One point in time

I never pass a park ranger's cabin without thinking of my brother, Tom. As a child he would walk right up to birds and other small animals and pick them up. Had I known about St. Francis of Assis, I might have wondered who this brother was, but we just knew him as a boy who always walked to the beat of a drum no one but he could ever hear.

His eyes were not good. He could not see six feet in front of him without thick glasses, but no one knew that until he started turning somersaults in first grade and the teacher thought he was "retarded." Several visits to a child psychologist later it turned out he was actually very gifted. He could already read, play chess and do most things -- if the spirit moved him.

But it took spirit to move him. Nothing else mattered enough to him. He couldn't play baseball like the other boys because he saw no point in running around hitting balls with a stick  and when he was standing in the field he was more likely to be watching that beetle carrying something through the grass than the ball flying towards him.

He wanted to be a Park Ranger when he grew up. He liked the idea of working out in the woods with animals, so in high school he got his first jobs mowing grass for a state park. It was a dangerous job working on steep slopes, but they just tied a rope to his waist and he was content.

After graduation he began taking the first steps towards this career. Unfortunately he also began dating a sixteen year old girl who wanted to get married. I think they imagined themselves living in that little house in the big woods together, but both parents were against it. So, being young and impetuous, they got pregnant! Solved their problems. They thought. In those days if you were pregnant you were married. And they were.

Now the boy who loved nature discovered you cannot pay rent and take care of a family mowing grass so he went to work in a factory. The money was good. He worked the night shift and sometimes in the daylight he could still walk in the woods. Sometimes.

That marriage didn't last five years and neither did the rest of them. He continued on working in factories and doing maintenance work to pay child support for his various children for the next forty years. Then he injured his back moving a five hundred pound stove and slowly succumbed to alcoholism, heart problems, and diabetes.

For a while he walked in the woods, but then he had to settle for watching nature programs on television. Smoking cigarettes' and watching Captain Kangaroo . . . don't tell me, I've nothing to do.

He finally died, a hard drinking, smoking man who quit both too late, missing two toes to diabetes with a bad heart and breathing problems. He was loved and missed by many people, but he was still  dead.

I think he would tell you he did it his way, a free man who walked to the beat of a different drummer, but I believe he took the wrong fork in the path when it really mattered.