He was the egg man

While I was out wasting my time at rock concerts and sitting in my room listening to records and baseball games, this is what my grandfather was doing.

Royal Lockard had no time for any frivolities. I don't really remember him much like this, but I do know he was always working. He seemed to hold not much use for the modern world, and he seemed to live a code that was rooted in the 19th century, at least to me.

Men had their roles, women has theirs. Men took care of work outside the house, women took care of work inside the house. My grandmother didn't drive, or example. He didn't have much use for television, and for shows he did watch (Lawrence Welk, for example), it became a problem for him when the show began to feature more and more women. He was the youngest of 11 children, and as I have mentioned before, arthritis left him a virtual cripple in his mid-60s.

Royal and Orpha (along with their children Kline, Florence (known as Dolly) and Rolland (my dad) grew most of their own food on their 40-acre farm, which featured a very large vegetable garden and field upon field of sweet corn. They raised cows, chickens and pigs. Kline and my dad had to drop out of school after the 8th grade to work on the farm. And for as much as women seemed to take a back seat, I was told he encouraged Dolly to finish her education, which she did down the road five miles in Picture Rocks.

Theirs was a simple life for sure. Work seven days a week, with church on Sundays. We often visited on the weekends when I was very young, and I got to help milk cows and collect eggs.

If Royal was alive today, he would not call what I do working. Sitting at a desk was for city folks, and if you weren't using your hands and back, you weren't working.

The only time I saw him relax was on Sunday afternoon drives. The women would sit in the back and the men in the front, me in the middle between Royal and Rolland, who drove.  We would drive around for a couple of hours, look at neighboring farms and end up with ice cream, which was extravagant (or so it seemed to me) in my grandparents world,

On the way home, "Pappy" could see I was getting sleepy and invite me to put my head on his shoulder for a nap.

And between faith and family and the sweat of the working day, you could feel the silence  of these far, far simpler times.

In rural Pennsylvania. In another time. In another place.