From:   Jan, [email protected] Hello folks, This is one of those days when my mind wanted to weave a story.  Bear with me as I explain just why. One of the beautiful things about our ancestry is the patchwork of it, and it is that very patchwork of different walks of life, different ideas, different ways that has fascinated me.  I have often thought of it, one family coverlet, and all the pieces of different cloth that make it up.  Within my family are doctors and truck drivers, carpenters and soldiers, lawyers and teachers, homemakers and factory workers, company executives and craftsmen, ministers and nurses, bookkeepers and firemen, janitors and construction workers.  There are the wealthy and those who live very simply.  The list goes on.  Folks from every walk of life, folks who made all manner of decisions about the path they wanted to walk down, yet call themselves "a family".  And in this country, it was all possible.   Often I have wondered at the descendants of the same common ancestors, descendants of the same roof overhead, and wondered how it was that a common tree tended to branch out so many different directions leading to so many different ways of conducting a life.  And in my thinking, imagination took hold, and I thought how it might be that branching off could have begun.  Excuse me now, I am going to step into the shoes for a moment of a boy who could have been in one of those families.  He could have had brothers and sisters who chose a far different life than he, not any better, not any worse, perhaps.  Just different. Yet the fabric he was cut from was stitched side by side that of a different texture and pattern, and made up a part of the same family coverlet. Something Like Poetry (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series) Papa always said wasn't but two things for certain in this life: you gonna pay taxes and you gonna die.  From my point of view he might have added two more: Mama gonna have a new baby this year and you gonna work from sunup to sundown six days a week and have little for your efforts.  The seventh day you going to be so dagblasted wore out you can't hardly stay awake through the sermon. I don't rightly know what it was give me the idea, but it came to me at an early age that all I had known in all of my young life was a new youngin every year to scoot over and make room for, and rising at the break of day to work in the fields, falling into bed too bone weary to even eat supper at night come dark.  Seemed that is all I saw of Papa's life too.  And it come to me if that was what life was all about, I was not real sure I wanted any part of it. Fact is what I hungered for was what I could not have, and it sung in my heart like the beat of a fervent poem.  Tickled me pink when the times when farm work was slow and I could go down to the school house with the younger ones.  Got so Mr. Henry, the schoolmaster, took an interest in me.  Loaned me some of his books.  He knew what I most wanted was books about doctoring and he got ole Doc Watson who had studied some back east to loan me his books too.  Papa did not like to see me reading them.  He couldn't rightly make out how they were gonna do me any good, and he said I far better off not to get ideas in my head about things that could not be.  Papa said I didn't need to know to read any better than enough to know I was not getting cheated, didn't need to write much more than to make my name, and didn't need any more figures than it took to figure what I would get for my efforts and what I owed the general store.  He said what schooling I had would do that much if I stayed beside him and learned the common sense of it.  I would be a farmer, he said, same as him and his daddy before him and before that even.  And I best be getting used to the work of it and learning what I could.  No time for foolishness.  Papa didn't see the use in school.   I managed to slip off out to the barn some nights with a candle Mama eased me and do my reading then.  Sometimes when Papa was off to town or over to the neighbors, she would rush in and help me with my chores, and so I got an hour or so to myself.  I don't know that Mama understood, but Mama knew I had a hunger and she knew I was different from Papa. If Papa ever wanted to be anything but a farmer I don't know what it was.  Seems like something about it was right for him, for I am not sure I ever saw him truly unhappy about it.  In fact, weary as he was, he seemed right satisfied.  Seems like sometimes I could see him feeling something more when he picked up the soil in his bare hands, or he looked up at the sky.  Seems like sometimes there was something soft in his eyes, and sometimes something like fire.  Seems like he felt something I could not see, and I could not feel.  Seems like, but then Papa never really let you know what he might be thinking.  I can't imagine Papa with a dream, but maybe he had one anyhow.  Maybe he had one, same as me, just different. The closest thing I ever heard to poetry come out of Papa's mouth was one morning just as the sun rose when he looked out over his fields, at the morning light tingeing the tops of his crops with a hint of gold, the mist on the hills behind them.  He saw it and he listened.  Then he said the reason the birds were singing was cause they had seen all that he had worked for, and it was good. Come the spring of my sixteenth year, I figured to do something about it.  I broached it to Mama first off.  I think that was the first time I ever realized Mama was getting old.  She was working her bread dough, and she put her hand up to brush a wisp of hair out of her face.  Some of the flour caught in her brown hair and it was then I noticed it was not just the bit of flour making white of it.  She sighed when she heard what it was I had to say, and she turned after a while to look at me straight on.  The sun slanted in the window, lighting up one side of her face and leaving the rest in shadow, and it was then I saw that the shadows were not smooth, but played soft little wavering whispers on the planes of her face. "I held my breath till you was ten," she said, "When a youngin reaches ten, likely he will live.  Then I held my breath till this day.  And it has come." I left the next morning at daybreak with a bit of ham and johnny cake wrapped up in a leather pouch.  I headed for the place Doc Watson had told me to go.  There was a loft there waiting for me, and chores to do for my board, and a school where I could learn what I wanted to know.  In a few years he said, I could come back to him if I wanted, as he was feeling winter in the summer now deep in his bones and there would be a place.  I would not work no easier than Papa, he said, just different.  If that was what I wanted.  It was.   I left behind me a carving of a bird for Papa.  I carved its mouth open, like it was singing.  I hoped he would remember the morning he spoke something like poetry, and understand. Copyright ©2001janPhilpot ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (Note: Afternoon Rocking messages are meant to be passed on, meant to be shared...simply share as written without alterations...and in entirety. 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