One and Done | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: One and Done | Previous Challenge Entry
By LINDA GERMAIN
01/18/24
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He was a funny fellow. Not odd. Just droll, witty, amusing, and sometimes knee-slapping hilarious. Before the term “dad jokes” was coined, he was already the invisible president of the local chapter.

He loved to write short, tongue-in-cheek poems to the editor of the paper as a comment on certain current events. Folks who looked forward to his infrequent published observations might have wondered if he was a writer of anything longer. Could have been. Wasn’t.

Take family trips. Please! It was easy for us to nod off when the fun “ribbon of road,” as he called it, would turn into long stretches of boredom. He must have gotten lonely with no one to talk to, especially when his ever-patient wife settled in for a nap too. As we tried to sleep in the back seat a loud bellowing alarm never failed to bring us to attention.

With his voice volume turned up to ear-splitting full force, he would warble a rather impolite silly song that had something to do with not ever hitting your grandma with a shovel.

Maybe he learned it back in his class clown days, or those WWII Army Air Corp barracks. I vaguely remember a line at the end about it leaving a bad impression on her mind.

Another startling, wake-up song was about a mule named Hee-Haw. The contents of that escape me, except for some strange braying donkey sounds in the middle. Even when a ditty would be amusing enough to make us want to hear more, no amount of pleading for an encore would make him repeat. When the show was over, it was over.

He played the piano quite well but couldn’t read music. Those smooth sounds on the keys were equal to what one might hear in old 1940s movies. Again, no immediate replay requests were ever considered.

As a very young child, I heard my grandmother say, “He has always played by ear.”
My innocent comment, of course, was, “But it looks like he plays by hands.”

As a four-year-old, I remember standing on top of his shoes as he gracefully waltzed me around the room. After one loop, the dance was over.

It seems like the element of surprise is what tickled his fancy. He never bragged about a thing he might do well, like the yodeling patter of auctioneer calling. It would just slip out of some well-guarded place when least expected and then right back into hiding.

Decades later, my sweet stepmother called to report something amazing he had done on Sunday morning that was so uncharacteristic she could hardly believe it. My mind raced in every direction trying to decide what on earth he would do during church services.

He didn’t mind passing the collection plate each week and then fading back into the flock. However, on this special day, she said that after his routine trip to the office to secure the money with the others who assisted, she wondered why he did not return to his seat as fast as usual.

All at once, with a resolute air, he marched in with three other men and straight to the front, up two steps, and stood behind the pulpit. She confessed she was afraid she might have gasped way too loud (she was funny too). It wasn’t clear to her what they had in mind until the pianist struck four different notes one at a time.

“Oh no,” was her first reaction, until he opened his mouth and sang clear and strong with the little quartet. Not everyone knew about his exuberant side, but this new surprise was a revelation to more than one. The man could sing!

You’ve probably guessed the next verse of that musical story. Public vocalizing was finished, kaput, over and out.

There can be many complicated explanations why an intelligent, humorous, multi-talented fellow would let a tiny flicker of his many God-given abilities seep out at odd times and then reel them back into storage before they could take root.

We never know who might need encouragement or enlightenment from one of our talents. Whether we bless others with it is up to us. Still, being shy, poor, or handicapped by whatever binds us, doesn’t seem to be an adequate excuse for saying, “No thank you, I’d rather not,” to our Maker.

God gives us a gift for a reason.
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