Little Farmer Boy

When I was a child, my paternal grandparents had a small farm in northeastern Mississippi. It wasn't much. Together with my great uncle, they had eighty acres, a couple dozen head of cattle, and about the same number of chickens. There was a barn for hay, a shed for the tractor, a hen house, and various other outbuildings whose names hinted at uses in contrast to their derelict condition, like "milk barn" and "smoke house." There were also numerous fruit and nut trees, grape and blackberry vines, and a modest garden, small enough to be easily maintained, but large enough to provide vegetables for the dinner table all year round.

We never lived on the farm, but my brother and sister and I spent two or three weeks there every summer when we were young. And we were usually joined by our two first cousins, the children of my father's only sister. These two weeks represent only a very small portion of our childhoods, less than 4%, but if I spend more than half an hour with either of my siblings or my cousins, those times on the farm will inevitably come up. We seldom share reminiscences other than those of the farm. They were without a doubt the happiest days of our young lives.

As we grew older, my siblings stopped going to the farm. They had sports activities and vacations with friends that kept them away. And then my grandfather passed away, and our happy little farm life seemed forever ruptured. Eventually, my cousins stopped going as well. So for years I went alone. Without my grandfather, running the farm became increasingly difficult for my grandmother. My great uncle helped, and my grandmother was not one to be daunted. She just reduced the size of her garden and took in my elderly great aunt for company. And when I arrived, she would have an enormous lists of tasks for me to perform. I moved feed troughs, hung barn doors, hoed garden patches, and stacked bales of hay until I thought my little body would fall apart. I was never happier.

And it wasn't all work. I recall one July when I went fishing all day long, every day, by myself. The farm had three ponds. Two of them were dug with backhoes during my lifetime, but the other was dug by hand when my great-grandmother was a child. My grandparents had stocked the two newer ponds with catfish, but the old pond had bass in it. It was my favorite. I was thirteen, and my grandmother would allow me to drive the little Datsun pick-up truck of my grandfathers through the pasture to the pond. I confess that this was a big part of the attraction of the expedition for me. I never learned to shift past first gear without stalling the engine, but this seemed like ultimate freedom to me. But there was more to it than that. I would take a sandwich for lunch, a camp chair, a tackle box, two fishing poles, and a can of worms, and I would sit in the sweltering heat for seven or eight hours a day and fish. Now I never caught much. During the entire week, I think I managed one medium-sized and one very sorry small-mouth bass. But as the old adage goes, it's called fishing, not catching. I never held any delusions that I was supposed to be catching fish. I never carried a book or a Gameboy and wouldn't have even if such portable video games had existed at the time. I just watched the minnows swim in the shallow water and the dragonflies dance over the surface. Sometimes I napped.

On my sister-in-law, my brother's wife's, first visit to the farm, she proclaimed it the dullest place on the planet, an attitude my mother also shared. She couldn't imagine what we did there and why we love it so. The tale of my fishing days provoked the question, "Weren't you bored?" To which I answered, "Yes, wonderfully, marvellously bored."

Ask any teenager today, and they will assure you that being bored is the worst crime on the planet. It's worse than global warming and worse than genocide. They have to be doing something all the time, texting, phoning, eating, playing videogames, watching movies. And I realize now that I am no different. I have lost the ability to just sit. Darling Wife possesses it. She can sit on our sofa and do absolutely nothing. She isn't reading, watching t.v. or sleeping. She's just sitting. When I note it, she thinks I'm making fun of her, but in truth I am jealous. How many of us can do that? How many of us really want to "get away from it all" as we are always crying? If we really wanted to, why are they erecting cell phone towers and putting wireless internet into National Parks. Even hiking and reading are activities. Are we a nation that doesn't know how to just be?

I miss my days on the farm. I kept going after the others stopped because I was convinced I was going to grow up to be a farmer. Years of my mother's criticism changed my mind. She said farmers have to work too hard and never have anything to show for it. She said I would be poor and bored. And maybe she was right. But I ask you, would that have been so bad?