required reading
I put on her finger the ring from a pop-top pop can. (Bet some of you don't remember those. ) Her sister threw it out the next morning, not knowing what it was. For our 15th aniversary, I had a gold pop-top made with her birthstone on it, on a necklace.
The attachment, "Cheerleaders" ran as my regular column in the Progressive Hay Grower magazine, earlier this year. It should be required reading for anyone contemplating marriage.
"35 years and counting, and my heaven on earth gets better every day. "
Brad
Tales of a Hay Hauler
By Brad Nelson
“For the want of a Cheerleader, a life was wasted”
Stereotypes are bad. One of the sharpest ladies I know is a blonde. And she gets a good laugh at a good “blonde” joke. But the stereotype doesn’t fit her at all. So as I relate the next incident, bear in mind that this is NOT typical. Some ten or twelve years after I graduated from high school I observed in my home town a couple who had been, in high school, the lead cheerleader and the star of the football team. She was blonde, well groomed, seemed to be sure of herself and anything but a “dumb blonde”. The other half of this couple, however, was still wearing his high school letterman’s jacket, even though there was no chance he could get it to button. He did not appear to be sure of himself, or educated; he could have been caught in a time warp, not unlike that of Rip Van Winkle, and awakened twelve years after high school, still dressed in high school clothes, and still following the cheerleader; appearing to not know why. The scene seemed comical to me, but somehow not funny.
In about my junior year in high school, (1962) at the annual elections for the next years’ cheerleaders, a tall, lanky blond young man named Max decided to become a candidate. This was before it was common for the cheerleader squad to be co-ed. In fact it was un-heard of for a male to be a cheerleader. As luck would have it, Max got more votes than any of the girls. It was a new and different situation, but it ended up working out okay. Now fast-forward to the upsetting days for agriculture of the mid 1970’s to the early 1980’s.
One of the hay growers I worked closely with mentioned the plight of a group of his neighbors. About four families had farmed close enough together to share the bigger, expensive pieces of equipment. They gave it their best, but the market for agricultural products was neither kind nor forgiving. After a valiant five year struggle, the financial institutions foreclosed, and they had nothing. The crowning blow was that their wives filed for divorce about the same time. Another individual experiencing the same financial situation in the same time frame had a different experience. When the bankruptcy was inevitable, and the discussion of where to go now, and what to do was underway, his wife said to him that as long as he took her and the kids with, wherever he went or whatever he did would be just fine.
Gender doesn’t matter. The cheerleader that matters is not elected, but cultivated. The fertile soil of compassionate consideration, encouragement, self-sacrifice, and love produces the best “forever” cheerleaders. To have a cheerleader in your life, you must be one yourself. Consider the following incidents. The car was misbehaving. The plan was to have the wife drop it off at the repair shop, the husband then to pick her up, and take her on to work. From the writings of the lady involved; “It hit me like a bombshell. He had always been somewhere behind me, just following, just there. In case I stumbled he would be there to pick me up. He didn’t interfere. He supported me in what I wanted to do, even those things that frightened me to try. How comforting were those headlights behind me, sometimes two or three cars back, but there and ready to pick me up. ”
Another lady, whose first child was born with potentially crippling congenital deformities, related this experience to her husband. She had taken their son to the hospital that day, for a scheduled appointment to have the doctors work with casts and splints to attempt to correct the twisted limbs of their child. This particular day she had met another young mother, whose child was there for treatment of a simple club foot. This was simple to correct, and as the child grew, the correction would be 100%. This mother was very attractive, well groomed, intelligent, and educated. The father of her child, presented with a baby less than perfect, had divorced her. The lady telling the story hugged her husband, and cried herself to sleep that night in his arms, with tears of gratitude.
Spend some time on the road with a man, and you learn more of what he’s really like. My friend Leo seemed like a breath of fresh air. The only female he had any desire to be close to he described as, “five-foot two, dark brown hair, and knows just where to rub my back to make it relax so I can sleep really well”. Leo and I shared the pleasure, on those few occasions when the “Mrs. ” could ride along, of going to the places we knew well, of introducing our wives to the waitresses and store clerks that we knew by first name. We both thought it was hilarious that certain other hay haulers we ran with, when they could bring with their wives, had to scout new territory. They must have looked like idiots to their wives, not knowing where to park the truck, or which was the front door into the café. We concluded that if a man’s wife couldn’t trust him, maybe we couldn’t either.
My favorite cheerleader isn’t much for being theatrical. Unless she’s acting as my editor. When the discussion of the proper usage of the king’s English would get a bit “warm”, she would tearfully state that she didn’t want people to think I was “an uneducated hick”. And so the commas were added or deleted as pleased her. (Most of the time. ) With her kind guidance I’ve progressed to where she doesn’t panic if I send a story off before she has a chance to edit it. Without her being theatrical, I know that she trusts me, that she believes in me and that in her eyes I can do no wrong. Ah, that every man and woman could have such a cheerleader in his or her life. And better yet, that they know how to feed and care for it, so it wants to stay forever.
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