Saturday, August 18, 2007
JETHRO'S FENCE
T. Wieland Allen
My husband, affectionately called Gramps by some of the grandkids, has a reputation in our neighborhood for having wonderful ideas, a man who can fix anything. Gramps has a reputation with me, his wife, of always having brilliant ideas, EXCEPT ONE. Normally he has really good insight into new designs, as well as fixing broken items cheaply but efficiently. For that quality, Gramps has my utmost admiration.
The EXCEPT ONE occasion was the one where Gramps created Jethro’s Fence. Or maybe I should say he de-created it, but there is no such word, so I’ll have to use the term "destroyed."
I must give you a visual picture of the surroundings so that you can fully appreciate the incident. Our home is a split level house. One must drive up our long driveway, turn left at a concrete block fence and then enter the garage/basement area of the house.
Now, the concrete block fence is eight feet tall and thirty feet long. In the back yard behind the concrete block fence is a huge, century old oak tree, stately and majestic.
After a devastating wind storm, there was a huge limb of the oak tree hanging down, not yet completely severed from the tree, but still hanging on so tightly that Gramps could not pull hard enough to completely sever it from the trunk so that he could cut it into segments and haul it to the dump.
The limb needed to be taken care of, so the day after the storm Gramps decided he knew exactly what to do to take care of the problem. He had slept on it and that’s when he sometimes gets his best inspirations, when he sleeps.
While Gramps was in the back yard removing the huge limb from the tree, I was sitting in my recliner doing some sewing when I heard a huge WHAM, BAM, THUD. It was so loud I feared that someone had run into the side of our house with a huge truck. What could have happened, I wondered?
A few minutes later I heard the garage door open, and I heard Gramps’ footsteps coming up the basement stairs from the garage. They were not the footsteps of the confident, self-reliant, efficient man that I know. This may sound strange, but they were the footsteps of a shame-on-me-I’ve-done-something-terrible man.
Gramps walked slowly into the room and sheepishly announced to me, “I pulled down the concrete block fence.”
Now, Gramps didn’t say that he had run into the concrete fence with the car and knocked it down, which would have been believable. He said that he had “pulled down” the concrete block fence. Was this possible?
Gramps is a competitive swimmer and has a great physique, big shoulders and muscular arms, but he’s no Hercules or Goliath, for sure. How could Gramps have done that feat, pulled down an eight feet tall, thirty feet long concrete block fence? My curiosity was so piqued that I couldn’t get mad at him, so I good naturedly replied, “How in the world did you do that?”
Gramps began to describe the great idea that he had, which turned out to be a bad idea, one of the few bad ones my Mr. Fix-it has had in our fifty year marriage. He said that his idea was to tie a real thick rope to the broken limb that was still dangling from the tree, then for leverage run the rope through one of the open circled decorative areas in one of the top blocks of the concrete block fence, then run the rope down the driveway and tie it to the front of his Mazda RX7 sports car. His idea was to back the sports car out of the driveway until the rope pulled the big limb loose from the huge tree. Brilliant?
Wrong!
Gramps proceeded to tell me that when he backed up the RX7 to pull the limb loose from the tree, instead of the limb breaking from the tree and falling to the ground, the concrete block fence came catapulting down onto the driveway block by block by block, creating a huge pile of broken concrete blocks, which completely blocked the driveway. The image in my mind at the time, because I had not yet seen the damage, was the image of Jethro Bodean of the Beverly Hillbillies doing the same thing in Beverly Hills, hooking a rope from that old rickety truck of theirs to a tree and backing up and destroying their house.
I got one of my laughing spells and laughed and laughed and laughed. How can you get mad when a brilliant scheme has actually not panned out and has not produced all what it was supposed to accomplish? At least Gramps had tried.
We walked out of the house to survey the damage. It was worse that I could have ever imagined. Instead of a few concrete blocks blocking the driveway, almost the entire concrete block fence, except the end posts, was piled onto the long driveway blocking the exit of the garage and exposing the whole back yard. No privacy fence for us that day and probably for the next month or so, I thought.
In the middle of my laughing spells, which Gramps was enjoying by this time, Gramps began to tell me more about the incident. He said that when he slowly started backing up the sports car with the rope tied to the bumper of the car, then tied through the decorative holes in the top of the concrete blocks, then securely fastened to the broken tree limb, when he began to back the car up the concrete blocks through which the rope was threaded and then tied to the front bumper of the car had broken loose from the rest of the fence and traveled with lightning fast speed down the rope and stopped inches from the car. If it hadn‘t stopped where it did, the front of the RX7, Gramps prized sports car, would have been an innocent victim of Gramps’ great idea. At least the car, windshield and all, had been spared the devastation that Jethro’s Fence suffered.
Gramps’ description of the fifty pound concrete block traveling the length of the rope and stopping within inches of the front of the car was enough to start me roaring again with laughter. What I would have given to have seen Gramps sitting behind the wheel of that sports car, with his big blue eyes the size of saucers, when that fifty pound concrete block came traveling down the rope toward him and his prized sports car. Instead of breaking the huge limb loose from the tree, most of the concrete blocks from the huge fence were littering the driveway. Just the image of it in my mind still gives me bouts of side splitting laughter.
Gramps restored the fence in a few weeks, laying the concrete blocks himself. It’s a more beautiful fence than it was before the incident. Even though it is more beautiful, I just had to name it Jethro’s Fence. It will always be known by that name to us and to the neighborhood, even in its restored state.
The eventual solution to the huge broken limb was for Gramps to saw it at the break which was located at the trunk of the 100 year old tree. Then he hired a man to come to the house, chainsaw it into sections and then load up the pieces of wood and haul them off.
Laughter is so beneficial to us humans. Gramps and I have lots of occasions to laugh, especially when our best laid plans don’t work out as planned.
Our oldest grandson, Neil, spoke great wisdom about not getting mad when someone makes a mistake. He said not to get mad when someone makes a mistake because it just might be you making the mistake next time. How did that grandson get so smart when he was seven years old?. He was right, everybody makes mistakes. Small mistakes don't run in our family. Big mistakes do.
The lesson was learned that sometimes the best plans of men don't pan out. We have the choice to laugh or get mad when people make mistakes. Jethro and Granny laughed at Jethro's mistakes and so do we, whether it's my mistakes or the mistakes that Gramps makes. In our family, we get to laugh all the time.
Gramps died in 2012, but Jethro's Fence proudy sits there as a memorial to how much we laughed during our marriage. It will always be known as Jethro's Fence to family and friends to remind us how fun loving Gramps was. Jethro's Fence is much better than a tombstone to me.
