Willie Heard

NBC13 featured a story on tonight's evening news about Willie Heard. He is 88 and lives in Alabama. Willie lives from his land, out in the country, which he still plows with a horse. He cans his own jellies and has his own irrigation system and smokehouse. He even eats at home with a wood-fire oven. Willie never graduated past the fourth grade. People like him make me feel that somehow my life must be missing something. Why can't my life be more like that? Shouldn't it be? It's the feeling I get whenever we drive through Leighton. Here is Willie, on the land, close to the land, nowhere near civilization, doing physical, hard labor. When he sweats, it's worth something. Isn't this the kind of man men are supposed to be? The hunter-gatherer kind? Not the kind of man you see getting a grande hazelnut latte or checking his stocks in USA Today before driving his BMW to his 22nd floor office. Willie is Dad's kind of people, simple and plain. A more brutish, natural man. I am an English major. I read books, think serious, intellectual thoughts. I'm proud of mowing a lawn. I sure ain't no Willie. In fact, if there ever were a world convention of plain people, I don't think I'd fit in or even be let in. Sometimes I think there's something wrong with that.