Outdoors with Larry Dablemont: Too soon old

My maternal grandparents, Bert and Hilda McNew, had a little farm out southeast of Houston, MO, a few miles. I was born in their old farmhouse. They were wonderful people whom I dearly loved.

Scratching out a living with a few milk cows and chickens and a hog or two was a difficult thing in those days, so Grandma sold some eggs and milk and butter, tended a big garden and canned and sewed a lot. Grandpa did a little work on the side when he could find it. One of the things he did for a while was pick up trash from businesses along Main Street to haul to the city dump in his old faded 1940s era red Chevy pickup. 

When I was only five or six years old, I would go with him on Saturday mornings, and it was a wonderful thing to go through that trash as he raked it from the bed of his old truck into the city trash dump three miles south of town. Grandma always wanted him to look for jars she could use for canning, and I would look for comic books and magazines. There were a bunch of them, and they always had the top few inches cut off of the cover. I guess the stores had to do that to prove they hadn’t sold them, and that’s the way I came across my first outdoor magazines, which fascinated me. 

But one day I found a little oblong wooden plaque, obviously cut out of a small pine tree, with the phrase printed on it, “Ve get too soon old, and too late smart.”

I clung to it like a valuable prize, and wrapped it up and gave it to my dad on Father’s Day. It was the first gift I ever gave anyone and I was tremendously proud of it. For a while Dad hung it in the kitchen, and it seemed everyone was amused by it. Dad said it was advice he could use.

In time of course I forgot all about it, and recently, going through Mom and Dad’s photos and things after they had passed away, I came across so many old things I had forgotten. And there was that little plaque in the bottom of a box! 

As I held it in my hands, it brought me back to that time long ago when I rode in town with Grandpa, looking so forward to driving down the alley with him, behind the Main Street businesses, to load up and haul off someone else’s refuse. And it was a time when I realized that someone’s trash could be someone else’s treasure.

But the words of that old plaque had such an impact on me now: “Ve get too soon old and too late smart.” My gosh, there is so much truth in that. 

I wish I could go back and do things differently. I wish I had gotten smart long before I got old. Well, I’m still not all that smart! But one thing I remember well was the words from old Bill Stalder, who listened to me late one summer evening about July of 1950, going on about how I couldn’t wait until duck season came and I could hunt ducks on the Piney with Dad.

“Don’t wish your life away, boy,” Ol’ Bill said with a sad and solemn look, remembering I am sure, his own youth. “It ain’t tomorrow that overtakes a man, it is the years beyond it.”

He told me to enjoy each day, and use it to accomplish something. For a man with almost no education, it was wisdom way beyond my years. I learned, there in that pool hall my dad and Grandpa McNew had acquired when I was only 10 years old, that there is a big difference in possessing intelligence and gaining wisdom. If only I could go back to my boyhood I would indeed grow too soon old, as I have done. But I would not grow too late smart.

In closing, I can vaguely remember a time when I was a little boy on my grandparent’s farm, and my grandmother told me she once had a small container of prunes, which had become moldy! She said she threw them out the back door by an old revolving-blade lawn mower, the kind you had to power as you pushed it. A bluejay landed on that mower handle and eyed those prunes and finally flew down to pick one up. He flew up on the lawn mower handle and struggled to eat it, but he finally got it down. Over an hour or so, he must have flown down to retrieve five or six of those moldy prunes, and ate every one. 

When they were finally gone, he sat there a while and then finally tried to fly off to the adjacent apple orchard. He only made it a few yards, and then he fluttered to the ground and died. Grandma told me I should learn a lesson from that. “Don’t go flying off the handle,” she said, “when you are full of prunes!” 

I did a lot of that flying off the handle when I got older. Wish I’d have listened closer to my grandmother. But I got too late smart!