From Disgusted To Decisive

No, that is not a picture of me holding one of my sons. That is a picture of my dad holding me.

Jackson Ralph Garrett, who was known to many people as the Oklahoma Cowboy Poet, or just plain Hoss to some, was very proud of me for being his son even though we seldom saw one another after he and my mom were divorced when I was six.

I didn't actually start seeing a lot of him until I finally had a car, which I think he bought if I remember correctly. He had to buy several cars for me because I either wrecked them or bought lousy ones to begin with. Up until then, my sister and I only had the usual every other weekend visit with him as was the case with many a young person after a divorce during those years.

My dad worked hard on the shipping docks as a warehouseman for Tulsa Paper Company for 34 straight years, so buying cars was not an easy thing for him to do financially. I discovered later upon his death that he would take money out of his paycheck each and every week and purchase a United States Savings Bond in each of our (my sister and my) names. And yes I do mean each and every single solitary week without fail for 34 years until he retired. Although he had sometimes mentioned to us that he was saving something up, I had no idea that I would one day discover the bonds while going through his belongings after his death. I want you to know that it was a pretty humbling experience to stumble onto a brief case in his closet with those savings bonds all neatly packaged and secured together. All $68,000 dollars of them with our names printed right on them as the recipients of the bonds. This was a pretty impressive deal to me since up until that point in my life I had never been able to save as much as a gum wrapper, much less being able to unselfishly save something valuable for someone else. The money was split between my sister and I, and we of course then paid our way out of our many debts and we started new ventures in life, but that is not what my story is really all about. My story is about another kind of saving something.

The saving that he did that I'm referring to in this story was a standard box guitar he had purchased in 1958, the year that I was born. It wasn't all that expensive, but it was a very good guitar. He always told me that I could have it once I reached 18 years of age. I looked forward to that for years.

Shortly after I lost one of the cars he had bought me in an accident at 51st and Peoria (a guy ran a red light and broadsided me), a friend of mine and I came up with this brilliant scheme to run away from Tulsa and find someplace where no one could ever tell us what to do. Let me see if I can stop laughing and continue typing the story. This would be my second attempt at running away from home, the first one having been a few years before that. I returned home from that adventure because of a younger brother who had passed away and I was flown home from Phoenix, Arizona by a church group immediately after receiving the death notice from the police. Just as a side note, people were telling us what to do in Phoenix too, so if you're looking for freedom from authority you won't find it by running off anywhere.

At this point I went to visit my dad and inform him of my intent to run away from the world with my friend and to tell him goodbye. After a few hours of trying to talk me out of it by telling me his stories about working all over the country as a field worker cutting broom corn, a railroad worker, a road builder, and all the other things he did that would have probably killed me, he finally agreed that he wouldn't try to stop me and he even gave me some money to help me with my escape attempt. Since he knew I was going to do it anyway, I guess he didn't want me to do it as broke as I was. In addition, I also managed to talk him into giving me the guitar he had saved for me even though I was nowhere near 18 years old yet. Getting that guitar from him proved to become one of the worst things and one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Once in Phoenix, it didn't take long to figure it all out. Everything is exactly the same as it is everywhere else. Somebody still tells you what to do. If you want to eat, you have to work, and to work, somebody tells you what to do. Get over it. I can still remember sitting on the porch outside of the dilapidated apartment my friend and I shared, holding that guitar and at the same time being scared to death of it. I couldn't play it and never did learn a single thing on that guitar. I was convinced that I was the only person in the world that would not be able to play the guitar, and of course, everyone else who picked it up could play stuff on it with ease, which made it even more frustrating. Subsequently, I never even learned or played a single note.

Once winter time came, my friend and I had finally blown it on our fancy big time jobs as a cook and a dishwasher at the International House of Pancakes on Camelback Road. Too many times of showing up late, and smoking way too much weed had finally done us both in, and we both got fired about the same time. As soon as the rent ran out, there was no place left to go but down. Or home. We chose home, but we had one big problem. We had no money.

Other than the blue jeans I was wearing, I owned only 2 items. A sheepskin lined jean jacket I had bought at Kmart, and the guitar my dad had saved for me. To get back home, I had to return the jacket to the store for a refund, and I had to pawn the guitar. As strange as it seems, I guess it didn't really bother me that much. I must have been a lot worse off than I had yet realized.

Upon returning to Tulsa, one of the things I knew I would eventually have to do at some point in my life, was to go and tell my dad what had happened to the guitar. When I told him what I had done, I think I saw in him a disappointment far beyond anything that I could have understood at the time, but I knew enough to know how deeply I had hurt him. After I left his house that day, I had to have the friend who had driven me there pull the car over so that I could throw up. Every time I thought about the look on his face I almost couldn't stand it, and I knew that I deserved to feel that way. I was so angered at myself that day that I made a decision that I would not only replace the guitar I had lost, but that I would also learn how to play well enough to play him all of the songs that I knew he liked, or any other song that he could tell me the title of, no matter the cost or how much time it would ever take.

Later, another person I had met who then grew to become a life-long friend of mine, Bob Brown, who was a gifted electric lead guitar player, tried to help me by letting me use his bass guitar. He tried to teach me some stuff, but that didn't seem to work out either. Then one day while visiting a pawn shop, interestingly enough, Bob spotted a busted up beginner sized guitar laying in various pieces on the glass counter.

He asked the man at the counter was this guitar for sale, and the guy just said, man if you want it just take it. So, he took it. It did not even have a back in it, just the shell, the neck, and the head. Bob brought those pieces home and assembled them together, even cutting out a back for it by using an old piece of heavy cardboard and small tacks to hold it on, and then he gave it to me. That is the guitar that I learned to play on. Those strings must have stood a half inch above the fretboard, and it was ugly, but my mind was made up. I went to Saied's Music store and bought a one page chart of chords and away I went. By the time I had finished I could strum almost any country song you could name, or at least half of it. Bob and I were working at the same place together for awhile, and soon after this I was able to finally purchase a pretty good sounding Eagle guitar. I was now ready.

The picture here is actually taken a few years later on a Polaroid camera by my dad when I wasn't looking. I'm sitting on his couch playing him a song on my new and even better sounding Takamine Acoustic guitar. I would play as he called out song titles. I didn't know some of them all the way through, but I knew most of the words to each song enough to recognize that he was happy. I could finally look him in the eye again without being overcome by a feeling of absolute disgust. Not from him, but from me.

I use this picture a lot, not because I'm trying to relive the glory days (although I do look pretty cool in it) but because of where I was when it was taken. I was sitting across from the man who had saved for me during his whole life. He sacrificed everything of his so that we could have it better than he did. He lived in a small garage apartment no larger than a storage shed for that entire time, and his Ford truck did not have an air conditioner. I don't mean that it didn't work. I mean that he ordered it without one to save the money. He didn't have one in his house either, just box fans. He could have lived a lot better for himself, but instead, he saved his hard earned money for us, and if I go by our actions at the time (my sister and me) we certainly did not deserve it. At the exact moment this photo was being taken, I was being able to return something to him that money can't ever hope to buy. His son was playing a guitar and singing for him, and he was happy and proud about it.

I'm so fortunate that of all the things I could say about my dad, the best is that he was saved. He knew Jesus was Lord and said so. But I do regret that he never got to listen a single one of my gospel songs. He died in 2000 at the age of 72 years young. I choose to believe he is among that great cloud of witnesses mentioned in the book of Hebrews, cheering me on and that he is well aware of what I am doing.

I believe that my dad would be happy with the legacy he left behind, even though I had once disappointed him so deeply. During all of that, and the relationship we had after these events, proved to me that a father's love goes so much farther and deeper than just being about what a child does. He instead loves his child simply because of who he is. You don't have to look very hard to find a biblical lesson in that statement right there.

So if people think I'm now somehow embarrassed or that I would draw back from asking people to help me fund the project I'm working on now, I would simply have to tell them that I am not bothered one little bit. What I'm doing has something much more behind it than just a guy wanting to release a CD. I'm really releasing what is in my heart for others, compliments of the Lord Jesus Christ, and compliments of those special people who have helped me in previous moments of my life. There have been and still are many of these people. Had not each specific moment been fit together like a finely knitted quilt, everything would most certainly have been much different.

In honor of my Father, Jack Ralph Garrett, I invite you to come and see what I am doing!

END