and my learning, about his family and my future. He was warm and quick-witted, and a wry smile would come over his face as he shared a story.
As I grow older, I still have more than a few goals yet to reach, but selfishly, I fervently hope that I am granted a long life, that I get to be an old man, that I am comfortable in my skin despite its wrinkles and scars and the aches of creaking bones under it. I want to be a grandfather, want to be a friend like Les Powers and Don Scheick were to me.
One can do worse than to end up a tough old bird.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Visit Mike’s Web site at www.mikelunsford.com to learn more about his second book, due out this fall.
Mike Lunsford
THE OFF SEASON: In praise of old men
- Mike Lunsford
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A walk in the woods
I went for a walk in the woods one day last week after work. It was a warm and green afternoon, and a fresh blue breeze blew in from the west like a new spring friend.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘Dowsers’ provide hope more than science
My grandfather was a man of God. Many times I saw him, his right hand held high in the air at his Wednesday night “prayer meeting,” praising the Lord before weeping at the altar on his knees. And yet, he was a “dowser,” a “diviner,” a “witcher” who, as a favor, would grab a forked sassafras stick and find water for some poor unfortunate whose well had gone dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: As of today, it’s unofficially spring
Despite the calendar telling us not to rush things, I think it is all right to go ahead and say spring is here. The Ides of March has passed, Easter is coming soon, and I have already been out in my yard with a rake, getting my boots muddy. It looks like spring to me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Twain’s Sawyer helps us yearn for ‘wilderness of childhood’
My cousin, Roger, stopped in one day last summer for a glass of tea and a little conversation. Rog has lived an hour’s drive away for years and now, and besides summer reunions, I don’t see him nearly often enough. He’s a good man who has raised a good family, and he owns a healthy sense of appreciation for not only the life he has now, but also the lives we had years ago as kids.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Cheerful green of wheat fights winter blahs
There is a light drizzle of freezing rain tapping at the door of my cabin today. It is little more than a week before the words I am writing are due to appear on your breakfast table or work desk with your morning coffee and scrambled eggs. But I write when I can, and today, despite a full schedule of televised football games, and the stacks of ungraded papers in my briefcase, and a good book lying open on my nightstand, I am clacking away on a keyboard to the whir of a heater and the steady drip of my gutters.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On the simple joys of watching it snow ...
It began to snow about 20 minutes ago, as I write this, light, wind-driven flakes that fall silently into my woods as I watch from a window.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On this day above all, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men’
More than a year after his wife’s death, the great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Remembering a Lefty Frizzell-kind of Christmas ...
My brother and sister and I sat around a Thanksgiving dinner table a month ago, shifting in our seats just enough to make our yet-to-be digested turkey sit a little more easily, and, as we often do when we get together, we reminisced about our childhoods for a while.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The wonders of wading in ‘The Iridescence of a Shallow Stream’
I have no idea how many times I have written a story that begins with the wistful phrase, “When I was a boy. ...”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Little man who came to dinner changes feel of household
My 7-year-old nephew, Carson, came to visit us last week. That in itself isn’t earth-shattering news, for he often drops by with one of his parents or the other, the last time dressed as a ghoul for Halloween. But for a couple like Joanie and me, whose youngest child is now nearly two decades past Carson’s age, having a little guy like him in the house, even for a few hours, takes a bit of adjusting.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Reflections: a bit of red glass and our daily thanksgivings
I sat in the half-light of my old desk lamp a few nights ago, a chilly wind blowing in from the northwest that made me appreciative of my long-sleeved shirt and purring heater.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Growing up — and ‘old’ — with many mouths to feed
At our family reunion last summer, I asked my brother if I could borrow a pair of photo albums he had put together. Over the past couple of years, I have committed quite a few of our family’s old yellowing snapshots to newly cropped and digitalized lives, and I wanted to do the same with some of the pictures John has collected for himself.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Violets in October – a pleasant surprise
I guess I don’t pay much attention to the weather forecasts these days because it surprised me a bit when our furnace kicked on a few nights ago.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A library is a good thing — even a little, homegrown one
I grew up with libraries, and I can’t imagine there ever being a time when I won’t want to wander one exploring it like some bookworm-Balboa, finding an author or title that I never really knew existed before. Creating those “Eureka” moments seems to be a dying interest now that so many of us download and digest books electronically without ever really considering that there just might be some hidden gem we’d have liked even more had we simply stumbled upon it on a shelf by accident. I think those moments of discovery are not unlike kicking up lost treasure a mile from where X marks the spot.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The ‘soothsayer’ who came to dinner
I’ve had a good time opening my mail these past few weeks. Sure, I still received the usual junk about lower credit card rates and satellite television packages, but the genuine letters made me smile; most were about a story I wrote in late August.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The agony of de‘feet’ has this writer on his heels
I don’t know if I can electrocute myself by using a computer and soaking my feet in a pan of warm water at the same time, but I am contemplating taking the risk. My feet, particularly the right foot, have staged a 10-digit rebellion over the past few months. After a half-century of commendable service, my pods are screaming to be taken in for repairs, a big inconvenience for a guy who works on his feet all day and whose “sole” form of serious exercise is putting one foot in front of another walking the local roadways.
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Mike Lunsford: Summer’s hidden beauty worth the wait
The great naturalist John Burroughs once said that nature teaches more than she preaches. I can’t recall a summer where that rings true more than this one, for that old sun of ours truly taught us a thing or two these past three months.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time to redefine the concept of ‘assisted living’
Although it has been nearly two months now, I can’t forget the few afternoon hours I spent on a hot June day this summer at a local “assisted living” facility in town. I had been asked to speak to a group of men there about Father’s Day, but for most part, the wonderful old guys who came to listen certainly made my day more memorable than I did theirs.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Observations on smooth stones and blue-green water…
It was raining when I began to write this. Although no one could rightfully call what we got this afternoon a “downpour,” it was nice to have my windows open to hear the steady drops of a passing shower tapping on my dry-as-dust deck and hard-as-concrete yard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: This summer has us recalling the heat of ’36
It was “only” 99 degrees one afternoon last week when I decided to work on a backyard deck. With a jack and a drill and a little more sweat than I wanted to invest in the project, I went about the business of leveling its sags and dips a bit. The sun pounded down on my head and shoulders like a thug’s blackjack, but as I packed my tools and drank a glass of cool water under a big maple tree a few hours later, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I’ve been these past few dusty and drought-stricken weeks. I have worked under this summer’s heat lamp for only a few hours at a time, but God help the roofers and utility linesmen and firemen, and so many others, who are out in it day after long hot day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: We had no better friend than Andy Taylor
The world is a sadder place now that Andy Griffith has died, but at least we still have Andy Taylor.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Wading deeper into the subject of Blue Herons
Like a relative who has worn out his welcome, the hot, parched weather of this young summer has already overstayed its visit with us, so my wife and I have found ourselves walking our road later in the evenings to keep our feet cool and our backs dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Thanking two dads whose gifts have never stopped coming…
It is nearly a week until Father’s Day, but I have had my dad, and my father-in-law — a second dad to me — on my mind today. I wrote about both men just a few weeks ago, but I have set my mind to write about them again anyway. I don’t want this story to be sad; they both loved to laugh and wouldn’t want that. No, I just wanted to tell them hello, and to thank them again for what they still do for me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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Raw: Aftermath of Deadly Attack in London
Okla. Teens Get Video of Deadly Tornado Overhead
Okla. City Mayor: Up to 13K Homes Hit by Tornado
Man Shot While Questioned in Boston Probe
Raw: New Video of Deadly Oklahoma Tornado
Raw: Kevin Durant Tours Moore After $1M Pledge
9-year-old Tornado Victim Loved Family, Singing
Florida FBI Shooting Has Boston Bombing Links
Paperless Scanner, Vision of the Future
School Storm Protection Spotty in Tornado Zones
IRS Official Pleads 5th Amendment
Oklahoma Survivors, Heroes Survey Damage
Weiner Launches Bid to Become NYC Mayor
Garcetti Elected Los Angeles Mayor Over Greuel
Today in History May 22
Raw: Costa Rica Volcano Roars to Life
Jodi Arias: Death Penalty Would Cause More Pain
Lawyer: Feds Investigating Susan Powell Case
Moore Native Toby Keith Tours Tornado Damage
Raw: Students Clash With Police in Chile
AK-47-wielding thug may be the most bumbling crook ever
Trout's cycle a boost for Angels
Kim Kardashian Flaunts Pregnant Bikini Body in Greece
NBA star pledges $1M to help tornado recovery
Shakira's Shocking Talent
Morgan Freeman falls asleep on air
GRAPHIC: Blood-Soaked Machete Killer Caught on Tape
Elin Nordegren Furious With Lindsey Vonn For Parading Kids in Public
Camera Captures Climber As He Loses Grip And Falls
Helen Mirren Meets with Dying Boy in Queen Elizabeth's Place
Crowd Chants '¡Si, Se Puede!' After Passage of Immigration Bill
DWTS Crowns a Winner
Police Ram House to End Hostage Standoff
Demi Moore a Rocks Bikini at Harry Morton's Family House
Anthony Weiner: I'm running for New York City mayor
Kate Middleton's Dress Flies Up
VIRAL: Baby makes epic soccer goal
The Hangover Baby All Grown Up
