My maternal grandparents, Bert and Hilda McNew, had a little farm out southeast of Houston, Missouri. I was born in their old farmhouse. They were wonderful people whom I dearly loved.
Scratching out a living with a few milk cows, chickens and a hog or two was a difficult thing in those days, so Grandma sold some eggs, milk and butter, tended a big garden, and canned and sewed a lot. Grandpa did work on the side when he could find it, including hauling trash from Main Street businesses to the city dump in his old faded 1940s red Chevy pickup.
When I was 5 or 6, I would go with him on Saturday mornings. It was a wonderful thing to go through that trash as he raked it into the dump 3 miles south of town. Grandma wanted him to look for canning jars, and I would look for comic books and magazines. The stores had cut the top few inches off the covers to prove they hadn’t sold, and that’s how I found my first outdoor magazines, which fascinated me.
One day, I found a little oblong wooden plaque — obviously cut out of a small pine tree — with a phrase printed on it: “Ve get too soon old, and too late smart.”
I clung to it like a valuable prize, 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. Recently, going through Mom and Dad’s photos and belongings 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 into town with Grandpa, looking forward so much to driving down the alley behind the Main Street businesses to load up and haul off someone else’s refuse. It was a time when I realized that someone’s trash could be someone else’s treasure.
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. He listened to me late one summer evening, around July 1950, going on about how I couldn’t wait until duck season came so I could hunt ducks on the Piney with Dad.
“Don’t wish your life away, boy,” Old 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 formal 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 between 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.
My grandmother once told me she threw a small container of moldy prunes out the back door by an old push mower. A blue jay landed on the handle, eyed those prunes, and ate five or six of them one by one.
When they were gone, he tried to fly off to the orchard, made it only a few yards, and fluttered to the ground, dead.
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. I wish I’d have listened closer to my grandmother. But, I got too late smart!
