Passing the Baton

August 12, 2018

All we could see was the back of his head as he drove down the street and off to college nearly thirty years ago. Linda and I stood side by side, clutching each other’s hand for the strength we didn’t have. There were lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes as our eldest son stretched his wings and headed off into the future that awaited him. 

This all came flooding back this afternoon as once more we watched the back of his head as he drove down the road, this time on her dad’s beloved 1948 8N tractor. All the years she was growing up, it was his baby, tended with loving care, garaged and covered each night, flawlessly maintained, and regularly used. He loved the soft low growl of the engine, and would sometimes just sit and listen to it purr. Linda loves to tell the story of the time he let her drive while he maneuvered the horse-drawn cultivator behind. As they turned to cultivate the next row of corn, she mistakenly shifted into fourth instead of first gear. Singing at the top of her lungs, she couldn’t hear his hollering as he bounded down the row, his short little legs pumping like you see in an old time cartoon. Huffing and puffing at the end of the row, he asked if she was trying to kill him.

Nobody, but NOBODY was allowed to touch his tractor! I was thoroughly surprised the day he needed help tearing down the old barn across the road. He was laid up with a bad back, but the barn needed to come down, and he actually let me drive it, hooking the chains to the back wall and pulling it to the ground. It was the only time I ever drove it. He on the other hand, plowed snow in the winter, cut hay with the sickle bar in the summer, hooked a large circular saw to the belt-driven pulley in the fall to cut firewood, and pulled the grandkids all over the farm in his homemade wagon. 

Linda was the tomboy of the six sisters, and had hoped that someday she would inherit the tractor. It’s the only thing she really wanted. The day came, a couple years after he died. Out of the blue, her mother said to her, “Your dad wanted you to have it. You better get it out of the garage.” Linda didn’t need a second invite. We brought it home, and except for plowing in the winter, our little 2 1/2 acres doesn’t offer much of a workout for the old girl, and the old six volt system rendered it pretty unreliable for starting on cold winter mornings. So most of the time, it just sat.

Last week we had a friend install a 12 volt system on it, and after giving the grandkids turns driving it around the yard this afternoon, we said our goodbyes with that same lump in our throats watching the back of Nathan’s head as he drove it down the road to its new home in his barn. Thankfully, we didn’t have to sell it. It’s only a tractor; steel and rubber, motor, gears, and wheels, but it’s more than that. It’s one of the last tangible connections to a life well-lived and to the man whose love and integrity shaped my wife into the woman of character and beauty she is today. Maybe that old tractor can be to the next generation a point of connection where love of family and of Christ is cultivated in young hearts and minds for eternal purposes. If so, it will be ample proof that ordinary material things can be more than they are, just as ordinary people touched with love can be more than they are.