I only heard my father cry once. Born in 1919, coming of age in the fang-bearing years of the Great Depression and rising to a fast adulthood on the battlefields of the Pacific during World War II, Dad had a pretty tough shell around him. But that night, Dad had reached his limit.
It was the early 60’s. My father had worked his entire life in the dairy industry, and he knew it from cows in the field to processing at the plant, to delivery on the front porch. We had finally settled in Denver when the physical pressures of this life, his war wounds and a life of poverty and stress caught up with him. Not yet 50 years old Dad suffered two heart attacks in quick succession. The doctors suggested a less rigorous vocation.
At about this same time my father was offered a position with the state department of agriculture, inspecting dairies. The job was his, all he had to do was pass a competitive oral and written examination.
Here was the problem. My father, like many young men growing up in rural communities in the Depression, had left school at the completion of 8th grade. He did not want to leave but he was expected to. The youngest of nine children, it was assumed that he would complete compulsory education at 8th grade and then join the work force. Now my father was being asked to pass a test designed to weed out college students 20 years younger than he. He also knew he needed this job. He needed the security, the better pay, the easier burden on a failing body, all he had to do is pass the tests.
Mom and Dad were on the front porch, unaware of my presence in the darkened living room. She was trying to reassure him, but I heard Dad’s answer. “How can I beat them? They’ve gone to college. I’m just…” and my strong, heroic father started to cry.
To this day the memory cuts like a knife.
The next day Dad completed the combined written and oral tests with a score of 98%. It was a score that set the benchmark for Colorado state dairy examiners for over a decade.
If there is a parable to this story, it is that people can be smart in many different ways. You can receive education in many different ways. Skill, discipline and hard work can make an expert out of most people. True, some people are born with more talent than others, some with more opportunities and some with even more luck. But, ultimately, it is what we do with the gifts we are given, and how we deal with the gifts that are withheld, that matter.
I have recently heard many people on the extremes of both political affiliations decrying the “elites.” While never defining who these people are, whom they hate so much, the general impression is that their ire is aimed at those who have more of what the name-callers themselves lack. Those who are smarter (which is a gift from God); those who are better educated (which is an act of self-discipline); those who have more power or wealth (which is earned by hard work) all become just one pejorative: the elite. This is a word of the jealous, not the righteous.
My father never disliked nor demeaned those with more education than he. He knew who he was and liked the man he saw in the mirror. He valued education and wanted more of it, not less, for his children. He did not distrust those who knew more than he did. He did not hate those who had more. He didn’t even resent those whose path had been smoother than his. Life was what you made out of it, and that made every victory all the sweeter.
Dad knew that envy is an ugly shade of green. He also, always, kept the faith. Thanks, Dad
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