| WorkThe Laugh Was For Me The Laugh Was For Me
Time is a natural thing. On the farm we all attempted wearing cheap watches at one time or another but the watches stopped running because of sweat getting into them while we worked or because the watch got banged with something. Or maybe because the watches were cheap. Anyway in those days when I was a boy a wristwatch was to wear on Sundays. If you had one that was what it was for, to wear on Sundays and not everyday when you were working. I have never become interested in having a wristwatch. On the farm everyone knew what time it was without a watch and like everybody else I got to feel what time it was. It is something you feel with your shoulders. If it is something that you learn then it was like learning to milk. It is a very nice feeling, knowing what time it is with your insides and your shoulders. Dad never carried a watch and we always went in for dinner at noon on the dot. He was never too early and never late. It worked on cloudy days too, he didn’t have to look at the sun. It was when the clocks were changed twice a year to and from Daylight Savings Time that a mix-up could come in. The neighbors next door across the pasture never paid attention to Daylight Time and sometimes we would see them starting to work in their fields at seven o’clock instead of six o’clock but I don’t ever remember that they were in the fields at five o’clock an hour ahead of us in the morning. If they had been there an hour before us they would have laughed for us. We used to laugh for them when they would come out an hour late in the morning. When a farmer is in the field next to yours and there is an occasion for you to laugh for them you have to laugh very loud so they will hear you and know it. A stage laugh gets to be a habit with a farmer. My dad could laugh for me to hear him at a great distance. It was never a forced laugh but it was a laugh that he could project so it carried through the air and the person to whom the laugh was directed always heard it and knew it. There was no mistaking it, you knew if the laugh was for you to hear. I never learned to do it with my laugh. Of course I never was a farmer. I am a farmer’s son. When I left my father’s farm in Indiana to study to become a painter I went to Chicago. The first day at art school I loitered in the cafeteria waiting for classes to begin. I knew I was early but then the woman working the coffee machine asked me why I didn’t go to my class. I told her it was too early. She said that classes had been going on for half an hour already. I was still on Indiana time but Chicago was on Chicago time. So I had broken my vow to attend all my classes at art school and I heard my father’s laugh all the way to Illinois.
Undated notebook entry |