Sebenleben, Uhmadgin, Goodeel

From sunup to sundown, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird was always busy. Achievement through productivity gave him great satisfaction. For him, hard work seemed as natural as breathing. Even though well up in years when he took me, a boy of ten, under his wing, during our long days working together in Dad’s Mississippi Delta cotton fields, keeping up with him was an all-day challenge. He was a doer, not a talker; he spoke through actions, not words. Even so, some of his words with multiple meanings offset his limited vocabulary. I remember three: sebenleben, uhmadgun, goodeel.