.Hard Shoes to Fill
My dad’s father Edison Thomas
Beck was quite a man. I marvel at the number of hats that he wore in his life and
that he was able to do them so well. He was a farmer and ran a saw mill on the
side. He was a justice of the peace, magistrate, bookkeeper, accountant, and a
lay speaker. He started a small church between Jones Mills and Somerset,
Pennsylvania. Not too far from the red Insulbrick church was my grandfather’s
home place, on land above the ski resort Hidden Valley. It had several natural
springs. They were named after the family, Beck Springs. The flow of water was
abundant and pure.
My granddad, when he was much
younger had a tooth problem. It wasn’t the norm to visit a dentist and he lived
far from the dentist. The decayed tooth gave him so much pain, that he bent the
rat-tail handle of a file, heated it to red-hot, and burned the nerve out of
the tooth. I couldn’t imagine doing that. Why he didn’t pull it instead? I
don’t know. This is the story my dad told me.
Granddad was blind in one eye since
he was about twenty-one years of age. He had learned to compensate; driving his
car, doing bookkeeping, and building a home for himself and his oldest
daughter. It seemed that there was little he couldn’t do.
His penmanship was superb and the
wills, deeds, and other legal papers that he wrote as a magistrate, were works
of art.
In later years, of life, the vision
in his “good eye” started to go blind. Facing total blindness, he visited a
very prominent ophthalmologist.
The doctor took him into the
examination room. After looking into both eyes, the physician said, “There is
tissue growing over your optic nerve.” The doctor began to examine the eye that
had been blind for over fifty years.
He laid aside his ophthalmoscope and
asked, “Where have you been, man? We’ve been able to fix that problem for
nearly ten years.”
“What is happening to your seeing
eye is what happened to your blind eye when you were young. What I suggest is
that I do surgery on your blind eye and allow the other eye alone for now. If
you eventually have problems with the repaired eye, we can always repair the
other eye. We have it to fall back on.”
He had his surgery. With new
glasses, his once blind eye could now see. He never had surgery on his once
seeing eye. He had been so used to living, working, and driving with vision in
only one eye he was quite capable of doing so after the surgery.
