I once thought I’d like to write a post in every coffee shop around the home area, and, branching out, in areas I didn’t normally visit.  It would be a sort of quest for me, like the guy who wants to climb all the fourteeners in Colorado, say. 

But I haven’t made it, even in the first one.  Maybe once I’m retired and have time to sit there and relax a while, so the writing juices can start flowing, it will happen. 

I am branching out a bit, though, this morning, and am going to attempt getting something down while sitting in our room here in Old Town Hotel-Wichita.

So, if it comes out rather disjointed, as some of mine do, perhaps we can chalk it up to immediate surroundings, or the fact that what I’ve been thinking on has been hard for me to wrap my mind around entirely.

Clear Eyed Man.

I’ve known a few of them, and I always find myself gravitating towards such when I sense one nearby. 

And maybe the clear eyed part is a little misleading.  Because it really isn’t so much about their eyes, in a way.  And yet you can see it in their eyes.

What I’m describing to you is a fellow who is uncluttered.  He probably has had every chance for his life to get cluttered, but he hasn’t let it happen. 

He’s the type of guy who doesn’t let the loud opinions one-up him, but he’s just as willing to entertain said opinions in light of the fact that what he holds could possibly use some adjustments.

He looks right on to the thing in front of him, even if that thing is a stinking, dirty assignment that’s just been given him.  And he ties into it and gets it done.

He’s just as soon to offer a rough, work hardened hand to some small hurting animal as he is to give it to his youngest child that’s in distress.

And, he’s just as soon to offer that same hand in gentle, yet firm direction adjustments to those around him, even if it means his standing in the eyes of those around him flinches a bit.

In a word, he’s his own man.  Not dependent or easily flung about. 

What makes him that way? 

It hasn’t been the big things he’s faced, although they play a part, to be sure.  It’s been made up of the little things that grind away at the fiber of his inner being on a day-to-day basis. 

Like when his wife forgets something, and it was admittedly her fault that she forgot, but he takes it as his own, and runs out to get what she forgot. 

Or, when his boy says he told him, and he claims he heard it word for word, how to get to someplace and now he’s way out in the boonies and claims it’s not his fault.  It grinds a little bit deeper, then, because he knows exactly what he told his boy, and he knows he saw his boy deep in thought about something else at the time.  But he takes it in stride, acts like it was his fault, and good naturedly sends out new directions, oblivious to how much time has been lost.

He doesn’t get up in the air about things.  If ever I’m in a storm with a crazy one in the corral, I want one of these men at my back.  It happened once, not long ago, that I was walking back to the box to bring a few more up into the squeeze chute to work when I heard some calm quiet words, loaded with portent- “Watch your back, Dad.” 

Because of my total certainty in the one who said them, I never looked back but rather leaped up the fence that was nearest, just as the ears of the calf behind me grazed the part of the fence where I had been standing.

You’ll know a Clear Eyed Man more by the feeling you get when you are around him than something you actually see. 

And I was lucky enough to stand in the presence of 3 of them this last week as they laid their father to rest.

You know who you are; stay steady, my men.