The Bull Who Taught Me to Stand Still

Martha always said papayas were the patient fruit. 'They take their sweet time,' she'd tell me, 'just like wisdom.'

I'm standing in my garden now, my joints stiff in the morning chill, watching the papaya I planted last summer finally showing fruit. At seventy-eight, I've learned that Martha was right about most things.

My grandson Tommy came by yesterday. 'Grandpa, were you ever scared?' he asked, that earnest look in his eyes that reminded me so much of his grandmother.

I told him about the summer of 1964, when I was his age—seventeen and cocksure, running from everything that mattered. Schoolwork, responsibility, my father's disappointed looks. I spent weeks running through these same hills, thinking I was fast enough to outgrow my problems.

Then came the day our bull, Old Bess, broke through the fence. My father had gone to town, leaving me to handle a fifteen-hundred-pound animal with a temper as wide as Texas.

I tried running. I scrambled up the nearest oak tree, heart hammering like it would burst from my chest. But Bess just stood there, watching me, snorting derisively. She knew something I didn't.

'Boy,' my father found me hours later, 'sometimes running's the worst thing you can do. Stand your ground, find your courage, and most times—most times—what you're afraid of will respect you for it.'

He walked right up to that bull, calm as Sunday morning. Bess backed down.

'That's the thing about fear,' my father told me later, over papaya from Martha's garden—she'd been growing them even then, exotic and stubborn. 'It's like a bull. Show it you're running, and it chases. Show it you're standing, and it might still charge, but at least you're facing it on your feet.'

I stopped running that summer. Started helping Martha tend her papayas. Married her five years later.

Now Martha's been gone three years, but her papayas still grow. I told Tommy, 'The bull taught me not to run. Your grandmother taught me that good things—like wisdom, like love, like papayas—take time. And some things, like family, are worth standing still for.'

He nodded, solemn. Then he asked if he could help me plant more papayas.

Some lessons, I've learned, ripen slowly, like fruit in the sun. But they're the ones that taste sweetest in the end.