17. DAVID AND THE LITTLE GIANT
In 1984 I did get that transfer to Y-12, another plant, but with the same company. What a blessing that was. I was transferred to a division that enriched uranium, and worked for a man named David. This man was very instrumental in my plight to becoming a man.
David taught me many things. One of those was the day, about two weeks before Christmas, and I’d asked him for the week of the holidays to be off for the remainder of my vacation. His answer was; “Sure”. So going back upstairs to our crew, I got to bragging about being off Christmas week. The feller that had the most seniority told me that David couldn’t do that. We had eleven people on our crew and six was already off, and David had to keep a skeleton crew of five to keep the machines running, and he’d probably get into trouble.
Thinking about this for a few minutes, I headed downstairs to talk with the boss. “David, I sure don’t want to get the big boss onto you, and didn’t realize you already had so many off”. David turned to me and asked: “You’re a man aren’t ya?” Answering, I said “yes”. He spoke again and told me to let him worry about that, if a boy wants off, that’s one thing, but his group was all men. “Take the week off and enjoy it”.
That was the day that my work ethics took a turn for the better. Any person that would stick his neck out for me was worth doing a good job for, and then a little bit more.
I made some great relationship during my stint with Y-12, and will always cherish them. From the stubborn foolishness of a boy to the downright stupid, man; way too many stories to tell……
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In the mid-80’s, I began farming in a bigger, much more serious way than I’d been doing for the past five or six years.
For several years I’d graze three or four head of cattle, and would mow and rake hay with horse drawn equipment. Then stack it around a pole, twenty feet high, and stomped down tight, for the winter feed. Back then I would even mow the sides of the roads, or anybody’s patch of ground that they weren’t using or mowing.
There were several lean years here that were a remarkable learning time for me. Lots of work, buckets of sweat, many mistakes, but I learned the old fashion way what small time farming was all about.
And once again, I was working for David, and another co-worker Jimmy. Both, who had farms and knew what they were doing, unlike myself. So in all our spare time on the job, we’d talk about cattle, planting, mowing, harvesting, sowing, and just about everything that had to do with a farm.
These guys had the money to do what was needed done, and I was about as smart as coal bucket, and as sharp as a bowling ball. I really didn’t know anything about this venture, and had almost no money to do it. But I had a good job, the will to learn, and a desire to do it.
So to keep up with the co-workers, I succumb to the peer pressure and bought a passel of cattle, some new equipment, and even built more and bigger barns. Got me a new tractor, mower, rake, and baler.
But despite my appearance of being a first class farmer, I never did build strong or sound fences. As long as the wind kept blowing from the south, I was ok, but when it would change directions, I was in trouble. Folks, My fencing skills or knowledge weren’t much. Three strands of the best barbed wire money could buy and put up like a knot-head that had been raised in the city. But I was having fun, talking the talk at work, and talking to cattle at home, except for the many times that the cattle had to be chased back into the fences.
By 1988, I was running 35 head of cattle on twenty acres of cleared land, and I still was hoping the wind wouldn’t change direction. To be honest, this couldn’t be done by anybody, not enough land, not enough me and not enough money to do it right. So I sold out. What a relief this was.
Now I had a little money and a whole lot less worries, and could make more money selling hay than I ever come close to in cattle business. And I never saw a bale of hay break through a fence to run down the road.
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Before I forget, I’ll tell you the story about losing a whole litter of pigs: You see, as I was sitting on the front porch, reared back in the swing, that hung from the rafters, and my feet propped up on the railing, this feller came by and had a boar hog for sell that he said was ready for breeding.
The reason he stopped is ‘cause I was finishing off shoats (a bigger pig but not yet a hog), that I sold in the Fall so the neighbors could put a slap of bacon and a couple of hams in the smoke house. It was a rare day that I wasn’t working somewhere on the farm, seeing how the south wind was still keeping the fences upright.
As he walked toward me hollering out: “Afternoon, didn’t think I’d catch you at home”. Responding back, I said: “How ya doing Jack, just being lazy on this warm spring day. Thought I’d set here a while and watch the traffic go by, while I rest a bit”.
“See that big boar in the back of the truck?” Said Jack as he lit a cigarette and still walking towards me.
I snapped back. “Yeah, I see that, what you going to do with him?”
Jack said that he was going to sell him if he could find someone that would have a use for a very big but ugly hog.
Thinking about the dilemma, I couldn’t come up with a solution. “Don’t know what ya’ll do Jack, but sure hope it works out for ya.” I said as he was turning to leave, head hung a little lower.
After he left, I got to thinking. Shoot, I wish that I had a sow to breed that boar too. Darn-it, guess that means that I lost a whole litter of pigs.
After that day I began to take my pig farming stewardship to another level. Did this part of my farming career for about three years. We ate good, but never did recover over that day with Jack. Chased a bunch of pigs though.
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I’m not sure what was happening to me in these early to mid- 1980 years. I’ve taken an honest look at myself hundreds and hundreds of times, but all that I could come up with is that the fear that I’d felt as a quadriplegic some thirty years earlier were somehow creeping back up on me.
At work we were required to work three rotating shifts, every seven days. We’d rotate from days to midnights and then to evenings. The midnight shift was more than my feeble body, or should I say mind, could handle, and was becoming more and more irritable. I was having a difficult time putting together how I was feeling, and what in the heck was going on, on the inside.
I was scared, and the fear led to thinking too much, which led to worrying about my health, which led to more fear, which led to working too much. Guess I was trying to run away, probably run away from myself. The polio and all the doctors and the way us victims were treated by the public was more than this thirty-something year old man, I mean kid, could take.
I began to have panic attacks, but at the time didn’t have any idea what they were, and what I was feeling was somewhat familiar to that stuff that I called spells back in the 5th grade, when everything was exaggerated. Remember when I was telling about my fingers and sounds were big and loud.
I went to the doctor often, sometimes twice a week, and once I went twice in the same day. For several months the doc and I both thought it was blood sugar. Then I would go a few months thinking it might be a brain tumor,” “maybe it’s something wrong with your heart, since you’re having palpitations”, he said. This in its self was enough to drive a feller crazy.
Anyway, I went through a gamut of diseases, and conditions, but nothing was bringing any relief to this knot-head of a guy, that just wanted some peace in his life. Not to mention what Nancy was going thru and what she must have been was thinking. I’m sure this was a very difficult time for her too.
One day was extremely hard, and painful, and I was so scared that I just lay in the floor and rock back and forth. Folks, I was in the fetal position, just laying there moaning and rocking back and forth for hours. So I called up the doctor and told him; “I was scared”. “What do you mean scared, are you saying that you think someone is chasing you?” The doc asked, trying to pin it down. Not really listening to him, I said “I guess so”. So he called in a prescription for me. It was Xanax.
I didn’t know what the stuff was, but when I’d taken one, within 45 minutes I was well. I wasn’t really well, but all the symptoms were gone. Now we had a handle on this thing, that I called “a spell” that was haunting me all these years.
The dose doc gave me was .250 and I was taking one of these broken in half, .125. Looking at that tiny pill, I realized that I was only a half of a tiny pill way from getting well, or at least better. So, me not really listen to the doctor on the phone, was what started me on the recovery that I sorely needed.
These four or five years were hard on my young family, because I was still having upwards of half-a-dozen panic attacks a day, but they were coming under control.
I think the fear inside was being projected to other areas of my life, instead of a disease, which really should be called a dis-ease, I began to work more.
Wanting to get off midnight shift, I got to thinking about starting a business that I could make enough to quit that hoot-owl work.
One night as I was reading a coin magazine, I saw an ad selling bags of five thousand unsearched wheat pennies for $99.00. Ten days after ordering them I received my forty pound bag of so-called unsearched wheat cents, I was thrilled.
I spent hours going through each and every coin in that bag, searching for that special penny that would be worth hundreds of dollars. I will admit that I was disappointed when I didn’t find anything of real value.
As a second thought, I put sixty or seventy Dixie cups on the table, each one with a different date and mint marks for the coins on each cup. Then meticulously going through each coin, I placed it in the correct cup. When, after many days, I’d completely gone through the entire bag, all the cups had coins in them. The least amount in any one cup was nine pennies. Wow, this meant that I had nine complete sets of pennies of a certain series.
Being a little excited about this new found hobby, I decided to order another bag. Thoroughly going through each coin again, with my paper cups on the table, I found that the least cup had twelve coins in it. This meant that I now owned twenty-one complete sets of Lincoln cents from 1939 to 1958, all fifty-seven coins.
The same magazine had ads selling a lesser set for $12.00, so I thought I’d run an ad to sell my better set in the same magazine for $12.00. It worked! I sold every set, and had a grand total of $252.00, and still had about eighty-five pounds of my original purchase. Right off the bat, I’m showing a fifty something dollar profit, from my almost $200.00 deal.
I did this several more times, until I found this company that sold me a roll of fifty, of each coin in the set, for a price of $240.00, which now meant I didn’t have to go through all that work, and my profit margin had just shot up exponentially. I sold these for $600.00.
I continued buying more and more sets and even added a second set from 1959 to date. As my business grew, I gave myself a name: “The Penny Farmer”.
For the next eight years, I continued to get bigger with a wider variety of coins, putting every dollar back into the business. I was advertising in five magazines that were distributed nationwide, and ended up becoming the biggest one cent dealer in America. This is not say the biggest coin dealer, just the biggest that dealt with pennies, ranging from 1787 to today’s’ date.
Once in a while the magazines would even write an article about me, with an interview. This was free advertisement, and helped a lot.
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As the coin business grew, once in a while, we’d all jump in the car and headed to Florida for a week or so of vacation. For relaxation, I’d run one of these metal detectors, and try to find mostly coins. Got pretty good at it but, never did find that ‘mother load., I sure did have a good time doing it, while the kids and their mom played on the beach and did their thing.
One day, still in Florida, we got a phone call at Nancy’s parent’s house that my Mom had had a heart attack and had died. I didn’t even know she was feeling bad, much less dying. She was my security blanket, and it WAS a sad day, and a very sad time in my life.
What’s so strange about this was for several years, while still having panic attacks, and an occasional major attack, I often had a feeling of someone in my family dying. Fear would overcome me, to the point that I felt paralyzed. But I got through this hump in the road, and actually in my thoughts and dreams about this death that was coming, it was much worse in my imagination than it was in real life.
I hope that makes sense, but in my mind, I first thought it was one of my children, and I’d always have an uncontrolled feeling of a much, much worst scenario. These were just feelings and imaginations that came over me, not a physic thing. It was simply a coincidence that the death happened.
Anyway, after all that confusion, this was another scary time in my thirty-six year old life.
So, with the success of this coin business, I could now start thinking about getting off those dreaded midnights. In 1988, I did.
Working three jobs; Y-12, farming, and now the coin business, and still having an occasional panic attack, was way harder on me than it was before. But I was slowly healing in my bout with anxiety.
You see, as I mentioned before, I still didn’t do very well in feeling my feelings. I sure hope that makes sense. At this time in my life, I had a wall built up, that I thought was protecting me from the pains and fears of life, so I couldn’t get hurt, or at least not feel the pain, or have to face the fear. I was rude, impolite, stand-offish, abrasive, un-thoughtful, inconsiderate, and a whole lot more of those dirty words.
I retired that year from Y12 at the age of 39, but still worked two jobs; the coin business and farmin’.
But I was a hard worker, for whatever that’s good for. I’d made a living somewhat for my family, but was not the family man that I was supposed to be, I was still just a BOY.
Imagine that, a 39 year old boy. I was being responsible, and successful in just about everything except in the things that mattered, and they really did matter, MY FAMILY that is.
God had blessed me with three beautiful, intelligent and wonderful children, whom I love from a deepness way down inside of me.
Our children were growing, doing well in school, very well rounded, and I was extremely proud of them. Andreas’ job was to take care of the chickens, Susie’s was to keep an eye on the pigs, and Matts’ was helping me with the cattle, we all did the garden, especially Nancy. Their grades were great, and the teachers’ all had something very complimentary to say about each one. As for me, life was not so great. It was like my feelings or inner thoughts were shut down. I could walk by people visiting in my house that I’d known for years and not even speak.
At this time and for several years prior to this, I was saying things to my wife that a person shouldn’t even say to a dog. Unabbreviated ugliness was mostly what Nancy had to hear. You know, this doesn’t even make sense, since I WAS proud of her, and I was still walking my walk with the Lord.
I know that sounds strange or maybe funny, I mean funny in a not so good way. I was shut down inside so much that I didn’t realize how much hurt and pain I was giving them, because of the walls that I’d built to protect myself so I couldn’t get hurt. In other words; if I didn’t feel pain, and criticism couldn’t hurt me. If words did no damage to me, because of the barriers I put up, then surely It wouldn’t hurt someone else if I said it them. I was wrong, but still it took a couple of years for me to see that for myself.
It was my mouth that was getting me into so much trouble, yes with my family, but mostly in my walk with Christ. So pondering on this mouth thing, and a revelation from God, (James III, The mouth is a deadly poison). I shut my lips to the ugliness in 1986.
No more name calling.
This, my friend, was a major break-through for me, I would say for Nancy too, but the pain I caused in her, echoed in her mind for many years. This was in 1986, and not a name or a slur came from me, but six years later the hurt was so deep in her, that one day I asked; “When was the last time I said those filthy things to you?” Her response was; I think it was last week”. When in-fact it was six years ago. That folks was a gob of torment that I’d inflicted on her that I can’t even begin to try and rationalize or explain. I had hurt her emotionally and hurt her BAD.
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I told this story, to remind myself and you, that this was the beginning of a long, long process of healing that would still take many years of hard work, and mountains of apologizing, and ridicule from my peers, before I was even slightly accepted as a changed person, on my way to being dis-ease free.
But the change was on its’ way, and there was no stopping me once I saw a difference that was beginning to take place in the inner man of my life. Not to mention that I was sleeping much better than I had in years. It might have gotten better for the next years, but our relationship never really got to that place you’d call good.
I was one of these guys that thought psychology was one of those ideas that were full of crap, and only a nut would go to a shrink. (Did I just say something pertinent about me being a nut?) But, right before our split-up Nancy saw things differently, and checked into a hospital to get some help. About three or four weeks later the councilors ask me to go to a family week-end at the hospital with her. Reluctantly, I accepted, and this too created an enormous amount of anxiety that consumed me from my hair to the soles of my feet. Folks, I was scared, wringing my hands scared, and besides that, I was going to get “found out”.
Come the next Friday, I took out towards Chattanooga, where she was getting help, to find this mob of family members that were to meet with their spouses. I thought this was strange because almost all the guests were men, or should I say boys just like me, and about my age.
You know this was not so bad, I began to see things about people in general, patterns and such that I never realized was the paths so many people had taken, so I sat up and took notice.
On Sunday afternoon, we were doing some of these psychological exercises, when it became my turn to participate in these activities. The counselor asked me to tell Nancy what I’d been wanting to say for these past years. Turning around to face her, I began to speak, but just as I did, Linda (the councelor) told me to turn back around and listen.
This frustrated me, but I did as I was told, after all I was here as a student and at this point wanted to learn. I thought Linda was attacking me, or at least she did get me all riled up. She spoke about how I was taking a pacifist attitude in my marriage, and should stand up and be a man about this opportunity and tell her what I really thought.
Once more I turned about to face Nancy and began to pretend like I was a man. Sequencing my eyes, pointing my face directly towards her, bent over with one shoulder directed towards her, I again began to speak. Linda repeating the same thing, asked or told me to turn around, sit and shut up.
At this point I was more than disturbed about what was taking place, but I did what I was told. This same routine happened once more, and as I was sitting back in my chair for the third time, Linda walked over to Nancy, and in a calm but firm voice, commenced to tell her, on my behalf, everything that I was going to say, and I mean Linda said verbatim everything right down to the letter what was to come from MY mouth. But she did it in an assertive voice that had a demeanor to it that I wouldn’t have had.
WOW! This really did happen, I was thinking, she had every jot and tittle of what was going on in that noggin of mine, and said it in a way, that at least to me, let her have it. Immediately, I felt some satisfaction, and relief, and peace come over me. “I was understood”. Maybe for first time in my life I said something and was understood to the tee. It wasn’t me that said it, but it felt like it was. This showed me that psychology worked and I wanted to pursue it further.
The next several months after Nancy came back home, it got better between us, but I think I was on edge, just waiting for the next fight or episode to happen again, so I never did relaxed. Three months later we divorced.
Andrea was in college, and on her on, Susie went with her mom, and Matthew stayed with me, but the split-up was final. Nancy moved to the next town over and I bought her share of the house, and stayed where I was.
I think I was still having so many issues about my self but was way to busy looking at hers to realize it.
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As I said, Matt stayed with me and we really did have a good time together. He played baseball and I coached a little, we both were learning.
I learned to cook and had fun in doing it because Matt liked my cooking, and that encouraged me to learn to do it better.
Earlier in Matt’s life, whether working on the farm or anything else for that matter, seems that I would spend way too much time trying to make Matt, or the girls too, live this perfect life, so I did a lot of correcting, which is a polite way of saying gripping. And it did put them on edge.
Just as my life was making a change for the better, Matt was getting a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator, and after pouring a glass dropped the carton and it exploded. Hey! Milk went everywhere. Matt looked up expecting the same belly-aching crap that usually flowed from my hardened heart and mouth, but this time I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say a word to him.
Anybody can make mistakes, the milk didn’t matter but Matt did, so I kept my trap shut. As he was backing up while wiping up the mess, the glass he’d poured was still on the counter and his hinded-end was heading straight towards it. Thinking to myself, if this is a way to show my son that I loved him in spite of the mess, what a wonderful opportunity if he were to knock the glass over and spill it too.
Probably sounds like a silly story, but this was the beginning of the realization of the imperfection and selfishness that had been embedded in my life. I think this incident helped me to see how wonderful of a son I had.
On his fourteenth birthday, I gave Matt his freedom to choose and make his own decisions for the rest of his life. I let him decide his curfew and his rules and live with the consequences. Now I didn’t ignore him I just did what you would call reality teaching but I was always there just in case he needed me. He was a good kid and I appreciated him very much, even learned several good things from that son of mine. He made good choice, I am a very lucky man. Matt and I built a good relationship living those years together, and will always cherish that time we spent together.