Front Porch Tales
Warm-Hearted Stories of
Family, Faith, Laughter,
and Love
Philip Gulley
To Joan
Contents
Part I: Folks I’ve Known
Growing Roots
The Front Porch Classroom
When the Tree Went Crashing
Expectation
Doc Foster
The Paper Route
Streams in the Desert
My Grandma, the Saint
My Grandpa, the Enigma
Ruby and the Rain Crow
My Friend Jim and Why I Don’t Like Him
Tim
The Wizard of Is
Part II: Hearth and Home
Why My Wife Bought Handcuffs
Family Vacations
A Family Tradition
“Patches”
Right Hearts
Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!
Handyman Blues
Advice Givers
The Second Child
Presents and Presence
My Cup Runneth Over, and So Does My Toilet
Guys
Family Life and Other Reasons Jesus Never Married
Confessions
Life’s Too Short
Part III: Observations
The Kitchen Table
Television
Vocation
Tasting Tears
Liberty
Stuff
Where I Stand
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Die
Soul Tending
Seeking and Finding
Exercise
Misery to Joy
Taking Inventory
Hardware Heaven
Family Values
About the Author
Other Books by Philip Gulley
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
THE CHURCH IN THE WILD WOOD
I don’t know what I expected to find at the end of that narrow road through the bare trees in Marion County, Indiana, but what I found was a little red-brick church. A “meetinghouse,” the Quakers call it.
I went inside.
The place of worship was a room, plain and simple, with smooth tile floors and folding chairs facing a modest wooden pulpit. Behind this, sitting on a chair facing the others, was a man. Rather young, he seemed. Lean in face and frame. Hands clasped in his lap, head bowed slightly, eyes shut tightly, in obviously earnest prayer.
And the service of Friends began.
When the youthful pastor stood, the appearance of piety vanished. It was clear, in a quiet sort of way, that he loved these people in the folding chairs. And that they loved him. And as his eyes met theirs, I studied the former: large, brown, smiling, penetrating eyes. Something wonderful is about to happen, I thought.
And it did.
It was not a “speaker’s voice,” really. But it was warm and smooth, and it measured the words it spoke the way a journeyman carpenter measures wood. And so, one rafter, one casement at a time, did Philip Gulley craft for us in the folding chairs a house, of sorts, in which we dwelled for the next twenty minutes or so and which I have often happily revisited in my mind ever since.
To paraphrase him would paint a misshapen, colorless picture of that dear place he created for us. But I remember how what he said made me feel: as though I were drawn into a world for which I longed, and yet which I had believed was now inaccessible in these turbulent high-tech times. The tale he unveiled was tender and humorous, and the characters who populated it—real people whom the young pastor had known—came vividly to life as he spoke. And then, sudden, unexpected, lump-in-the-throat poignancy. And I found myself lamenting irresistibly that others who have longed, as I had, for once-upon-another-time did not know the way down the narrow road through the bare trees to the church in the wild wood and the gentle voice.
Well, now you do.
Paul Harvey, Jr.
A WORD ABOUT THESE STORIES
A few of the names and events in this book have been altered to protect persons still living, namely me. The alternative is full disclosure, which means I couldn’t go back home for Swap and Shop Days or music nights at Ellis Park. Thomas Wolfe was mistaken. We can go home again. But not if we tell the whole, unvarnished truth. If you’re from a small town, you’ll understand what I mean.
Philip Gulley
Folks I’ve Known
I live in a neighborhood full of children. I never knew there were children around until school began and I saw them waiting for the bus. Outside of school, they stay in their homes and play Nintendo. I don’t know any of their names. I seldom see them ride their bikes or play football or baseball. I keep waiting for them to come around and play in the meetinghouse yard, but they seldom do. So it sits empty. We laid out a baseball diamond, hoping kids would get the message. But vines grew up and nature reclaimed it before the feet of little children could wear it bare.
I thank God I was born before Nintendo and video games and all the other things that keep kids from getting out and exploring their environs. My parents turned off the television set and sent me outdoors, where I met all kinds of interesting people, like Mrs. Harvey and Doctor Gibbs and Mr. Welty.
Knowing these people was an education in and of itself. Sometimes people ask me when and where I started preparing for ministry. I tell them I was ten years old and that it was in Doctor Gibbs’ yard, the day he was beating his saplings with a rolled-up newspaper.
Here is his story and the stories of other folks I’ve known. I hope you are as blessed by reading about these fine people as I was by knowing them.
Growing Roots
Had an old neighbor when I was growing up named Doctor Gibbs. He didn’t look like any doctor I’d ever known. Every time I saw him, he was wearing denim overalls and a straw hat, the front brim of which was green sunglass plastic. He smiled a lot, a smile that matched his hat—old and crinkly and well-worn. He never yelled at us for playing in his yard. I remember him as someone who was a lot nicer than circumstances warranted.
When Doctor Gibbs wasn’t saving lives, he was planting trees. His house sat on ten acres, and his life-goal was to make it a forest. The good doctor had some interesting theories concerning plant husbandry. He came from the “No pain, no gain” school of horticulture. He never watered his new trees, which flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Once I asked why. He said that watering plants spoiled them, and that if you water them, each successive tree generation will grow weaker and weaker. So you have to make things rough for them and weed out the weenie trees early on.
He talked about how watering trees made for shallow roots, and how trees that weren’t watered had to grow deep roots in search of moisture. I took him to mean that deep roots were to be treasured.
So he never watered his trees. He’d plant an oak and, instead of watering it every morning, he’d beat it with a rolled up newspaper. Smack! Slap! Pow! I asked him why he did that, and he said it was to get the tree’s attention.
Doctor Gibbs went to glory a couple years after I left home. Every now and again, I walk by his house and look at the trees that I’d watched him plant some twenty-five years ago. They’re granite strong now. Big and robust. Those trees wake up in the morning and beat their chests and drink their coffee black.
I planted a couple trees a few years back. Carried water to them for a solid summer. Sprayed them. Prayed over them. The whole nine yards. Two years of coddling has resulted in trees that expect to be waited on hand and foot. Whenever a cold wind blows in, they tremble and chatter their branches. Sissy trees.
Funny thing about those trees of Doctor Gibbs. Adversity and deprivation seemed to benefit them in ways c
omfort and ease never could.
Every night before I go to bed, I go check on my two sons. I stand over them and watch their little bodies, the rising and falling of life within. I often pray for them. Mostly I pray that their lives will be easy. “Lord, spare them from hardship.” But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to change my prayer.
Has to do with the inevitability of cold winds that hit us at the core. I know my children are going to encounter hardship, and my praying they won’t is naive. There’s always a cold wind blowing somewhere.
So I’m changing my eventide prayer. Because life is tough, whether we want it to be or not. Instead, I’m going to pray that my sons’ roots grow deep, so they can draw strength from the hidden sources of the eternal God.
Too many times we pray for ease, but that’s a prayer seldom met. What we need to do is pray for roots that reach deep into the Eternal, so when the rains fall and the winds blow, we won’t be swept asunder.
The Front Porch Classroom
When I was in the fourth grade, I was offered a job as a paper boy. It didn’t pay much money, but I knew having a job would build my character so I took it, good character being important to fourth-graders. My lessons started the first day on the job. A customer paying his bill asked me if I wanted a tip, and I said, “Sure.” He said, “Stay away from wild women.”
One of my customers was a lady named Mrs. Stanley. She was a widow and not prone to wild living, so I took to lingering on her front porch during my rounds. She’d watch for me to come down her street, and by the time I’d pedaled up to her house, there’d be a slushy bottle of Coke waiting for me. I’d sit and drink while she talked. That was our understanding—I drank, she talked.
The widow Stanley talked mostly about her dead husband, Roger. “Roger and I went grocery shopping this morning over to the IGA,” she’d say. The first time she said that, the Coke went up my nose. That was back in the days when Coke going up your nose wasn’t a crime, just a mite uncomfortable.
Went home and told my father about Mrs. Stanley and how she talked as if Mr. Stanley were still alive. Dad said she was probably lonely, and that maybe I just ought to sit and listen and nod my head and smile, and maybe she’d work it out of her system. So that’s what I did. I figured this was where the character-building came into play. Turned out Dad was right. After a few summers, she seemed content to leave her husband over at the South Cemetery.
Nowadays, we’d send Mrs. Stanley to a psychiatrist. But all she had back then was a front porch rocker and her paper boy’s ear, which turned out to be enough.
I quit my paper route after her healing. Moved on to the lucrative business of lawn mowing. Didn’t see the widow Stanley for several years. Then we crossed paths up at the Christian Church’s annual fund-raiser dinner. She was standing behind the steam table spooning out mashed potatoes and looking radiant. Four years before she’d had to bribe her paper boy with a Coke to have someone to talk with; now she had friends brimming over. Her husband was gone, but life went on. She had her community and was luminous with love.
Community is a beautiful thing; sometimes it even heals us and makes us better than we would otherwise be.
I live in the city now. My front porch is a concrete slab. And my paper boy is a lady named Edna with three kids and a twelve-year-old Honda. Every day she asks me how I’m doing. When I don’t say “fine,” she sticks around long enough to find out why. She’s such a nice lady that sometimes I act as if I have a problem, just so she’ll tarry. She’s lived in the city all her life, but she knows about community, too.
Community isn’t so much a locale as it is a state of mind. You find it whenever folks ask how you’re doing because they care, and not because they’re getting paid to inquire.
Two thousand years ago, a church elder named Peter wrote the recipe for community. “Above all else,” he wrote, “hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). That means when you love a person, you occasionally have to turn a blind eye toward their shortcomings.
Kind of like what my dad told me about the widow Stanley. Sometimes it’s better to nod your head and smile.
Psychiatrists call that “enabling denial,” but back when I delivered papers, we called it “compassion.”
When the Tree Went Crashing
A friend of mine has a bunch of college degrees. I was really impressed until he told me he was going to another city to deliver a paper. Heck, I was delivering papers in the fourth grade. One of my customers was a Quaker widow named Mrs. Harvey. When weather permitted, she’d sit on her front porch swing, waiting for the paper and a conversation. I’d pull up a rocking chair, and we’d sit and visit underneath the shade of the maple tree which stood guard over the porch.
One day she asked me if I would work as her yard boy. She had a big yard, almost two acres, which she wanted mowed with a push mower since riding mowers didn’t do a very good job. She was emphatic about that and, since I didn’t have a riding mower, I agreed with her.
I’d stop by every afternoon when I was done delivering papers and mow a section. Every afternoon but Sunday, since Mrs. Harvey said that was the Sabbath, and if the Lord needed to rest on the seventh day, who was I to work?
It was in the fourth year of my mowing that I noticed the front porch maple tree was dying. It had some years on it. Mr. and Mrs. Harvey had moved there the first year of their marriage, forty years before. Mr. Harvey had planted it then. “Twenty years from now, we’ll appreciate this,” he’d said at the time. And twenty years later they did appreciate it, on a summer evening when the heat would loosen its grip.
But after forty years, Mr. Harvey was dead, and so was the tree. And when I told Mrs. Harvey, she stared at the tree the longest time and told how she still remembered what her husband was wearing when he planted that tree. Then she went in her house and called Kenny. He was the man in our town who cut trees.
He rolled up the next day in his truck and got right down to business—another day, another tree. Mrs. Harvey was watching from her front porch swing, along with her neighbor, who had made her way over to offer comfort. So when the chain saw bit into the tree and Mrs. Harvey flinched, her neighbor took her hand and listened while Mrs. Harvey talked about summer evenings that were supposed to be but never were.
Once spent a whole semester studying the book of Job. Never did understand it until I read it in light of Mrs. Harvey.
Job had it all, then Job lost it all. Servants: murdered. Wealth: stolen. Health: gone. Sons and daughters and bounce-on-your-knee grandchildren: dead. Job sat on a pile of ashes, lamenting over a life that was supposed to be, but never was. God made his way over to Job and sat with him amidst the charred remains of his life. A tender thing, given the immensity of the universe and the smallness of Job. But then God knows our secret pain.
When I was in college, my philosophy professor spent an entire week talking about love. But for me it was never clearer than the day the tree went crashing.
Expectation
Was over visiting my folks one autumn morning, and Ray stopped by to borrow Dad’s car. Dad and Ray became friends when Dad served on the town board and met Ray, who worked for the sewer department. Ray’s one of those eminently useful men it pays to know if you need something done—from getting a raccoon out of your attic to nosing out the most likely spots for morel mushrooms to setting off the town fireworks on the Fourth of July. In a specialist world, Ray’s a generalist, which inclines me to think well of him. The problem today is that too many folks know a lot about a thing or two, but not enough folks know a little about a lot of things. If you don’t believe that, just try to find a doctor who’ll mend your feet and your nose in the same visit.
Ray started working for the town when he graduated from high school. College was out of the question, it costing money and Ray not having any. Instead, he married his high school sweetheart. They settled into a small house outside of town and slipped into the lifestyle Ra
y had come from—work, raise your kids, hope they turn out right, and pray to Jesus that Social Security is still around when you retire. And every now and then, lie awake at night frustrated that your kids can’t have the same things the doctor’s children have.
Ray and his wife had a first-born daughter who hit school like a cyclone. Made straight A’s, which startled the teachers, she being Ray’s daughter. It wasn’t that Ray lacked enthusiasm for learning; he just wasn’t one to let school get in the way of his education. His interests lay elsewhere. I’m that way myself. Took me to eighth grade to figure out that algebra wasn’t a line of Playtex undergarments.
Ray’s daughter kept up her grades. Out-hustled the doctor’s kid to become the class valedictorian. But the halls of Harvard don’t overflow with sewer-worker offspring, so she was trying to get used to the idea of a career in fast food. Then a college in Ohio, scouting around for smart kids with gumption, offered her a free education, and her dream of being a psychologist drew closer. So she went to Ohio, and Ray, whose truck kicks up a fuss when driven past the county line, borrows my dad’s car once a month to go visit his daughter, of whom he is fiercely proud.
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