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Health & Fitness

Dillard Brown and finding love

He was a Kentucky corn and tobacco farmer, then a blacksmith, and then a maker of resplendent cherry furniture, which he burnished to amazing, deep redness with a varnish leavened with chewing tobacco juice.

He would spit his plug chaw juice into a rusty coffee can, grip a full brush and whip the varnish inside the can to a rich frothy brew. And when he spread the thick color over his wood with slow, loving strokes, the finely chiseled surfaces would assume a deep, burgundy mood.

The little coffee table that sits at my feet every night is one of his legacies. It is a delicate, lovely remembrance for a man who would have scratched his eternal week-old beard fitfully had you called him lovely.

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My grandfather - DaDa - bathed once a week whether he needed it or not because that’s all the God he reluctantly acknowledged would have demanded of any civilized man. He shaved with equal indifference to the custom, or at least indifference to the wishes of the women in his life.

A dearly departed wife, two daughters, several deeply disgruntled sisters-in-law and most of the parish mavens had wished he would do much better on his grooming habits and lobbied him without letup or success.

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But Dillard Brown cast his own dice. He always wore bib overalls and a sweat-stained baseball cap with its bill tightly cupped into a deep V. He was a country man with his own ways.

And of course, he was a fabulous five-string Bluegrass banjo player whose 1940 recorded rendering of “Cripple Creek” remains my favorite sound in the whole world.

His fingers could fly like a swarm of bats scared into startled flight.
I still know Dillard Brown for all those memories, but I remember him most for love and winter.

Dillard Brown found love in winter. Not only the winter of weather, but the winter of his life when all his kin had thought him mostly through with life and love.

But Dillard Brown fooled them with the strength of his yearning and came to love a woman after his dear wife of decades had been taken by a cruel stroke. She had lingered in twilight for months and months, and his heart was broken by the loss of her.

He soaked himself in bourbon and cherry varnish. He pulled his cap down tightly and got on with life.

But now he had found love again. How strange. How odd. Life is a trickster.

He would stand in the cold Kentucky mornings of my childhood and stare into the winds of February and then turn to look at me. He’d laugh. And wink. He was happy. There was no doubt of that.

And when he found love again at 70, no one could understand it, least of all him, because he was old and he had been loved enough for a dozen men’s lives. And why would he spoil the delicate end-of-life symmetry by being an old man in love?

They had no intention of understanding the depth of his yearning, and so were angry with it.

Love at the wrong point in life can so disturb other people.

But he was in love. Even I could see it when I saw them together. And in her was a warmth that I saw he had needed. She was his spring after a long, dark winter.

We would stand outside his working shed and watch the embers of soft winter sunsets, and he’d wink at me and then go inside to her.

Inside to the warming. Inside to love. I understood, even then.

Yes, thinking of approaching winter makes me moody, and  the thought of approaching gray skies can deflect the happiest moment and make it sullen.

But at this moment, I think of Dillard Brown and the power of finding love when you least expect and are told you cannot possibly deserve it.

When I am least happy with life, I think of Dillard and his unexpected love. And I feel better.


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