okieinexile
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A quality of time
By Bobby Neal Winters
When a loved-one dies and you are there time takes on a different quality. An eternity passes between each click of the second hand. Actions that used to be done as second nature now require a focus and concentration that you are no longer capable.
Jim Pittman, my father-in-law passed away during the afternoon on October 11, 2007. He’d eaten his favorite lunch and laid down for a nap with a book. When his wife went in to wake him, his finger was still marking the page, but his body was cold.
Time became different.
I first met Jim over Christmas break in 1984. At the time he was semi-retired. Indeed, his pickup sported the bumper sticker “Semi-Retired, Semi-Impossible.” He’d retired from running an orchard for Gerber’s Baby Food and had bought twelve acres of sandy land near the Spiro mound site just a mile south of the Arkansas River.
His plan was to have a Christmas tree farm and to do a little experimentation with sustainable agriculture. He was interested in how a family could feed itself on a small holding of land. I spent some of the first visit along with Jean, then my girlfriend, planting Christmas trees out on the acreage.
Jim had suffered a heart attack shortly after his semi-retirement—and had a couple more after that—but it never stopped him longer than his time to recover. He was always planning, and he always had a project in the offing. It is instructive that many of his projects never got beyond the planning stage, but, what he did do, he did well.
Jim had a puckish sense of humor. He loved practical jokes, and April Fool’s Day was always a time of nervousness for the rest of the family. What has Jim got up his sleeve? Although, I must say, the family gave as good as it got. One year my computer skills were drawn upon to create an official-looking fake document implicating him in a money laundering scheme with former business partners in Central America. He was completely taken in, reading the letter and muttering curses about former colleagues, until he saw the name of the typist: April Fool.
Jim was also interested in politics. I quickly learned not to praise Harry Truman, who’d fired Jim’s favorite general, or Lyndon Johnson, who Jim thought should be dug-up from his grave and hanged. In his later years, Jim had a similar lack of affection for George W. Bush, which we need not go into here.
Jim loved children and animals and played with one as readily as the other, depending upon availability. He and his wife Janet moved to Pittsburg to live near my wife and our family upon the birth of their second granddaughter, Sarah.
Having been in the Korean War and lived in Japan for a time, Jim had developed a taste for foreign travel which was reinforced as a buyer for Gerber’s Baby Food in South America. While he wasn’t able to indulge this in retirement, he did scratch his itchy feet by camping on extended road trips in such locations as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan during the summer and south Texas during the winter. Sometimes, for shorter outings, he would go ahead and scout out a camping location for the rest of us, and we would go and join him for a weekend camp. These trips were invariably restful and enjoyable.
These last few years, Jim’s health was more of a struggle, but he remained the man he was.
A couple of years ago he bought the vacant rent house next door to Jean’s and my home and began converting it to an experiment station for small-scale sustainable agriculture. He bartered some hunting vests he found there for 50-gallon plastic barrels which had been used to hold vegetable oil and used the barrels to catch rain-water to use for irrigation.
He built a lean-to greenhouse on the southern exposure of the house to grow spinach during the winter.
This past summer, while Jean’s and my house has been being renovated, he allowed our dogs, Buttercup and Obadiah, the run of his back yard and spoiled them in doing so.
The Sunday before he died, we celebrated Lydia, the youngest grandchild’s birthday. He and Janet brought a big cardboard box which was filled with smaller, handsomely wrapped gifts.
Lydia chose the smallest first, desiring to work her way up. She struggled with tap for several minute before revealing a pack of gum from which all the sticks had been removed. Other presents were a well-wrapped rock and a lump of coal. There was also, much to the dread of everyone else in the family, a practical joke kit.
When Jean and I were called over to Jim and Janet’s house, the paramedics had already left. I went into the room and saw him lying there with the maps on every wall and the book on the bed in front of him. The sparkle that had always shone from his eyes was gone.
With cooler weather coming on, we can imagine he has headed south to Texas. Or maybe he’s gone on to a new camping spot he’s heard about to get the campsite set up for the rest of us. Someone else said something like that.
But now the ticks of the second hand resound like a drum and an eternity passes between each one.
(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University. He pastors the Opolis Methodist Chruch.)
By Bobby Neal Winters
When a loved-one dies and you are there time takes on a different quality. An eternity passes between each click of the second hand. Actions that used to be done as second nature now require a focus and concentration that you are no longer capable.
Jim Pittman, my father-in-law passed away during the afternoon on October 11, 2007. He’d eaten his favorite lunch and laid down for a nap with a book. When his wife went in to wake him, his finger was still marking the page, but his body was cold.
Time became different.
I first met Jim over Christmas break in 1984. At the time he was semi-retired. Indeed, his pickup sported the bumper sticker “Semi-Retired, Semi-Impossible.” He’d retired from running an orchard for Gerber’s Baby Food and had bought twelve acres of sandy land near the Spiro mound site just a mile south of the Arkansas River.
His plan was to have a Christmas tree farm and to do a little experimentation with sustainable agriculture. He was interested in how a family could feed itself on a small holding of land. I spent some of the first visit along with Jean, then my girlfriend, planting Christmas trees out on the acreage.
Jim had suffered a heart attack shortly after his semi-retirement—and had a couple more after that—but it never stopped him longer than his time to recover. He was always planning, and he always had a project in the offing. It is instructive that many of his projects never got beyond the planning stage, but, what he did do, he did well.
Jim had a puckish sense of humor. He loved practical jokes, and April Fool’s Day was always a time of nervousness for the rest of the family. What has Jim got up his sleeve? Although, I must say, the family gave as good as it got. One year my computer skills were drawn upon to create an official-looking fake document implicating him in a money laundering scheme with former business partners in Central America. He was completely taken in, reading the letter and muttering curses about former colleagues, until he saw the name of the typist: April Fool.
Jim was also interested in politics. I quickly learned not to praise Harry Truman, who’d fired Jim’s favorite general, or Lyndon Johnson, who Jim thought should be dug-up from his grave and hanged. In his later years, Jim had a similar lack of affection for George W. Bush, which we need not go into here.
Jim loved children and animals and played with one as readily as the other, depending upon availability. He and his wife Janet moved to Pittsburg to live near my wife and our family upon the birth of their second granddaughter, Sarah.
Having been in the Korean War and lived in Japan for a time, Jim had developed a taste for foreign travel which was reinforced as a buyer for Gerber’s Baby Food in South America. While he wasn’t able to indulge this in retirement, he did scratch his itchy feet by camping on extended road trips in such locations as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan during the summer and south Texas during the winter. Sometimes, for shorter outings, he would go ahead and scout out a camping location for the rest of us, and we would go and join him for a weekend camp. These trips were invariably restful and enjoyable.
These last few years, Jim’s health was more of a struggle, but he remained the man he was.
A couple of years ago he bought the vacant rent house next door to Jean’s and my home and began converting it to an experiment station for small-scale sustainable agriculture. He bartered some hunting vests he found there for 50-gallon plastic barrels which had been used to hold vegetable oil and used the barrels to catch rain-water to use for irrigation.
He built a lean-to greenhouse on the southern exposure of the house to grow spinach during the winter.
This past summer, while Jean’s and my house has been being renovated, he allowed our dogs, Buttercup and Obadiah, the run of his back yard and spoiled them in doing so.
The Sunday before he died, we celebrated Lydia, the youngest grandchild’s birthday. He and Janet brought a big cardboard box which was filled with smaller, handsomely wrapped gifts.
Lydia chose the smallest first, desiring to work her way up. She struggled with tap for several minute before revealing a pack of gum from which all the sticks had been removed. Other presents were a well-wrapped rock and a lump of coal. There was also, much to the dread of everyone else in the family, a practical joke kit.
When Jean and I were called over to Jim and Janet’s house, the paramedics had already left. I went into the room and saw him lying there with the maps on every wall and the book on the bed in front of him. The sparkle that had always shone from his eyes was gone.
With cooler weather coming on, we can imagine he has headed south to Texas. Or maybe he’s gone on to a new camping spot he’s heard about to get the campsite set up for the rest of us. Someone else said something like that.
But now the ticks of the second hand resound like a drum and an eternity passes between each one.
(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University. He pastors the Opolis Methodist Chruch.)
or two) for your loss. I picture your father-in-law and my dad together with at least a couple of fishing rods, two complete tackle boxes and several worms/minnows, chatting about the ones that got away here (but not where they are now) and about their children and grandchildren.
