So, what?
(Every time I look at a possible story, I ask myself this question. If there is a "what," and it can be said in 20 words or less, that's a story. If the what is self-serving, that's an ad.)
Dad was a veteran of World War I (Yes, one.), and he hammered out three silver rings from quarters with a muleshoe in a French barn.
Six words over the limit, but still something in it makes a listener wonder, ask a question or two.
World War I was at once the most meticulously planned and the least planned of any war up to that time. In earlier wars, fights on this scale had been generally planned, the we'll-take-this-slab-of-real-estate-with-that many-divisions.
But, early in the 20th Century, European generals had planned their invasions down to the number of miles a troop could march in a day and how much food it would take to keep him fit to march the next day.
Trains ran on schedule mainly because they had picked up on the war supply plans.
When a plan is together in that much detail, it doesn't take much to set it in motion, and anybody who might stop the rush would look foolish.
It only takes a spark to set off execution of such plans, and the assassination of a minor German prince did it.
My dad, Jess, was 26, a little old for what planners considered the best age for soldiering. However, he had grown up on hardscrabble farms at Nosey Creek off Mt. Zion Road, near the A.C. King Place around Sadler, and at his grandfather's place near Little Flock Church on Millerstown Road.
Jess had trained horse and mule yearlings to work. The army needed a man who could sock a mule between the eyes with his fist and knock the mule out. And dad could do that.
Plans for World War I involved a lot of mules, what they would need to be fed, how much they could pull, and for how far and how long. Even how much iron was needed for their shoes. Dad knew how to make the shoes -- harnass, too.
But, Jess was still unmarried, another plus for the army, no widow's pension to worry about.
He trained at Camp Taylor near Louisville, then went "over there" with all the other Yanks, as the old song recorded.
By any standard, it was horrible fighting, some said a slaughter. At the time, it didn't seem quite so bad because the plans had already calculated losses.
But, there are contingencies of war no plans can detail in advance. Some soldiers in dad's unit came down with meningitis, the contagious kind, the deadly kind.
For about three months, dad was quarantined in a French farmer's barn not far from Chaumount, north of Paris.
It was here that he used his three American quarters, to make rings. Quarters then were mostly silver, and the metal was easy to work -- a hole bored in the middle of the coin, scraped to make the hole larger, then placed over an iron bar for the hours of hammering.
The rings were polished by rubbing on unplaned wood, red cedar being the best.
He made a ring for his mother, Nancy Ann ( Nannie) Keller, who was buried with her ring on. He made one for Martin Fulkerson's daughter, whose brothers just called Bess (my mother), and she was buried wearing her ring. The third one he made for his sister, Minnie Gaither.
Aunt Minnie, though, gave the ring to her daughter, Betty, who recently uncovered the keepsake while she was getting ready for a yard sale.
My cousin showed it to me, and it fit my little finger. It's yours, she said. A mule's kick, it was.
In my dad's time and part of mine, to wear a ring on your pinkie was considered cultured, but not exactly manly. That poor German prince who was shot when the 20th Century was a teenager could have gotten away with it.
If a pinkie ring was high culture -- caviar -- dad was navy beans. He would have called such uppiness "nonsense and foolishness."
To put it on another finger, though, would mean altering his original work, so I'll take the raised eyebrows in stride. If anyone comments, I can just come back with: The guy who made this ring could knock out a mule with one blow! Should shut them up.
Knowledge of how to handle this kind of thing comes from dad.
He never talked about the war, at least not the darker side of it, to me, his seventh and youngest son.
This told a truer story than all the speechifying that's ever been done about war. He talked little, too, about the Great Depression that came on the heels of the war. He was stoic, too, about his mother's death at 50 from infection after surgery.
The rings, however, tripped him up. He was an artist, good at too many creative things to ever have enjoyed success in a world that valued plans and the ability to stick to them no matter what.
He had a poet's heart, something I never saw until he was quite old and I had become his father in many ways.
It was dad, not mom, who cried when his two oldest sons went off to World War II. He knew where they were going, what they would find there.
With one foot in the creative world, a footing that led him to learn shape-note singing, and the other foot in the harsh reality of war and near-famine, he was constantly on my case.
I was to learn a solid trade. Fiddling around with words and fleeting images on television would not abide, he thought.
Telling me what he had learned by experience, he fretted about my having my nose in a book all the time, going around dreamy-headed instead of getting down to business, watching the birds instead of picking the cucumbers, and generally being what he saw as lazy.
He drummed on a single theme: Stick to your bush or you won't amount to a hill of beans! Until his death, he worried about me becoming one of those creative bums and lost in a world that valued little I created.
He was determined that what he thought happened to him wouldn't happen to me.
Still, here's the ring, flashing across my keyboard as I remember him. I am more the grasshopper than the ant he wished I would become, but it was he who gave me the grasshopper gene. No amount of nurture could change our natures.
If I sold the ring for the silver in it, I couldn't buy a cup of coffee in any restaurant in the county. But if I sold it for what it means, nobody could rake up that much money.
That's a bumper hill of beans if I've ever seen one!
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