“Stay behind the hog.”
Of all the advice given to me from my father, this phrase – offered to me one summer at the Fayette County Fair – turned out to be unexpectedly useful.
Back in the day my brother and I showed 4H hogs at the Fayette County Fair. We bought piglets from the Durbins and raised them until they were ready to show. Jack Durbin also had a set of sons about our age, and the four of us were later joined by the Schaub brothers and other Sefton Township youth to make up the Sefton Clovers. We were a very 1980s crew, accustomed to vague expectations and unsupervised afternoons, and the stories that percolate from those summers, many of them mostly true, could fill a book.
But today we have just one column, so let’s focus.
As I remember it, showing hogs was relatively simple. We kept them in their pen until it was about time to show, then we moved them to the cleaning stall outside the barn. Once showered off and preened for display, we shuttled them to the show ring. Mostly the hog did what it was supposed to do, which was to walk around so the judge could get a good look at it while we followed and watched where we stepped.
The one thing a young 4Her wanted to avoid, however, was getting in between the judge and the pig. There should always be a clean line of sight between the judge and the animal, because it wasn’t about us. It’s about what we were showing – the hog.
It wasn’t until years later I realized this concept was useful even outside a show ring, because too often in life, I have absolutely gotten in the way of myself. My pride and bad habits – sometimes just my hesitation to turn the pages on chapters already read – have often kept me from living life as designed.
In my younger years, for example, I had a tendency to take things much too personally.
I’ve learned over time – mostly – to let other people just be people; to let them be rude, or distracted, or whatever. I’ve learned to “let the hog be,” so to speak, and just focus on where I was walking so I don’t have to clean off MY shoes at the end of the day.
More recently, I’ve also allowed nostalgia to get in the way of good parenting.
Parents and children seem to live in parallel universes, existing next to each other but operating at different “speeds.” Because of the nature of relativity, one year for us is quite small, but for kids it’s a huge – and sometimes cataclysmic – passage of time. A half decade goes by and kids are different humans altogether, living in the same house with the same name but in different bodies with different minds. Thus, an activity that might seem quaint and delightful for us – the elders taking the long view – will seem remarkably stupid to them, although we were sure it was them (surely just a week ago, right?) who had begged to go see the Christmas lights, for example, or walk on the TREC trail, or just sit in the same room with us at the same time and watch the same movie for the dozenth time.
What happened?
Nothing happened, but also everything, and as the “adults in the room,” we will do ourselves a favor by letting them be them. As we learn from the book of Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for everything under the sun, and trying to reap when it’s actually time to sow is one of the clumsiest ways of getting in our own way.
Reminiscing on my own childhood, I’ve come to appreciate how good dad was at knowing what time it was. Reflecting on his passing five years ago this spring, (and all the parenting I’ve attempted in the half-decade since) I’ve come to realize how patient he was, allowing us to become who we were – dumb mistakes and all – instead of constantly corralling us towards his own prerogatives. I’m sure he often parented with Ecclesiastes in mind, whether it was time for dinner or time for bed; whether it was planting season or harvest, or baseball season, or time to get the hogs loaded up and shuttled off to fair.
Joshua Robison lives in Effingham, where he teaches English at Effingham High School. He can be reached at josh.robsn@gmail.com