Licktubs and Waitin' Sense

My dad has two trucks, a brown one mainly for farm use and one that is white for running errands in town.  The other day he decided to purchase a licktub for his cattle.  These provide extra protein, salt and other nutrients that are essential for healthy animals. 

So, he drove his white truck to one of the local feed retailers and bought one.  The trouble is, it has been raining quite a bit so far in 2021 and his pasture is very muddy.  The white truck is just a standard rear-wheel-drive truck whereas the brown truck is four-wheel-drive, much easier to maneuver on the soggy terrain.  He did not want to risk getting stuck delivering the licktub to his modest herd, so he decided to transfer the 200 pound tub from the bed of one truck to the other.

Ordinarily, he would not hesitate to drive into his pasture.  He would simply park on an incline so the bed of the truck faced downward, tie a sturdy rope around the heavy tub, and pull it off the truck bed.  The tub would slide easily enough and fall to the ground so the cattle could get to it.  It was no big deal if the tub cracked or landed on its side upon hitting the grassy ground.  Even though he is in his 80's and not as strong as he once was, he could easily upright it and the cows could have at it.

Why, you may ask, didn't he just pick the tub up in his old brown truck and avoid the need to transfer it?  Well, here's where we come to an all-too-typical story about my dad and how sometimes the simplest things turn out to be most frustrating.  And how my dad experiences patience.

The brown truck (which is pictured in an old post here) was actually "totaled" several years ago, near Christmas, when a tornado wrecked havoc on my family's farm.  Though pretty banged up, it was still drivable.  My dad had some work done on the engine and kept using it.  Recently, the water pump has started leaking a good bit and it has finally reached the point where he does not trust it to go to town and back, though it is still just fine for moving about the farm.  He is trying to make it last without investing in what would be another expensive repair of the long-since totaled truck.

Being thrifty, he took the white truck instead.  He knew conditions were too wet to actually deliver the licktub to his pasture.  He planned to back the two trucks up to each other, let the tail gates down and simply wrangle the tub from one truck bed to the other.  Unfortunately, he did not count on the tailgates being two different heights, off a few inches from one another.  And, as things go with my dad, the brown truck's gate was a couple of inches higher than the white one.  

No biggie, he thought.  He could back the white truck up a bit more and let the two gates overlap.  His plan was to simply roll the tub over the two tailgates and complete the transfer.  One challenge that faced him was that he tore his right hamstring several weeks ago and has been hobbling around.  Though better, it has not fully healed.  So, he found that he could not pull himself up into the bed of either truck to facilitate the transfer.

I want to point out to the reader that I have told my dad countless times to call me if he ever needs any help with anything at all.  I am almost always available.  And he does call me from time to time.  I have helped him trim the trees around the house, repair his fences, clean his gutters, and other odd jobs.  But, he is a stubborn, persistent and, above all, independent guy who hates the idea of needing help.  More often than not, he does not call.  This was one of those times.  After all, it was such a simple thing, right?

Anyway, he managed to turn the tub onto its side while reaching over the edge of the truck bed, with the idea of rolling it from one truck to the other.  Only he discovered that he did not have the strength nor could he manage the momentum necessary to roll the tub up the couple of inches necessary.  It would almost make it over the small arch in the gates only to roll backwards into the truck bed where it started.  

Undeterred, he kept at it, shifting the tub a little closer to himself to make things easier.  With one final mighty torque, he rolled the tub up where it awkwardly caught itself on one of the bolts in the tailgate.  Now it was stuck between the two gates.  Gritting his teeth he twisted and turned the tub, trying to free it from its locked position.  By the time he succeeded in doing so the tub was turned almost 90 degrees on its side and, as it rolled backward, it came off the gate entirely and solidly hit the ground.

The tub itself cracked though the heavy block inside remained intact.  But there he was, with two trucks backed up to one another and a couple of hundred pounds of nutrients laying on the ground.  What to do?  He decided to fetch his tractor, which has a front-end loader, and attempt to pick up the cracked tub that way and deliver it to the intended brown truck.  

Of course, he moved the white truck first.  Upon returning to the frustrating scene with his tractor he discovered that, try as he might, he could not get the tub to sit securely in the skid bucket.  Finally, he had it, lifted it, and turned to place it in the old brown truck - only to have it fall again, this time cracking into multiple pieces.

My dad finally managed to securely tie the fragmented mess to the bucket with a long chain.  While wrestling with binding the pieces to his skid bucket with a chain, he realized he could simply deliver the it to his cattle with the tractor.  He didn't need the truck at all.  It turns out this was a fortuitous choice.  The pasture's grassy ground was exceedingly soft and sluggish.  He might have gotten stuck over there even with his four-wheel-drive.

All cattle love licktubs.  Tubs are not only a refreshing change form their hay and grass diet but their bodies physically crave it for all those nutrients and salt it possesses.  That afternoon most of them were laying around or munching, docile as usual.  But when they heard the tractor they knew from previous experience that something edible was most likely coming.  My dad uses the tractor regularly to bring them fresh hay in the winter.

They came running to the tractor and arrived at the chained-up licktub before dad had a chance to put it down.  They crowded in, pushing each other around, in order to get in a few licks at the fragmented chained-up mess.  Which was all well and good except for the fact that my dad still had to unchain the tub from the front end loader.  He was forced to fight his way through the small maddening herd to get to the chain.  

The cows pushed him around, mooing, groaned and stomped in protest at not being able to access the tub immediately.  Dad finally fought his way through the frenzy, unchained the now broken tub and, at long last, let its contents tumble onto the soggy ground.  Then he had to work his way back through them before mounting the tractor and returning to the barnyard where the misadventure all began.

He had a few more things he planned to get done that day but, after the ordeal of it all, he called it quits and hobbled back to the house to rest in his recliner.  Such are the simple pleasures and joys of farm life for an 83-year-old.

Everyone who knows him says my dad is the most patient man in the world.  He's had plenty of practice with all sorts of situations like the one I just described.  Once he starts something, he is going to finish it come hell or high-water.  But his patience isn't limited to odd jobs and working around the farm.  He is also patient and kind with other people, going the extra mile for anyone in need.

As he has aged, however, those "in need" are not as numerous as they once were.  Most of dad's friends have either passed on or are now under the care of their family members. These days, his primary task is looking after my mother, who is far more anxious and hurried by nature than he is.

I visit them regularly just to check in on how they are doing, see if there is anything I can help with (if dad will even mention it), and just to reminisce about our many years as a family together.  I typically visit in the mid-afternoon if I don't have any chores to tend to on my own property.  Often I stay a couple of hours.  

My mom is also a creature of habit, which is where I get a lot of my own behavior from, I suppose.  Her day is set punctually by the clock.  If it is 8:30 AM then it is time to go for a walk (weather permitting).  If it is noon it is lunch time.  If it is 4:30 PM it is time to start thinking about dinner (which my parents still refer to as "supper").  Her memory is not what it once was so my dad ends up repeating himself more than he would like.

So, I was visiting.  It was about 4:30 and my mom had already mentioned that she had no idea what they were having for dinner more than once.  My dad already told her he was going into to town to bring back a fish dinner for the evening.  When my mom suggested that dad might want to get a move on to avoid the after work traffic my dad snapped a bit at her.

"I've already told you I've got that taken care of."  Then he opined in the grander sense, "Woman!  You don't have no waitin' sense!"

We laughed.  The way he said it combined with what he said made a funny impression.  But, later, I considered the wisdom of what he said.  It is not uncommon for my dad to take what could be complex philosophical arguments and place them in what might be called plain-speak.

I recall one such nugget of insight way back in 1993 when we had just finished moving from the Atlanta area into our newly built home.  Boxes were everywhere.  Furniture and odds and ends were in disarray all through the house.  Somehow everyone had gone or was outside and my dad was left alone with me.  We sat in silence as men often do.  I was exhausted from moving everything Jennifer and I owned two and a half hours away in one long day.  Suddenly, my dad rose to head back to his home.

"Well son," he said.  "You'll never get caught up."  And he left.

Truer words have never been spoken with such erudite brevity.

Waitin' sense.  There's a multifaceted concept.  Of course, he was talking about patience as a virtue, which he truly believes, embodies and has practiced like an expert Taoist all of his life.  But, from his simple farm-raised perspective, it meant more than being patient.  It meant the active application of waiting.  For my dad, waiting is not doing nothing, it is doing something - that is, to wait for what comes next in the fullness of time.

No sense in getting too heavy about it.  I think we can all learn something about patience and ourselves and perhaps even a bit about meditation and/or contemplation if we discover the art of waiting as a sense, a form of competence.  Of course, it is easier said than done for almost all of us.  But it seems to me that waitin' sense is a worthy aspiration for anyone challenged by this fast changing world of convenience and consumption.  Waitin' sense is a call to simply Be in the moment, to observe, and to act when it is time and not before it is time.

Certainly, my dad exemplified the active quality of waitin' sense while he was struggling with that licktub as the situation became steadily worse.  He didn't give up.  Surrender is certainly not the way of waitin' sense.  With his customary resilience, he kept at it until he had the epiphany that he could transport the tub with his tractor.  He didn't have to use his preconceived notion.  With persisting patience, the moment arrived when, instead of one mishap after another, it became clear what needed to be done.  

Waitin' sense brought the clarity so badly needed, just as it had countless other times with countless other catastrophes, some trivial, some harsh.  So, I have added waitin' sense to my little mental book of wisdom.  It comes in handy to frame the act of patience and resilience in the power of those two simple words.  

Of course, you can't teach waitin' sense to cows when you dump a lick tub in front of them.  You have to fight your way through them to unchain the thing so you can go on with the rest of your life.  I guess the true strength of that sensibility lies with intimately knowing what waitin' sense is and why the rest of the world does not possess it at all.