Gust and Calm

It was the morning ritual.  My Aunt Arlene’s dad, Gust Kopack, would sweep into the back porch of the farmhouse after milking the cows, peeling off his coveralls with their faint sweet smell of fresh milk and hanging them, all in one motion, on the hook behind the door to the house, simultaneously calling to my Uncle Joe, “Come on, Joe, time’s a-wastin’!”  And off they’d go to fish for the trout we’d have for breakfast.

Time’s a-wastin’.  “Gust” was what everybody called him, short for Gustavus.  While the unknowing person would have called him “Gus”, that added t gave him a truer name, a name more befitting him.  He was like a wind that kept us moving.   And this ritual greeting of his seems to have found a home in me, because I have a sense of eagerness to make the most of time.  It has me waking early as he did, early enough for him to milk the cows, push the squealing-axled, milkcan-clanking, morning’s produce to the roadside for pickup, and get to the trout stream with his smiling son-in-law and yes, back to the kitchen by the time his grinning wife Ida had brought in the morning’s eggs from the henhouse.  Whew.  His pace was as breathless as that sentence. 

Gust was not a prevailing wind.  He could be calm, too.  He smoked a corn-cob pipe from time to time, generally in the evening when the chores were done and it was not quite

time for dinner.  He had a certain way of sitting at times like that.  He’d sit on a chair, or a stool, or a tree stump and with a single motion cross his lean left leg over his right, even as his right hand unfurled in his right overall pocket to withdraw his pipe.   By the time he had clamped the pipe between his teeth, his right hand had already plunged back in for his tobacco pouch, his fingers nimbly opening its flap while his left hand removed his pipe from his teeth and placed its bowl between the thumb and first two fingers of his right, the stem just barely crossing over the top of the open pouch.  Then with the left thumb and pointing finger, he’d delicately deliver pinches of tobacco from the compressed pad of shreds in the pouch to the blackened opening in the top of the corn-cob bowl of his pipe, precisely teasing it into that narrow opening with the stubby-strong tip of his pointer finger, yellowed by this regular duty.  Soon his left hand was bringing the filled pipe back to the waiting clamp of his teeth, his right hand adeptly flapping the pouch closed and returning it to his pocket while the left hand retrieved his pipe lighter from his left pocket.  It was a “Nimrod” pipe lighter, good for nothing else because it was perfect for lighting a pipe.  With his left hand he positioned the hole of the lighter over the bowl, then with his right hand pulled the lighter open so his left thumb could flick the wheel across the flint and ignite the wick, the huge flame flaring bright between puffs of his puckered cheeks, one…two…three and click, the right hand tossed the lighter closed into the left hand and grasped the warming bowl as he smiled and blew out the first savored mouthful of aromatic smoke.  His left hand dropping the lighter back to its place in his pocket, his restin’ would commence. 

As full of motion as his going was, his restin’ was as bereft of it.  Except for the fact that that pipe would go out unless he took a drag on it every minute or two, he was absolutely still.  Oh, except for the almost indistinguishable formation of a tiny, satisfied smile that just barely turned his placid lips upward as his almost unmoving eyes slowly surveyed whatever he had done that day.  Perhaps it was the section field freshly plowed, or the sweet-smelling manure from last year half gone, loaded onto the wagon for the next day’s spreading, or maybe just the cows ambling back to pasture after their evening milking. 

I learned a lot from Gust by watching his working, but what brings tears to my eyes now is that he’s still alive in me 55 years later, reminding me how wonderful it is to rest and take in the day’s work, and like the creator, call it good…and know that it is enough.