For the record, this wasn't the first time my father-in-law had gotten me to do something I didn't really want to do.
Marrying his daughter, that was all my idea. In fact, I'm not too sure he was all that enthusiastic about it, and, frankly, I can't really say I blame him. All I can say is, I tend to grow on people. But it takes a while.
No, Exhibit A in the "Let's Get My Son-In-Law To Do Something He Would Never In His Right Mind Do Under His Own Volition" sweepstakes was the swing set.
Now, I think we've established I'm not mechanically inclined. However, this is a revelation I personally didn't arrive at until later in life. Until that point, a combination of hubris and completely unwarranted optimism led me to believe I could build anything. I mean, I owned tools and I had painstakingly and with much study memorized,"righty-tighty, lefty loosey." What else did I need to know?
My limitations, apparently.
So it was on this stage that my over-confidence and my father-in-law's desire to provide a swing set for his first granddaughter played out. A comedy for most; a tragedy for my knuckles.
The curtain came up on this thing one afternoon in late spring when the Lovely Mrs. Smith pulled into the driveway of our Fort Smith starter home just in time to see her father running across our yard toward his car.
Let's stop here for a moment and paint the picture. My father-in-law was somewhat bigger than life. He was also a big man. And he had a distinctive laugh, a sort of deep bass, Laugh of God (if God has a Southern drawl) chuckle that literally sounded like thunder going "heeheeheehee."
So when you see a big guy trucking across your lawn in the opposite direction from your house, giggling, you sort of get the idea something is up. And it's important to remember people typically run FROM things they don't want to be around. Like bombs. Or alligators. Or anything you have to put together yourself.
Dealing with the bomb or the alligator might have been easier.
As you can imagine, with us being young homeowners/married people/parents, most of the project is recorded on film. I say most because at some point the Lovely Mrs. Smith got tired of taking pictures of me staring, with a confused expression, at two pieces of metal the manufacturers assured me were supposed to go together and that rather obviously didn't. She would see that look again, many times.
One of the pictures shows me with all the parts to the swing set laid out neatly on the ground, mostly because someone had told me once you should lay out all the parts to something before you start putting them together. I wish that person had told me to read the directions all the way through. It might have helped. And kept me from having to dissemble the entire swing when I realized the center support beam had been installed upside down. And bolted into place.
We also have a picture of our oldest daughter blissfully playing in the box the swing set came in. She seems so happy. Maybe I should have just left well enough alone.
Eventually, I got the swing set my father-in-law bought his granddaughter together. And I joined him for golf games and car trips and vacations and dinners and all the things that he loved and that were part of the rolling party that was his life.
And I was there near the end, when his battled was almost over. I think of him often and remember him with a mixture of joy and sadness. With the exception of my own father, he was the man who had the greatest influence on my life.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a terrible disease that literally robs its victims of muscular control and leaves them prisoners in their own bodies. It's even more tragic when it strikes people so active, so full of life. People like my father-in-law.
At last count, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge had raised $88.5 million for research to help develop treatments and, hopefully, find a cure. That's $88.5 million raised, basically, $10 and an ice bath at a time.
So although being filmed while having a bucket of ice cold water poured on my head wasn't exactly my idea of a good time, it was just one more thing my father-in-law got me into. And, somehow it seemed like just the sort of thing that would get a laugh out of Earl Q. Shipley.
A deep bass laugh, kind of like thunder going "heeheehee."
GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST WHO LIVES IN ROGERS.
Commentary on 08/28/2014