We had just moved to Happy, Texas and I got a call on the church's number from a stranger out of the blue. He introduced himself as Kenneth Wood and said that he lived across the alley from the church building and that my lawnmower didn't sound like it was running right. It was kind of astute that he had noticed, for in fact it wasn't running right at all. As it turns out, the geniuses who removed lead from gasoline and then replaced it with ethanol failed to take into account how that would wreak havoc with small engines such as those found on a lawnmower. So, when my mower stopped running right, I just took off the air filter and jammed a screwdriver down into the carburetor to hold it open and let more gas flow through.

As it turned out, this hurt Kenneth's feelings. Kenneth happened to be blind and I was more than a bit curious as to how he seemed to know so much about lawnmowers. As it turned out, Kenneth was the lawnmower repairman for the Town of Happy for more than 30 years, and knew just about everything there was to know about them, including the fact that only a moron (or a preacher) would ever jam a screwdriver down into a carburetor to hold it open so it could get more fuel.

Thus began a friendship that was to last for the next five years, until Kenneth passed away at over 80 years of age. We would have coffee twice a week. Kenneth would make the coffee and even poured my cup the first time. Do you know how a blind man pours coffee? He puts his finger on the inside of the cup, near the top, and pours until his finger gets hot. Since Kenneth was still repairing lawnmowers and smoked 3 cent cigars (okay, I really don't know how much they cost, but if he paid more than that, he got gypped) it only took me the one time to offer to pour the coffee myself after that.

Kenneth was always teaching me something. One day, he asked me if my wife ever let me do the dishes at home. Slow though I might be, I inferred that he was suggesting that it wouldn't hurt anything if I washed the coffee pot when we were done, so I did. I remember one day when we were waiting for the coffee to finish perking, when Kenneth said that it was ready. I thought that I had heard it stop perking and said something to that effect when he said, "No, the little light came on". 

Kenneth kept a sheep to keep his grass down in the yard. I always thought it funny to see a yard ringed with broken down lawnmowers, only to have a sheep grazing in the yard. It was if to say, I give up! One day I noticed Kenneth with a bandage on his forehead. I asked him what had happened, and he said that old sheep of his had headbutted him the other day while he was bent over putting food in his dish. He added that this would not happen again. When I asked him why, Kenneth said that the next day he grabbed "Sheepy" by the collar and hit him over the head with a ball peen hammer. So far as I know, that sheep never did headbutt Kenneth ever again.

The last year of his life, Kenneth got a little worse off. He had broken his leg a few years earlier, and was now starting to have problems with his feet. Until then, he had been riding his exercise bike every day. He had an odometer on it and whenever I came by we would see how many miles he had gone. His plan was to ride the equivalent of peddling to Canada and back, but when his body broke down he had to stop. I think he was in Kansas or Nebraska at the time.

He was one of the most amazing men I have ever known. He was completely blind, wore hearing aids, and was in a wheelchair most of the time. But Kenneth just never seemed to get down. Part of it was because he had kept his freedom, still living alone with various friends doing different chores for him to allow him to do so. One did his shopping. One gave him his baths on Saturday night. He even had a friend (Charles) who would come over and read him his mail. Someone had asked him once what if the letter was personal, from an old girlfriend or something like that. He said it was okay because Charles was deaf without his hearing aids, so he would just turn them off whenever the letter to be read was of a personal nature.

I often think about Kenneth, even though he has been gone for over twenty years now. I think about how he rarely complained, though he had plenty of reasons to, while so many of us who have little to complain about, do so with regularity. It's something that took me a long time to understand, but I see it very clearly now. And it took a blind man to help me see it.