Father, Son and Hold This Goat

My dad turned 80 last week.

We had a party for him at my brother’s house Saturday, where we sat in lawn chairs under some big oaks as the sun set, ate boiled shrimp six feet apart from each other, played some dominos and laughed about the great goat chase that spanned the previous two days.

A delivery driver had dropped off some stuff at my parent’s house on Friday and spied one of the young goats in their field and offered to purchase it, for a barbeque.

My dad is not young anymore, but he thought he could still chase down the goat to complete the transaction.

After an hour-and-a-half of working together my dad and the delivery driver were no closer to catching the goat.

That’s why early Saturday morning, as I was still wiping the sleep from my eye after a late night covering the Leps dramatic football win, my dad called and asked me to come down the road to help in the goat rodeo.

Me and my oldest son went over to find that my brother and his son had also been invited to the event.

With my mom and dad guarding wide space in the gates, the rest of the four of us formed an advancing brigade, which eventually cornered the goat in the barn.

The goat was no fool, however.

He recognized that my brother was the oldest of our advancing force, and thus would have the slowest reaction time, so he targeted that direction for an escape.

The goat was right, and my brother made an all-too-late dive at the kid, but the goat dodged him and came right into my arms. As I held him aloft in triumph, I knocked my head on a low lying barn rafter, nearly losing the goat.

The bump on my head has subsided but the humor of the situation has not.

These kind of exciting errands are fun stuff and here’s hoping my dad is around for 20 more birthdays to keep us busy.

I’m not sure I actually thought he’d make it to 80, even as recently as a few years ago. My dad’s in great shape for someone of that age (though the goat chase may have sapped a few years from him), but he’s had more than his fair share of ailments over the years. He’s battled a number of skin cancer flare ups, brought about from a life spent working outside.

But more serious was his leukemia diagnosis about 35 years ago, that had him going regularly to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for rounds of experimental treatments.

I was too young to really know how serious things were, but even as a young kid I knew that when your mom is having to give your dad shots every night something’s bad. My younger siblings and I have lots of memories of the kid’s craft room at MD Anderson, where they send children to pass the time when parents are getting checked out by doctors there.

But my dad recovered and they eventually started having him come back to MD Anderson only every six months, then it was every year, and now he hasn’t been back in years.

The wildest thing about my dad’s leukemia is how he got diagnosed with it.

He stepped right through a rusty hay hook, one of those harpoon looking metal things used to move square bales.

The thing was laying flat on the ground in the barn, covered in hay, and the metal hook went all the way up through his boot and foot and out the other side. He went to the hospital and they noticed something weird with his blood work.

This was back in the mid 1980s and he never went to the doctor otherwise. No telling how long that leukemia would have been attacking him if he hadn’t stepped on that hay hook.

There’s a pretty obvious lesson there, it seems.

Even something that seems really bad can be for the best.

Anyway, even as he hits 80, my dad hasn’t slowed down that much. He can’t catch a goat anymore, but he is still is willing to try for an hour and half.

May we all grow old like that.

Jeff Wick is the editor of The Fayette County Record. His dad often waits at the picnic table in his front yard for the newspaper to arrive by mail every Tuesday and Friday.