Waiting

When he wasn’t busy running his Mississippi Delta cotton farm, my father visited other growers, and would sometimes take me with him.

One of his peers had a plaque in his office with a quote by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe inscribed on it: “A useless life is an early death.” That quote puzzled me, so one day when I was fishing with my boyhood best friend and mentor, Jaybird, I asked him what it meant. “You remember when yo’ daddy turned you over to me and told me to teach you how to work?” I nodded. “Well, de reason was, he wants you to make yo’ life count. You can’t jes sit around, waitin’ for sumpin’ to happen. A lotta times you gotta make it happen. Lazy folks never git past the waitin’ part. Dat’s who dat sign is talkin’ ’bout; folks like dat is already dead, mainly ’cause life done passed ’em by.” “Does that mean that all waiting is bad?”

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“Shoot, naw. When you can’t keep fum waitin’, ain’t nuttin’ you kin do, ’cept wait. Dat’s what I had to do during The Great Depression. We had a sayin’ back in those sad days: “Take a cold tater and wait.” Toward the end of his life, Jaybird’s eyesight began failing, but the old black man refused to stop doing things he loved to do, especially fishing. Before his vision loss, he rigged my pole and paddled while I fished; afterwards, I rigged his pole and paddled while he fished. I put a large red bobber on his line, one he could see well enough to know when he was getting a bite. On one of our last fishing trips together, neither of us had gotten a bite. I set my pole aside and asked Jaybird to describe how bad those days in the Depression really were, when there was nothing to do but “take a cold tater and wait.” Little did I realize that I had provided the master teacher an opportunity to impart yet another lesson his student has never forgotten. He told me about the abject poverty of his youth, about days when a cold potato might be all that was available to stave off extreme hunger … about days when there wasn’t even a cold potato to eat. When I asked how he endured such misery, he said, “I waited.” Even though he may not have known it at the time, the purpose of Jaybird’s waiting during those tough years was the molding of an invaluable virtue: self-reliance. He learned to make his way through life by depending on others as little as possible, and I am so grateful that he taught me to be self-reliant. At the same time, he passed that “cold tater” on to me. When waiting can be more accurately described as patience, it is good. That is what Rudyard Kipling meant in his poem entitled “If,” when he said we must “…wait and not be tired by waiting.”