Fear of the Dark

The child will fear the dark
And all the fears the dark contains.
The monsters the imagination makes,
The things unknown and unimaginable.
Such terror is real
In the presence of unreal things.

The dark holds terrors, too,
For those no longer young.
Their fears are fears of real things, things known,
Things half-forgotten and buried half-alive:
The foolish choice, the cutting word,
The act of passion or wrath.
Such terror is real
In the remembrance of real things.

Suggestions for Receiving Criticism

1. Realize that criticism is necessary for our growth as human beings and as Christians. Joe Bayley used to say, "Criticism is the manure in which the Lord's servants grow best." The Book of Proverbs is full of encouragements for us to receive criticism.

2. If the criticism is valid, then it is good for us.

3. If the criticism is invalid, it cannot harm us. Indeed, it may help us in a variety of ways. For example, Some of us are temperamentally, "thinned-skinned." This is not, in itself, a bad thing. Such people are, frequently (not always), more sensitive to others. But, to remain thinned-skinned is a character flaw. Receiving criticism, even when it is invalid, can help toughen us up.

4. Criticism helps us to see things more three-dimensionally. It helps us to get perspective. "He he trusts his own heart is a fool." "There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death."

5. Criticism received can keep us from mistakes and disaster. There is a story told about the Indian women who were plundering the dead after Custer's defeat on the Little Big Horn. While Custer's body was not mutilated as the other fallen soldiers on the field, an old woman was seen pushing a sewing awl into the dead General's ears. When asked what she was doing, she replied, "Maybe he will listen better in the next life."

6. Develop a spirit that not only receives criticism when it comes, but invites and welcomes it as necessary for a better life.

7. Develop a spirit of self-criticism and a circle of friends who will lovingly criticize you when necessary. But, make sure these friends understand your perspective and personality. Flannery O'Conner said, "I am willing to receive criticism, but only from those who understand what I am trying to do." This is wise.

8. Do not let your own self-criticism and that of others degenerate into an unhealthy self-hatred.

9. Be slow to criticize others, but faithful to do so when it is needful and helpful.

10. Be open to the criticism of God by his Word and Spirit. "Whom the Lord loves, he chastens..." "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten..."

11. Do what you know to be right with boldness and with little regard for the criticism your actions may generate.

"Daddy"

My father, James Patrick Smith, died ten years ago this past Thanksgiving week. I think about him every day and, perhaps because of this anniversary, I have been thinking about him more than usual. He was an intriguing, unique, and polychromatic personality, utterly unforgettable. And this is all the more interesting, given that he acted out his three-score-and ten-years on a small and obscure stage. I have written about him before in fragments, often tragic and sad, so I thought it might be good to give a larger, less tragic and more balanced picture of him.

In the sermon I preached for my daddy's funeral, I said, "Loving Daddy was never a problem to me, but I have spent my whole life trying to understand him." The quest for understanding goes on, though not so furiously as before, even now. Love seeks understanding, especially of those we love profoundly and totally.

That love is rooted in his undeniable love for me. In the young years that I did live with him, we were almost always together. If he could have me with him, I was there. He loved me- profoundly and totally. One can love profoundly and totally without loving perfectly- or let us hope so.

As I have said, my memories of my life with him are memories of being much with him. How many country roads we traveled together. How many country grocery stores we stopped at for cheese, crackers, and cans of Vienna sausages, (cans that had to be opened with a key soldered to their tops) and bottles of grape or strawberry pop. This was lunch. The roads led to "camp sites" of American Indians in plowed fields, or creek banks, or washed-out gullies. There he would patiently scour the ground flicking bits of flint with the walking stick he carried (the stick had been brought back from France by his gas-crippled uncle Pat after the Great War), occasionally stooping to pick up a shard, rubbing away the dirt with his fingers. He was, of course, looking for arrowheads, "projectiles," he sometimes called them. I found the whole thing a bore after a while. But he was there, I was there, we were there together. Arrowheads, "points," "projectiles," "relics"- these were his passion then. I know now that the cotton-headed boy was his greater, even his greatest, passion.

He was given to passion, my Daddy. I wonder if he ever did anything in his life without passion, except to die, and that because the tumor eating away at his brain had robbed him of his ability to do everything he loved to do. When he faced a life without work, without puttering, without thinking hard about things, he simply gave up. Not, that it mattered all that much; the tumor was more powerful than any of us, even than the doctors and the therapies.

Because of this inexhaustible passion for life, Daddy lived big, thought big, dreamed big. He gave of himself in a big way. And, as he would be the first to admit, his mistakes and bad choices were also big. That is the problem with passion. Unless it is wedded to prudence, it can lead to a big mess. And, in Daddy's case, it frequently did.

But, I want to reflect on the bigness of his soul that compelled so many people to love him. Because so many people did. The funeral home in Winnsboro, Texas was full that day, full to the point of standing-room-only. People had come from a two-hundred mile radius to be there and to honor the man in the casket dressed in a new pair of bib-overalls.

Part of the attraction was purely his physical good looks. Over six-feet, tanned, muscular, straight as an arrow, he was a presence. Strong features with a glorious smile, flashing teeth, and sparkling eyes. And a loud, friendly voice. I write in fragments-the charm, the winsomeness, the magnetism can only be caught in fragments.

And he never met a stranger, as the saying goes. He was always greeting people, introducing himself, engaging others in conversation, sometimes despite themselves. I took him to Washington once (Washington was Mecca to him, the Smithsonian the Black Stone), and as we waited in line at the Archives to see the founding documents of the nation, Daddy, in ball-cap, tee-shirt, and suspenders, engaged an, at first, dubious well-dressed couple in a conversation that ended in their telling him all about themselves. He was ebullient, effervescent, talking, shouting, laughing, teasing, and sometimes, darkly threatening. He was all over you and after you left him the fragrance of him remained. I have no doubt that the couple from the Archives still, remember, sometimes, that man from Texas.

He had a way of communicating love for people. He wouldn't have put it that way; it would have offended his sense of propriety. He would say, he "liked" people. Countless people he would describe in his highest praise, "He's a good old boy," or "a good'un," or, "a dandy feller," "She's a fine lady." And if you were his friend, as a handful of people inside and outside his family were, he would die for you-or kill for you.

He ended his formal schooling in the tenth grade to go and work in the oil fields of south Texas. But, possessed of a quick intelligence and a omnivorous curiosity, he made himself an amateur expert in the history of the American West and of Indian ways in his native Oklahoma and Texas. His love for reading was insatiable and his interest in things profound. I learned to read at his side on those country trips as he stopped to read the ubiquitous Texas Historical Markers that dotted Young and Jack Counties. One of my earliest memories is a visit to old Fort Belknap in Young County, where he read and explained the various "relics" to me-at age five. On our Washington trip, I had to pry him away from all the explanatory markers, saying, "If you do that, we'll be here for years." "Well, son, you've got to read if you ever want to know anythang," was his half-humorous reply. He taught me before I learned it again and again in the presence of the formally educated, that formal education does not make an educated person. "The educated fool was a fool before he was educated," he would sometimes say, quoting his own daddy.

He was the best early story teller I knew and one of the best that I have ever known. This was in part, because he was a natural collector of people and their tales. They relaxed with him and shared their lives. This had been true of him even when he was a boy. When his buddies would be playing ball or fishing, he would often choose to ride the old mare over to a family home-place, to eat dinner, and play cards or dominoes with the "old people," and hear and collect their stories. He also loved and collected their "turns of phrase," like the rest of our family. These enriched and colored his speech, and continue to do the same with mine. When we came together in my adult life, it was a time of rehearsing the old stories, made richer and sweeter by their re-telling. They are retold now by my own children.

Part of his genius as a story-teller was his encyclopedic, infallible memory. We would sit and revisit the old people and places and one of us would say, "What was that feller's name?" or "Where did they come from?" and after a moment, one of us would remember. Usually it was Daddy. He remembered where he found or traded for each of the nearly one thousand arrowheads in his collection. He could remember a tree in a vast woods that he had shot a squirrel from sixty years before, and could take you there. To be in the presence of this memory of place was to be on the edges of the visual memory of the plains-mountain men and scouts, red and white, that memorized the vast American West a hundred years before his birth.

Those who remember him remember him as the happy, funny man. He was always grinning, always laughing, always teasing. His stories were replete with humor. This was due in part to his penchant for "collecting" odd characters, discerning the traits that made them odd, and then rehearsing these things to others with a measure of exaggeration for comic effect. Wherever he was the place would ring with his laughter.

It may come as a surprise to some, therefore, to know that he was a deeply wounded, conflicted man. He carried within himself this large hurt, this colossal pain in all the years I knew him. And in some ways he will always be to me, "the Hurt Man." I want to try to talk about that hurt, that pain.

To be continued...

The Landscape of the Soul

"You will want to come home,"
My Daddy said, just before he died.
"You will want to come back
to where you were raised."

Like other things that fathers say
I dismissed it, outright.
I pushed it away.
But, it stayed somewhere
In my head.
He was right.
I was wrong.
The way that fathers and sons
Are.

The landscape of childhood
Is the landscape of the soul.
Something like this
I had read in an old book.

And now,
I long for open country
For big skies
Where the sun
Can be seen to rise
And to set
On a horizon clearly defined.

I long for a country of extremes-
A western country where
The drawl is soft.
I crave the booted walk of men
That carries a swagger
Of self confidence
Rarely seen in claustrophobic minds
Of city dwellers
And people of mountains and hollers.
Where a smile of welcome
Not a scowl of suspicion
Meets the visitor, the stranger.
Where the wind makes a sea
Of the tall prairie grasses.
Where the hint of Indian drums
And the memory of buffalo herds
Are in the sod and brushy timber.
Where the rattlesnake is still feared
And watched for at every country gate.
Where the rivers have a muddy cast
And dark, northwest clouds adumbrate
The wrath of God.

The landscape of childhood
Is the landscape of the soul.
My daddy knew this intuitively,
And never read it in a book.
I read it in a book
And learned from life
To trust my intuitions.

Ironies

When my beautiful, gracious mother died at age twenty-four of cancer, my father was swept into a vortex of pain, anger, and confusion. He lived there for the best part of the next twenty years.

After traveling with his infant son of thirteen months across the country for a while, he finally placed the child in the care of his own parents on a farm just outside Thackerville, Oklahoma. It was in that large, bustling household that I lived for the next four years. It was an environment of love and discipline and I thrived there.

Daddy worked the oil fields, fished the Red River, and, in his own words, "caroused." I have no idea where he lived at the time. There was a succession of girlfriends and working-fishing-carousing buddies. I remember him most in those years by his absences, though a child's mind has a way of distorting and exaggerating the reality of things. When he did come to the Big House, it was always with presents and exciting curiosities. I remember him coming once with a trunk load of writhing, flopping catfish, and I used to love to play with his oil field worker's hard hat. And he always brought his ebullient self, full of talk and laughter and stories.

When he left, I cried, but he always promised to see me again. "I'll see you again next Saturday."

I remember one such Saturday. I must have been three or so at the time. It was a warm day, so early in the morning I scooted my little red rocking chair out on the front porch that extended across the full length of the old house so I could sit and watch the long road for a first glimpse of his black Ford. And there I sat for the best part of the day. When evening fell, my heart began to fall with it. All day I had watched and no Daddy. After supper, I returned to my sentry post until dark, when my "Big Mamma," my grandmother, came and gently said, "He's probably not coming today, honey. Come on in." I do not remember crying or saying anything. I do remember the sense of loss and disappointment that filled my young mind. It would not be the only time that such a thing happened.

Fast forward forty years. I was living in West Virginia and literally traveling the world. My trips to see my Daddy, then living in East Texas, were infrequent, too infrequent.

On April 9th, 1998, Daddy turned seventy. I was, on that day, three hundred-odd miles north of him in Tulsa, Oklahoma, taking part in the ordination service of one of my pupils. It was an engagement that I could not excuse myself from. I had told my Daddy about it all and he was sadly resigned to the thing. I was conflicted and guilty about missing his seventieth birthday, but my sense of duty won out.

Late in the day, after the ceremony and services were over, I phoned him to wish him happy birthday and to send him my love. How was your day? How are you feeling? Who did you hear from? Were any of the family members there?

He was fine. It had been a day much like any other. No one had showed up. He had received phone calls from his brothers and sisters and some of the other children. He and his wife had eaten a dinner of catfish at home, alone. And then,

"I watched the road all day long, thinking you might come," he said.

On the Haystack by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory, or "IT"

When I was a kid, I reckon that we had the same kind of depression and such that I hear so much about these days. People got the blues and some people was jist plain bluesy all the time. Like everthang else in a small community, these thangs was noticed and occasionally commented on, but, for the most part, people jist kept going. They had to if they was going to survive, especially during the Depression. People didn't talk about such thangs when it came to themselves. I expect that some of the women would talk to old Doc Grey, but I doubt if any of the men I knew did. I never knew a man that would go to a preacher about such thangs, though he might if it was a spiritual question. Ever once in a while, the old men would set on the porch or a river bank fishin and maybe they would mention being down or discouraged. When I was a kid, I would hear this once in a while. It always took place in the dark and they always thought that being a kid I wouldn't be interested or understand what they was talking about. Truth is, I was always listening and interested, even when I didn't understand. I can remember their chicken-billed, hand rolled cigarettes aglowing in the dark when they'd talk. I expect they eased one another in this way more'n they knew. Kindly like the "therapy" they are always talking about today. And they wasn't any drugs, except the kind that comes out of a whiskey bottle or a Prince Albert can. Sure enough, some people turned to whiskey in such times, and some of 'em, turning, never turned back. I always figured that real troubles are not drowned in that way because real ones can swim.

I expect that some wives and children and not a few horses and mules suffered more from male depression than the male himself. And a few inanimate thangs have been beaten purty bad because they was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Female depression was probably more common and more tolerated because it could be chalked up to "female trouble," and I know that some women were as addicted to patent medicines as some men were to whiskey.

We had occasional suicides, men and women. People jist wore out and there are stories of rat poison and straight razors. It didn't happen very often, but that meant that it made a big impression when it did happen.

I reckon that people had other ways of coping, hard work being the main one. My old daddy used to say if a man got up early enough and worked hard enough, he didn't have any spunk left by bedtime to fret much. But, speaking of daddy, I have known him a time or two to go out south of the barn where there was a big sandy place and fall down and wallow around for a while, jist groaning to beat the band. The first time I snuck out and witnessed this, it scared me near to death and I thought he was having a fit. When I run and told Mama, he jist said, "Don't mention this, and try not to worry. It's jist your daddy dealing with his demons," which didn't help a bit because she chucked the devil into the thang. She also said, "And don't go sneaking around watching folk's business. It won't make you happy."

I remember one situation worth mentioning, now that I'm talking about this thang and that has to do with Old Man Killigrew and the haystacks.

Old man Killigrew was of the old school and didn't take no stock in modern thangs. Refused electric lights even after the rural electric come. Wouldn't own a car, but went to Thackerville in a wagon or on mule back when he needed anything, which wadn't often. Plowed and cultivated with mules and a goose-neck hoe. You git the picture. Now, long after most everybody else got hay balers, Old Man Killgrew still ricked or stacked his hay the old timey way. We kids used to jist love to visit the Killgrews because we got to play in the hay ricks, making caves and tunnels and slides down the side.

Well, ever now and again, the Old Man would get in a state and the old lady and the kids would say, "It's about time for Daddy to go up on the haystack."

And, sure enough, he'd git him an old bucket for his thunder jug and a blanket and a ladder and would climb up on one of them hayricks and jist stay for two or three days and nights. Never took any liquor with him or reading material, jist that bucket and blanket. And he'd sit and sit until he sat it out.

The old lady was amazingly tender about the thang. She'd take him his breakfast and dinner and supper up to him three times a day. She'd take him a jug of water and empty his bucket and bring it back. The memory of that old lady makes me kindly tender, jist thanking about it.

After the second or third day, Missus Killigrew would tell the children, "Daddy's about ready to come down from the haystack," and sure'nough, he'd come down, wash out the bucket, put the ladder back in the barn, fold the blanket and put it up, and go back to work, right as rain. Had himself a little retreat from ever'thang and was fine as frog's hair for a long spell.

Human beings are copers. They find a way to cope and survive- if they survive. It's one of the thangs I have watched throughout my life, and one of thangs I have enjoyed watching and studying.

Jimmy Decker, Part III, by E.D. "Shinbone" Smith, Bomar, Oklahoma, formerly "Indian Territory" or I.T.

Well now, the next day Sheriff Clyde McGill paid visits to Jimmy and Tommy Tink. Tink by this time was sober, if hung over, and admitted to most of what he was accused of, the end result of which was that he agreed in court to pay for Jimmy's dental work instead of going to jail. Jimmy got the money, alright, but no dentist ever saw any of it.

The preacher had another "come to Jesus" talk with Jimmy and the end result of that was that Jimmy jist up and quit coming to church altogether, along with them kids. I have to admit that by then we weren't too cut up about not having Jimmy around, but them kids...them kids was something else. I'd see them once in a while down at Daughtery's grocery store in Thackerville, and would buy them candy or pop. They was always appreciative of anything you did for them. But they jist sort of disappeared little by little from our lives.

A few months later, and this didn't surprise anybody much, Jimmy was out late in that old truck of his and hit another feller east of town. Both of 'em was drunk and neither one was much hurt, but the end result of that was that Jimmy lost his license to drive, which put a crunch on him and the kids. They moved to Marietta where he worked at the cookie factory and bought an old bicycle to get around on.

That oldest girl, Hannah, got a baby with old J.D. and moved in that new trailer house down at White Rose. Pretty soon, she had another baby and then another. J.D. never had to work another day in his life, like he said, and along with the welfare and whatever they kept getting from old man Killigrew, they managed to get by. The trailer was pretty much of a mess after a couple of years and the dog population there continued to grow.

Little Jimmy got into trouble with drugs and robbery down between Gainesville and Denton, and after two or three warnings went off to "pick cotton for Uncle Bud" down at Gatesville, Texas, courtesy of the Texas taxpayers. He got out, got into more trouble, and finally ended up in the Huntsville penitentiary for stabbing somebody to death down around Mexia.

I am proud to tell you that that youngest girl, Elizabeth, turned out good. She made good grades, graduated valedictorian of her class and went off to the University in Norman on a scholarship. She married well and became a schoolteacher. We hear about her ever' once in a while, though she has never come back home, so far as anybody knows.

Jimmy continued to hang around with a rough crowd. He took up with several women in Marietta, but never for long. He let his hair grow long and got to looking kind of rusty. From time to time I'd see him peddling that bicycle down the main street in Marietta and would beep my horn or holler at him. Each time he would see me, recognize me for sure, but would never acknowledge me. I finally quit trying to get his attention when I would see him.

Well, after a year or two, he got his license back and commenced his ramblings to various joints on the River and elsewhere. He was in a beer joint up on Hickory Creek south of Ardmore around Christmas last year and got into an altercation with with an old man over a shuffleboard game. Evidently, Jimmy accused the old man of cheating and when he wouldn't admit to this, Jimmy hit him. Well, this was a tough old bird and Jimmy didn't have the sense to know who he was dealing with. The old booger gathered himself together and when Jimmy turned away, he reached around with a Case pocket knife and severed the carotid artery on the right side of Jimmy's throat. He bled to death on the nasty floor of that dive.

I went to the funeral and there wadn't nobody there but Hannah and J.D. and their babies, and Wanda (who cried uncontrollably; Hannah never shed a tear, that I could see), and one or two of Jimmy's drinking buddies. There was a preacher there I didn't know who assured ever'body that Jimmy was finally in a better place. The whole thing and all the memories it brought back depressed me for the best part of a week.

I thank alot about it all. I thank about them kids. I thank about Jimmy quoting the book of Romans with a glow on his face. I thank about that cold night before Christmas with that big barn of a moon.

And I thank about "once in grace, always in grace" a lot, too, especially when I thank about Jimmy.

When I thank about that, I don't know what to thank.