Strong fences

When former Penn State head coach Joe Paterno died Sunday, ESPN and all the other networks spent most of the morning talking to friends, former colleagues and players. One former player who went on to play in the NFL got my attention with something he said about Paterno. I'm paraphrasing here, but pretty much what he said was JoPa acted as an extension of your father when you left home. And for those players who came from a home with no father, he became their father figure. He taught them so much more than how to play football. He taught them how to tuck their shirt in, how to say "yes, sir and no, sir", how to treat a lady, etc. The player said that Paterno had just as much impact on his life at that critical age of 18-22 years old as his own father did.
That hit home to me because I had someone just like that in my life. At about the age of 17 or so I started working for the newspaper, putting on address labels the night before we shipped them out. The man who owned the paper at that time also owned a ranch, and before long I started going out there and helping him build fences, work cows, and all that fun country boy stuff. I also did newspaper routes for him at night, and pretty much whatever else he needed me to do.
My father and mother divorced when I was so young that I can't even remember him at all from my childhood, and my mom went on to marry someone else. They also divorced when I was pretty young, so this man that I worked for became the closest thing to a father figure that I had ever known. Or maybe it was a big brother type of relationship, I don't know.
Whatever it was, he was the one to teach me about so many things. He taught me to never put all my eggs into one basket. If you make your living from two or three different places, then one place will never have a complete hold on you. He taught me how to provide for a family, to put your wife and kids' needs first- way above yours.
He showed me how to work hard, how to take pride in whatever I was doing at the time. I remember carrying a very heavy cedar corner post through a dry creek bed one day, and I was tripping on brush and sliding down the bank over and over. Finally I got mad and asked him why we had to use such heavy posts to make a stupid fence, anyway.
"Because," he told me, "the corner posts are constantly getting pressure from all sides. The other parts of the fence- the t-posts, the gates, even the wire, are all getting their strength from the corner posts. That's why we sink them in the ground so deep, pour in concrete, and stomp dirt all around them. No, if you want to build a good fence, a fence that will last, you have to have good, strong corner posts."
I don't get to talk to him very much any more- once or twice a year, at best. He's got family and work, I've got family and work... But I still feel exactly the same about him today as I did twenty years ago. It's kind of like what that football player said about Paterno- even though he didn't see him much anymore, or even talk to him, he always knew he was there. And that was enough. He could always draw strength from that.
Kind of like a corner post.