“There was this three legged frog that wanted a new hat…”

Man it’s no good for me
To read Rumi or Kabir at bedtime
I get all worked up excited you know
And I want to go run around
Outside in the starlight
I’ll never get any sleep like that

James Lee Jobe

A jerk is not something you are. Being-a-jerk is something you do. There is no jerk outside of you being a jerk. When you cease to be a jerk, the jerk you were when you were being a jerk vanishes instantly.

Brad Warner, “Don’t be a Jerk”

        Deep in the pine woods of East Texas my father and I are lost, but it isn’t so bad. It’s a sunny day and we can tell directions, and we know where the Sabine River is, and that Big Sandy is somewhat north of us. What we don’t know is which way to go to get back to where we parked the trusty Ford pickup truck. 

        We stopped hunting a couple of hours ago. The shotguns are unloaded and broken open across the crook of an arm. No accidents that way. There is no game to carry as we didn’t shoot anything, or really even try. Neither of us actually likes to shoot anything, we both prefer to fish, but we do both like the woods. The pine woods are beautiful, smell nice, and our booted footsteps make lovely crunchy sounds as we walk along, side by side. 

        My father, that other James Lee Jobe, always calls them “the piney woods.” Dad is about 50 and I am in my mid-teens. By the time ten years pass I will have hiked out all of this East Texas area on my own, and by the time I am his age I will have hiked out a lot of California, too, especially the Gold Country. My father has less than a decade to live, and he knows it, and I am just starting to realize that.

        We walk and tell each other jokes and stories, at times laughing so hard our sides ache and the laughter gets silent. We just sort of bob up and down croaking out, “Stop! Stop!” We can always crack each other up. Many times that’s how we stop arguing about something. Dad has a way of starting a joke that in itself cracks me up. Something like, “There was this three legged frog that wanted a new hat…” 

        We need to cross a creek, or at least we think we do, and we find this place where a fallen tree makes a sort of bridge. Halfway across he starts off a joke, and the opening line gets me laughing, and I’m laughing so hard that I have to sit down straddling the tree trunk so I don’t fall in the creek. Me breaking up breaks him up, and he has to sit down the same way, and there we are, several feet above a creek we don’t want to fall into, laughing like goofballs. 

        We have far too few good days like this one in 1971, the two James Lee Jobes, laughing it up in the woods of East Texas. 

James Lee Jobe

I hope you don't mind the prose piece this time. Please help support this blog with a small donation on the BUY ME A COFFEE link below. Every little bit helps! -jlj