Hard Shoes to Fill

 .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.