A brother died not long ago—and I attended the memorial talk—who once toured with Hank Williams. He’d been a roadie, one of the support team. It was a plus when they discovered he could sing. One evening when, according the memorial speaker, Hank didn’t show up and he was pressed into service. How did it go afterwards, family asked him. “Well, nobody asked for their money back,” he replied.
Actually, the reason Hank did not show up was that he was dead drunk. There is no better way to authenticate a Hank Williams story than to say he was dead drunk because he so often was. Nonetheless, stories sometimes get exagerated in the retelling, so I ask family members afterward about it. ‘Oh yes,’ they assured me, ‘it absolutely happened.’
John (let us call him John) was born Native American in the 1930s. His formal education took him through the third grade. He thus said ‘irregardless’ a lot. This factors into my first book, ‘Tom Irregardless and Me.’ He related to me ages ago how he was helped to break free from that word. After a certain public talk, kindly Kermit approached him to ask if, as a favor, he would look up the word ‘irregardless’ in the dictionary. “I never found it,” John told me. He never used the word again.
This story excited me to no end because another brother was saying irregardless all the time and it was driving me nuts. I approached him. “Do me a favor,” I asked kindly. “Look up ‘irregardless’ in the dictionary.” He did so. Much had changed in 30 years. He found it. True, the word was qualified as “irregular,” but believe me—that was a qualificaton far too subtle for our boy. If anything, he doubled down on it. Thus it is that my Bible student, Ted Putsch attends his first public talk, this brother is the substitute speaker, and I slink down in my seat as he launches into a discourse that employed the word so frequently that Sam has downloaded an app that keeps count.
At the end of the book, this brother leaves for another congregation and I am so thrilled. I like him and all—who doesn’t?—but I am so sick and tired of hearing ‘irregardless.’ If I never hear that stupid word again, I will . . . “OH NO!!! Ike Incumbantuponus just moved into the congregation!”
John’s son, at the memorial talk, was interviewed about his dad. He said Pop “never sweated the small stuff.” As proof, he told of when he cut his Dad’s hair when the latter had fallen asleep after a day’s exhausting work. He had been playing with his son, but then he fell asleep. “You weren’t watching your son, were you?” said his wife when she returned, the woman who had first made the observation that he needed a haircut. John looked in the mirror and broke up laughing, the son related. It was a horrific job. “I just wanted to help the guy out,” the son told me after.
“Come to think of it,” he related, “Pop didn’t really sweat the big stuff either,” thus anticipating the reaction—speaker included—of those who knew him best.
And no, he didn’t permanently stay with Hank. Sometime early on he figured that if he did, it would be the only thing he would do. Other interests that he held more dear would suffer.
****** The bookstore
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