Paul's Story

Upon hearing of his passing, I am immediately taken back to the yellow dodge pick-up, dirty interior wreaking of spent Pall Malls, exhaust fumes, and the rough gargle of words coming from one of three Cook boys: Tracy, Darrel, or Bill. My balance is unsure, the road is no more than two parallel slits in the middle of endless brown and spattered white. We drive slow in correction. This gave us enough time, from leaving the house to our arrival at a broken fence, the workshop or the cattle pens, to listen to his every consonant. How delicate and mindful he was to be understood, and for his stories to never fall on deaf ears. Our silence at 6 AM is already mandated, but now profound at the presence of "The Rest of the Story".

A man loses dog, finds jesus, finds dog, loses jesus.

A woman viciously raped and murdered by son and gang of unruly friends

A farmer, fond of heavy metal, scares cows away, only to lure them back with Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody...straight to the slaughter house. (Bill chuckles at that one)

Come lunch, it was back to the house for bologna sandwiches with REAL mayonnaise, a pleasant departure from Miracle Whip.

"did you listen to Harvey today, Darrel?"

"yeah. that cattle story?"

"Ha Ha Ha. Matthew and I got a kick out of that, didn't we son?"

Even then, at the endless age of 10, i knew that the morning was special and that, though inarticulate, i wanted to sit and listen to Paul Harvey for hours with the Cook boys. Later, my father would drift in and out of stories of him hating the harvest and loving Harvey. How his stories were, in part, the catalyst for his divorce from agriculture. Strange. To this day, its one of my fondest memories of the farm.

If "The Rest of the Story" were a symphony, the false endings would have us terrified from second to second. I was never sure if he had finished a story. His pauses were the lull that kept us wanting. You could finally relax when Paul gave the all-clear "Good Day". This is when the mass of the day laid its girth on you. The world isn't about stories anymore, its about labor. But its still the pauses that crack the possibility that make you chuckle at the drunkard drinking O'douls, weap at the abandonment of an infant, or take stock in the ludicrous national politik. And the pause, now forever, keeps me posted.

Good Day