July 7, 2022
My Uncle Rayvon (my mother’s brother) and his best friend Alec had worked in the summer heat all week. It was Saturday afternoon, and they had finished their work. They had just enough time to rush home, clean up, and pick up their dates. They had two problems.
I had spent most of the afternoon riding the tractor with my uncle. I was 5 years old and one of their problems. The other problem was that they had two tractors and a pickup truck in the field that had to be taken my parents’ house and only two drivers. Being resourceful, Uncle Rayvon quickly solved both problems. Michael could drive the John Deere Model B to the house.
The John Deere Model B had a small platform between the seat and the steering wheel. If sitting, the driver could rest his feet on the platform; or for a change of pace, he could stand up and drive the tractor. The tractor also had a lever, about three feet long, to the right of the steering wheel.
The driver used the lever to engage and disengage the clutch, an easy task for a teenager or an adult, but impossible for a five-year-old boy.
Uncle Rayvon figured out the new problem. I was to stand on the platform with my hands on the steering wheel. Since I was too short to see over the steering wheel, I was to look just to the side of it. He put the tractor in second gear, set the throttle at just above idle, and positioned the tractor so that I could drive in a straight line across an unplanted field to the house. He was ready to give me my first driving lesson.
“I want you to drive to the open spot between your dad’s shop and the burn barrel. I’ll push the clutch up and get you started. Then I will jump off, get in the pickup truck, and I’ll be at the house to jump back on the tractor in time to pull the clutch back and stop the tractor.”
His last instruction was to tell me that I wouldn’t have to do much steering. “Just keep the tractor headed for the open place between the shop and the burn barrel.” The path I was to follow was little more than a quarter mile long and straight from where the tractor was to the stopping spot between dad’s shop and the burn barrel.
He did. I did. He did. All ended well. I drove the tractor home. Uncle Rayvon drove the pickup truck, and Alec drove the other tractor; and they made it home, cleaned up, and picked up their dates.
Years later, when Uncle Rayvon was in the end stages of kidney cancer, I visited with him. He was having a better day than usual. “Let’s go for a drive. I want to go look at the crops,” he said, as he pitched me the keys to his truck. “You better do the driving. I get a bit dizzy occasionally.”
Our farm tour took us across fields full of memories. They included land Grandpa Knapp had owned and farmed, which now belonged to my grandmother, land owned by Uncle Rayvon and Aunt Frankie, and land owned by my parents. Each field called forth shared memories. I would stop the truck, and one of us would start a story. “Do you remember . . .?” It was a precious, pleasant afternoon of sharing stories birthed by times of shared work.
Our last stop of the day was at the field in which I had received my first driving lesson. Stopping the truck, I asked, “Do you remember letting me drive the John Deere Model B tractor home on the day I had spent with you and Alec? I love telling that story.” He did remember, but I told it again. Good stories need to be told again and again.
When I finished telling the story, Uncle Rayvon smiled and chuckled. “There’s more to the story. Your mother almost killed me, and you and the tractor almost ended up in the house.”
According to my uncle, Mom, who was in the kitchen preparing supper, heard the tractor getting louder as it approached the house. From her vantage point, it appeared that the tractor was driverless. She stepped outside to get a closer view. About the time Uncle Rayvon came flying into the driveway, a cloud of dust rising from the truck’s tires, Mom spied her little boy’s head peering around the tractor’s steering wheel. I remember seeing her and waving excitedly so that she could see I was driving.
I’ll let my uncle finish the story. “When I jumped out the truck and rushed toward you and the tractor that was just entering the shop area, your mother jumped me. She was screaming about my letting you drive and hitting me with her fists. You were already where I meant to have stopped the tractor, and you were moving toward the house. I pushed your mother to the ground, jumped on the tractor, and stopped it just before you entered the backyard and would have hit the house.”
“She never told me that part of the story,” I said.
“Well,” my grinning uncle said, “It is not one her favorite stories.”
And that was my first driving lesson, and the most important part of the lesson was learned on that later afternoon spent with my uncle.
The most important part of the lesson was about the power and importance of shared stories. Stories drive our living.
The earliest books of Bible make clear how important storytelling is. Consider these three examples: Exodus 12:21-25; Deuteronomy 6:20-25; and Joshua 4:1-7.
Our living creates stories. As we share the stories, both the stories and the persons in the stories live on into the future.