Squarehead

 August 14, 2023

“I’m just an old German Square Head,” he said. I can’t remember what we were talking about, but his self-description amused me even as I knew it fit. He was bald, with a high, square forehead perched atop a stocky, rectangular face and jaw, all of which sat upon a short, stocky frame. I think he also used that moniker to describe his personality. He had come from tough stock; German anabaptist roots that brooked little nonsense in matters of faith and practice. 

He was my grandfather, John Helwig; actually, my step-grandfather, the man who led me to Christ years before marrying my widowed grandmother. He had brains; he had worked for Kodak in its heyday, but other than his faith in Christ, his real passion was horticulture. He was one of the few laymen who had an open pass to Highland Park in Rochester, where he was allowed to take cuttings from the lilacs there, some worth thousands of dollars. Not many were given this almost sacred privilege. 

His house was the last on a dead-end street, perched at the crest of a low ridge. The gully at the end of his street curled like a giant backwards “C” penetrating his back yard and looking like a miniature amphitheater below his back steps, sidewalk and the garage that sat slightly behind and to the left of his home. There was just enough space to walk beside his garage to his vegetable garden on the far side of the amphitheater.

The soil of his garden was like nothing I’ve ever seen before or since. It was a beautiful sandy loam completely devoid of even the smallest of stones; a gardener’s veritable Eden, and he was Adam, tending it with loving care. The principles by which he lived were gleaned from the soil as much as from the Scriptures, but among the many there was one that is forever etched in my memory. It had to do with weeds:

“Quarter inch, quarter hour.

Half inch, half hour.

One inch, all day.”

Poppa Helwig, as we called him, made sure I knew he wasn’t talking just about weeds, but about life. So often, we ignore small problems, hoping they will somehow go away, but like tiny quarter-inch weeds, they just keep growing till something that could have been handled quickly and discreetly has become a firestorm that takes monumental effort to eradicate. I’ve not always listened to the old Square Head’s wisdom, to my own detriment. But when I’ve taken it to heart, it has saved me a boatload of trouble. It might just do the same for you.