Maybe it's odd that I have such fond memories of a pickup.
But I love telling stories about the 1978 F-150 my Dad used to drive. It was brown, with a yellowish roof. Straight cab, one bench seat, four-speed manual transmission. They don't build them like that anymore.
Dad bought that truck used, just a few months before I was born. Then, in mid-March of 1984, a blizzard hit southeast Colorado. A weird blizzard. Thunder cracked, lightning struck, and snow fell and blew everywhere. If not for that truck's ground clearance and four-wheel-drive, I would have been born in the living room.
I don't particularly remember all of those details, since some of them took place before my eyes opened. But I've heard my parents talk about them. Maybe they've taken on a special legend in my mind.
I do, however, remember some other things about that truck.
I remember a dent that my brother Jared and I left, inadvertently, on the outside of the bed. We were little, and had been playing in the back end one evening. We strung Dad's heavy log chain over the side, and forgot about it. We left it there overnight, not knowing what it would do.
The next evening, when Dad got home from work, he took Jared and I out to the driveway. He showed us where the metal had caved in a bit under the weight of the chain. He told us why our mistake had caused the damage. He made certain we knew he was not happy about it. And then he never mentioned it again.
I also remember what that old Ford did to one — the only one — Tonka truck that Jared and I had. Our parents constantly warned us not to leave our toys in the driveway, but one day we did. The next morning when Dad left for work, he didn't see it on the ground and drove over the top of it.
Jared and I were sad. We even cried. We begged them to, but Mom and Dad held firm and refused to replace the toy. For one thing, we didn't have the money for new Tonka trucks. For another, they had warned us not to leave our toys in the driveway. I'll never forget that lesson.
* * *
That old pickup kept running. More than once, it outlasted a radio and Dad had to replace it with one bought from a junkyard. Dad went through seat cover after seat cover. But the truck kept running. There was a hole in the floor, where the clutch ran from the pedal down into the engine. Over time, that hole grew from about the size of a quarter to a few inches wide. We could see the highway speed by underneath. But season after season, and year after year, that truck kept running. So many of my childhood memories involve that pickup. But the strongest happened a few years later, when I was in high school.
One winter, the heater quit.
A lesser man would have taken on unwise debt and purchased a new car. Dad didn't. He didn't even dump a bunch of money into repairing or replacing the heater.
Instead, he started using a tarp. Every evening when he got home from work, he closed one end of the tarp into the driver's side door, stretched the tarp across the windshield, and closed the other end in the passenger's side door. He could handle driving a few miles to work every day in the cold, and that tarp saved him from having to scrape ice in the morning.
* * *
My parents both grew up in tiny houses just outside of small towns, in conditions that can only be described as impoverished.
Dad was the oldest of six siblings. I've heard him tell stories about how cold his bedroom occasionally got in the winter: Some nights, a glass of water would freeze solid on his bed-side stand. They raised chickens so they had something to eat. He helped his dad load and haul hay for 10 cents a bail. If his mom hadn't had credit at the grocery store, I've heard him say, there were times when they would have starved.
Sometimes, Dad still talks about those years when he worked 90 hours a week, manufacturing asphalt and driving a truck. When his dad died in a workplace accident, Dad bought clothes for his siblings, so they had something fit to wear to a funeral.
When I was a baby, Dad started working for the county road department. It didn't pay very well, but that job let him have more time at home with his kids than his job at the asphalt manufacturer did. Every single day of my life, he has held a job that required him to work overtime, all the time. And I learned a long time ago not to "dream of a white Christmas," like a lot of people do, because a white Christmas means snow, and snow means Dad might have to go to work plowing the roads. I'll always take a snow-free Christmas, with Dad getting to stay home with us.
Mom was one of four children, living in a three bedroom, cinderblock house. She moved away from home as a teenager, to flee an abusive mother. She attended community college for one year, until she got married and moved to Colorado, where she could no longer afford the tuition.
When I was very young, she taught me how to read. After my younger sister started school, Mom got a full time job — in addition to the three part-time jobs that she had held forever — at the County Appraiser's office. For most of my life, and until last year, she worked four jobs. She still works three.
For more than a decade, we lived in a single-wide trailer house. As it aged, it fell apart. We used floor mats to mark the spots where we couldn't walk — so as to avoid falling through the floor. Every winter, Dad stacked hay bails around the outside of the house to keep the water and gas lines from freezing.
Instead of purchasing new work boots, Dad repaired his old ones with duct tape. For family vacations, we visited his cousin in Colorado. We had three channels on TV, and almost never ate out. We grew vegetables in the garden and canned them, so we could eat them through the winter. I wore hand-me-down clothing from my much-larger brother. (To this day, I like clothing to fit loosely. Mom says that's because I got used to it when I was young.)
But over time, my parents climbed.
They scrimped and saved, scratched and clawed, kept going to work, kept raising three children, paid attention to their finances, didn't spend more than they had, repaired things instead of buying new ones. Deliberately, honestly, smoothly, over the years, they climbed. From their impoverished childhoods, they pulled themselves into the lower-middle-class that we lived in during my early childhood, and later, to the middle-middle-class I enjoyed by the time I reached high school. Then I graduated and went to college at Fort Hays State University.
My parents chipped in what they could to help me get by, and they provided a safety net. But I needed scholarships and student loans. I also worked every summer, and during the school years. I lifeguarded. I worked for KDOT, flagging traffic at road work zones and weed-eating around highway signs. I drove a tractor. One summer, I worked for Wal-Mart, pushing shopping carts in from the parking lot.
After five years I earned a history degree. As far as I can tell, I was the second Manly ever to graduate from college. (My brother, I think, was the first. Today he's an engineer. And my sister Catelyn, I think, was the third. Now, she's a high school math teacher.)
I worked as a reporter for the Hays Daily News for a few years. Then I enrolled in law school at KU. More student loans, more scholarships, more part-time work in the summer (and for the past year, also during school), and the GI Bill have helped pay for my legal education. And again, my parents helped where they could.
On Saturday, I will graduate from law school.
* * *
This story is my attempt to pay tribute to my parents, and to America. Tribute to my parents because they have done everything that anybody could reasonably ask of them — actually, much more than that — so that their children could have things a bit better than they did. Tribute to America because it worked.
In America, scrimping and saving and sacrificing can lead to something great. One generation's socioeconomic status and education level holds no bearing on what the next generation can accomplish. If parents work hard and make good decisions, their children can have things better than they did.
In America, anyone can go to school. Almost anyone committed to it can get a college education. By making the right choices, anyone with the brains can go to law school. It doesn't matter if your parents were lawyers or if they were day laborers.
In America, it doesn't matter if a boy grew up poor. It doesn't matter if his dad works overtime every day, and his mom works four jobs, just to make ends meet. It doesn't matter if they lived for years in a single-wide trailer house with holes in the floor, or if they couldn't afford a car that had a heater. In America, if that boy's parents raise him well, and if they make good decisions, when he grows up he can become anything he sets his mind to. In America, if parents work hard, their children can have things a bit better than they did.
* * *
Lately — I think this is because of the crossroads that I am about to reach — I've been contemplating life. I think about where I started, and where I have reached. Today, I sit at the bottom of a heap of debt, and if we weigh what I still have to learn against what I already know, what I still have to learn would clearly be the more massive side of the scale.
But I'm young, I'm healthy, I'm capable, and — because of the things my parents did for me, and because rising is America's greatest virtue — I have a fighting chance.
I think about my physical and mental talents, about my physical and mental health. For that, I'm thankful to God.
I think about the values I've been taught, and the advantages that I've been handed. For that, I'm thankful to my parents.
And I think about where my parents came from, and where I've been over the last 28 years, about where I can go in the rest of my life. I know there is no limit. For that, I'm thankful to the United States of America.
* * *
In those days when I worked as a newspaper reporter, I sometimes reviewed movies. My colleagues told me I was the harshest critic on the staff. Of all of the movies I ever reviewed, I only ever gave two A's. One movie that got one was Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks.
He played a congressman who used his unique position on a handful of relevant congressional committees to arrange for the weapons that the Mujahideen used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Other than a small handful of John Wayne's very best works, it is my favorite movie.
I'm particularly fond of
one scene, which takes place just after Congressman Wilson has made the dramatic decision that he will champion the cause of the Afghans against the Soviet army. He's on a plane ride with a young aide, and he tells her about his first foray into politics. He describes a day when he was 13, and a neighbor — a member of the city council — viciously killed his dog. To win revenge, the young Mr. Wilson used his learner's permit to drive 96 otherwise disenfranchised voters to the polls on the next election day, where he dutifully told them about his neighbor's brutal behavior before they voted.
Then, with satisfaction, he tells about how the neighbor lost the election by 16 votes. Then he said: "And that's the day I fell in love with America."
It's a beautiful scene, in an excellent movie, based on a beautiful — and true — story. It's one of my favorite movie lines: "And that's the day I fell in love with America."
But my own experience is a little bit different. Every day I think about the place I am in life, the challenges that my parents have faced, and the opportunities now available to me. I think about how poor people can work hard and make good choices, and then their children can grow up to go to college, to go to law school, to accomplish anything imaginable.
I think about what my parents did for me and my siblings. And I think about how remarkable it is that their efforts worked. That doesn't happen everywhere in the world.
I think about how, in America, there is no limit to human accomplishment.
I think about my dad driving a pickup —
in the 21st century — that had a hole in the floor and no heat. I think about my mom, to this day still working three jobs. I think about every chance that I have had, and everything I can accomplish.
And
every single day, I fall in love with America again.
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