“When I was a little boy,” I said, “I had a lot of fun with Pop.”
I didn’t tell Colton why I spent so much time with Pop and my Grandma
Ellen on their farm in Ulysses, Kansas. The sad truth was that my dad, a
chemist who worked for Kerr-McGee Petroleum, suffered from bipolar
disorder. Sometimes, when his episodes got bad enough, my mom, Kay,
an elementary school teacher, had to put Dad in the hospital. She sent me
to Pop’s to shield me from that. I didn’t know I was being “shipped away”—
I just knew I loved roaming the farm, chasing chickens, and hunting rabbits.
“I spent a lot of time with Pop at their place out in the country,” I said to
Colton. “I rode on the combine and the tractor with him. He had a dog, and
we’d take him out and hunt rabbits.”
Colton nodded again: “Yeah, I know! Pop told me.”
Well, I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “The dog’s name was
Charlie Brown, and he had one blue eye and one brown one.”
“Cool!” Colton said. “Can we get a dog like that?”
I chuckled. “We’ll see.”
My grandfather, Lawrence Barber, was a farmer and one of those
people who knew everyone and whom everyone considered a friend. He
started most of his days before dawn, beating it from his farmhouse in
Ulysses, Kansas, down to the local doughnut shop to swap stories. He was
a big guy; he played fullback in the days before the pass. His wife, my
Grandma Ellen (the same grandma who sent money to help with Colton’s
hospital bills), used to say it would take four or five tacklers to bring
Lawrence Barber down.
Pop was a guy who went to church only once in a while. He was kind of
private about spiritual things, the way a lot of men tend to be. I was about
six years old when he died after driving off the road late one night. Pop’s
Crown Victoria hit a power pole, cracking it in half. The top half of the pole
keeled over and smashed into the Crown Victoria’s roof, but the car’s
momentum carried Pop another half mile into a field. The accident
knocked out the power at a feed yard a little way back in the direction Pop
had come from, prompting a worker there to investigate. Pop was
apparently alive and breathing right after the accident, because rescue
workers found him stretched across the passenger seat, reaching for the
door handle to try to escape from the car. But when he arrived by