My Dad is a simple man. He didn’t make it past the
eighth grade. He worked in the factory doing piece work for his entire working
life. He hired himself out to a local farmer as a “hand”, not because he needed
the money, but because he enjoyed the simple life of a small farm. He is not a
good debater. He is not well educated. He does not subscribe to the Harvard
Business Review. His favorite author is probably a tossup between Zane Grey and
Louis L’Amour; however, what my Dad does have, is a healthy dose of common
sense.
I remember watching
him thoroughly clean, oil, and sharpen a borrowed chainsaw before returning it;
wash, wax, change the oil and fill with gasoline his brother-in-law’s pickup
truck before returning it; thoroughly clean the deck, then remove and sharpen
the blade of a neighbor’s borrowed lawn mower before returning it. “Robert”,
he’d say, “Always return anything you borrow, better than when you got it!”
I came home from sixth
grade one time and told Dad about someone picking on me, threatening to beat me
up. “Robert”, he said, “Don’t ever start a fight, but never run from one,
either. And if the [bleep] (Dad had quite a vocabulary of colorful metaphors)
is bigger than you, get something to even the odds, but never run. You’ll run
for the rest of your life.”
One time my brother
and I were “helping” him work on the old pickup truck. Well, at least our
intentions were to work on it, but the hood latch was difficult to pop at best,
and impossible at worst. He kept a small pry bar in the cab to help the latch
along, and was working both that latch and his temper into quite a frenzy.
“Pry, twist, pry, pry, twist . . . swear . . . pry, twist.“
Even as a kid, I could see where this was going.
“Pry, twist” . . . increasing frenzy and muttering of a
string of colorful metaphors . . . “twist, WHAM!”
He took that pry bar a slammed it across the hood of
that truck, putting a nice, obvious crease across it. (The old truck really
wasn’t much account anyway.)
He dropped his shoulders and looked over at us and
said, “Well THAT was stupid!”
No excuses, no blaming latch or the old, practically
worn out truck, just accepting responsibility for his own actions . . . common
sense.
I’ve learned so much from that dear, uneducated, hot
tempered Dad of mine, because he was a man of common sense, common sense that
I’m afraid is rather uncommon these days. It wasn’t all that long ago that
knowing what was right, and knowing what was wrong was pretty obvious. People .
. . most people, anyway, and if you weren’t most people, you were the odd ball
. . . understood what was right and just did it, and they understood what was
wrong and didn’t do that: and if they did something wrong or stupid, accepted
responsibility and paid the consequences for it.
The old prophet Isaiah in chapter 5, verse 20 of his
prophesy saw the disappearance of common sense coming, and had this to say
about it: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness
for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter!”
The definitions of right and wrong, good and evil,
have been turned on their heads, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Way down
deep in our souls, we know the difference. We just need to be bold, like my
Dad, and make uncommon sense common again.
