by Corynne Nuckols
Whenever something is happening in my life that makes me sad or depressed and I start thinking to myself “Oh my life is so hard, this is so terrible,” I try to stop and remind myself of one very important fact: I shouldn’t be here.
None of my siblings or nieces and nephews should be here either. Because of my father. My father’s life has truly been an extraordinary one. It’s been full of adventure, adversity, adaptation, accomplishments and acceptance. But do you know what strikes me the most about his life? It’s how many second chances he’s had. He should’ve died so many times in his life but he has always survived.
He was born in the summer of 1931, in the southern Illinois countryside. The first near miss my father had was when he was about 2 years old: he was attacked by a family friend’s dog. That Chow bit him, dragged him off by the head and left him for dead in a culvert. It took quite a while for family members to track him down and find him.
Another time, when he was an adolescent, he was chased by a mountain lion one evening as he walked home from a friend’s house along a country road.
He could’ve died when he ran away from home and hitchhiked as a very young teen. He made it 3 states away, before he was picked up by a trucker, lectured, fed and sent home on the next bus. He could’ve died when he used dynamite to go fishing with while in his late teens.
He once had a car accident in the mountains of California where an elk went through his windshield, over him in the front seat and into the backseat of his car. He had to pull over and let it out. Not a scratch on dad.
He’s had car crashes, motorcycle accidents, plane crashes too. He’s had ulcers, heart attacks and strokes. He’s had military service full of both fun and danger, fist fights that turned into bloodshed and three ex-wives.
He has cheated and missed death by just a fraction way too many times. But it’s also allowed him to see and learn so much more about life and being a capable human being than I think even he realizes.
My dad may not have gotten his learning from schoolbooks and classes, but he has always been a very intelligent man. He was born with an innate sense of engineering skills and an incredible understanding of the mechanical world. I have seen this man look at some broken mechanical device that he’s never seen before, fiddle a bit, and come up with what was wrong and how to fix it. Then he’d proceed to do so. Even when others couldn’t. He has always been incredibly gifted mechanically.
He’s also been quick to pick up on other ideas and thoughts if the basic principles were explained to him. At least, if they interested him enough anyway. He really is a jack-of-all-trades, a man that is handy and capable of many things.
Other things he’s excelled at are his abilities to adapt to different situations, to put people at ease, to make his presence felt in a room. To just jump in and do whatever is necessary. He figures out what is needed as he goes and adapts what he is doing to whatever is needed. His early life molded him and made him that way.
He moved around from family member to family member a lot while growing up, because his mom was a single parent and she went where the jobs were during the Depression era. But with 7 sisters to help, grandma always knew that dad had a place to stay and learn at. All this moving around taught him city life, farm life and everything in between. It taught him how to handle most every type of situation he has come up against.
My father is a very unassuming man who does not realize just how unique and special he is. I know that nowadays, there are not a lot of people like my father left in the world. Not a lot of people out there can compete with his background and the upbringing he had. It’s made him what he is today. He is a man who has strong morals and ideals, a strong work ethic, intelligence, and he is adaptable to most situations.
He’s loyal to a fault and above all, he’s just a good man.