Monday, June 30, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Auction
See how I am presuming to speak to my Lord
though I am but dust and ashes!
Can I tell one last story gathered up from Dad’s life of generous hard work? In this scene he asks his son a question. I imagine him considering the question for days, more likely weeks, anticipating what he expected his son’s answer would be. He and Mom must have talked about it, but Dad never spoke much, especially when he was sorting out his thoughts. Thinking about all of this over and over, at last decided to get it over with.
He held his breath and asked … David, do you want to farm when you finish school?
I did not hold my breath. At age 15, thinking of my new girlfriend Nancy and so much more, I craved freedom, especially from farming.
No, I said, looking Dad in the eye. He did not drop his gaze.
OK, he said.
And within a month he had lined up a livestock auctioneer, scheduled a date to sell his prize Holsteins to the highest bidders and move on. All his cows had names. He had books with long green pages, breeding records and quantities o of milk and butterfat. In the spring the cows bore calves that needed to be weaned. Sometimes there were complications during the birth process, and Dad stayed up all night with the vet. And for fifteen years he milked those cows twice every day. Then one day suddenly, in the summer of 1966, they were gone.
At church today I heard two earnest young guys talking about the spiritual life. You serve God, and out of your service comes true worship. I think that’s how Dad lived for years, but over time he came to see how much knowing himself to be a CHILD of God was the foundation for his servanthood. Without ever hearing a lecture, I learned that from him and am forever grateful.
Bless the LORD, O my soul;
and all my being, bless his holy name.
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits.
In 1966 I had a year left of high school. Dad helped me find a 1954 two-toned bronzy brown and white Chevy Bel Air. Although I missed an answer about traffic signs and flunked my first driving test, I passed the second one. I had time for the statewide Senior Bowl. I tried out for a play and was chosen to be the Young Man in Twelve Angry Men.
My friend Dusty (Henson) Keys had a role in that play. Later he played Shakespeare’s King Lear and many other Shakespeare characters all over the USA. He became the drama/acting “chair” at the University of Illinois while we lived in Urbana, and we renewed our relationship. Henson and I spent bunches of talking lunches together.
When Dad sold the cows my life felt free and large. Dad loved livestock, and now he raised hogs and beef cattle. (He continued to grind feed.) My brother John should tell this story, because John did want to farm, although he dreamed of ranching in Montana as I dreamed of war journalism.
After the Vietnam War John was farming and I became a typesetter in Chicago. It was John’s cow Carrot that our local politician Ed Madigan milked one morning in May. There was a contest, and we were expected to measure the quantity of his Republican milk output, and the congressman was doing pretty well, John remembers, but then the cow kicked the milk bucket over and all was lost. (Although not for Ed, who became the US Secretary of Agriculture thirty years later.)
So I remember my life, and John remembers his, but only at rare moments did I hear much of what Dad remembered. He wrote a few pages about his childhood in the ‘20s and ‘30s. In school pictures he looks like his dad’s son, and I treasure those along with memoirs and stories from his brother and sisters.
But he didn’t write anything or really say anything to me later about his feelings or what he was thinking on Auction Day. He was busy, of course, lining up the cows while Mom made coffee for the auctioneer. He wore his usual blue jeans and shirt, brown and white cotton socks that did not hold up very well in the wash, and the old strong brown leather work shoes which he rarely took off until evening. How good that must have felt as the sun finally set, taking off those shoes.
So I imagine his thoughts and his feelings, and I’d like to write out my imaginations and make a story of them, hoping he’ll be watching over my shoulder and pushing my words around to make them right. I imagine that now and feel him close by.
This afternoon we’ll watch Aly’s basketball games and visit the cemetery in Mt. Pulaski where Dad was buried twenty-three years ago. I’ll be listening.
(2 Corinthians 11, Psalm 34, Matthew 5, Matthew 6)
(posted at davesandel.net)
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