January 11th, 2017
Dear President-Elect Trump:
Clare Okerlund owned the farm adjacent to the farm that I worked on when I was twelve. I told you about changing sprinklers on the farm in an earlier letter.
Clare had an old rusty Ford Tractor that pulled a rusty pipe wagon that he used to change his sprinklers–his octogenarian body no longer able to carry the sprinkler pipe the forty feet needed to water a different patch of ground. The process took him two or three hours every day. My twelve-year-old body could have done it in a third of the time—without the tractor.
But I was too self-centered to want to take the time to help him. I should have helped him every day just because he was so old, and I so agile, but he was also my great uncle—my late granddad’s brother, which meant that I really should have helped him. Periodically, I would stop to help but those days were the exception rather than the rule.
On a day that I helped him, I sat on the pipe wagon as he drove the tractor. A Clorox jug hung behind his seat. Dried coffee-colored dirt flowed down from the mouth of the weathered jug like crusted lava from a prehistoric molten eruption. He had wedged a coarsely whittled stick into the jug’s opening, the cap, long since gone. The jagged shards of the wooden wedge kept inside the vessel only most of the bleach tasting water as it bobbed to and fro, alternatively whapping against the rusty tractor wheel well and the tractor’s seat made shiny from decades of Uncle Clare’s bib overall clad backside.
Frayed orange bailing twine held the jug only in orbit, not in place. The plastic jug bounced up and down in rhythm with the old cracked tractor tires as they rose and fell, rose and fell across water worn furrows in Uncle Clare’s hay field.
Clare was an old man long before I was born. By the time I got to know him, he was just about the oldest man alive. At least it seemed so from my twelve-year-old vantage point. He told me he went to college in the early 1920s on a track scholarship and served a Christian mission to South Africa in 1923. His early photographs depict a dashing man capable of running a fast mile or preaching a passionate sermon in a distant land. But by the time I knew him he’d lost his speed, his youthful looks, and many of his teeth. He’d plowed more than seed into his farm—he’d plowed in much of himself as well. In return, he harvested a meager living in a tiny and insignificant corner of the world.
I wish I could relive many parts of my life—have a re-do. That summer is one of them. If I had only cared enough to spend the time to help a frail man, I could have spared him some of the pain of old age. And maybe, I would have seen his wisdom and smooth kindness, buffed through a thousand and one disappointments, that penetrated his slow and pained step. It was there to see. I see it now, in retrospect. But I did not see it then.
I was too busy in my own life to realize that had my life is connected to the lives of those around me and that connecting my life to those around me, make each of our lives more valuable.
More about Uncle Clare tomorrow.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
