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People have been telling me for years that I ought to write an editorial for this publication since I’m just sittin’ here twiddling my thumbs, anyway. Up until recently I guess I just hadn’t been properly inspired.

A couple of months ago, after years of prodding, I grew a beard to show my wife of seventeen years and our fourteen year-old daughter what it would look like. After a little trimming, what I ended up with is some cross between a Sam Clemens and a Yosemite Sam mustache. The same people who urged me to write this column are now volunteering to shave me. Volunteerism – that’s the word that inspired me to write this.

Folks associated with the farming community have always been there to help when someone in need finds themselves in a bind. If you get stuck, somebody will come along and pull you out just for a thank-you. If your fence needs mending, the barn needs repair or if a storm’s coming and it seems you’re going to run out of time before you can get the hay up, along comes a neighbor and everything gets done. If there’s sickness in the community, people bring food and somebody will collect money for the family, or start a money tree at church or the beauty shop to help out. If there’s an accident or someone has an operation, everybody, it seems, finds time to go by and give a pint of blood. If the school needs new playground equipment, or a gym floor needs to be refinished, or if the post-office needs landscaping, with some ingenuity and some elbow grease, it happens.

We build houses, churches, schools… whatever it takes. People volunteer their time with the Scouts, 4-H, FFA, Master Gardener Associations, at hospitals, schools, churches, nursing homes and to other community services not for any reward, not for the proverbial star in a crown, but because it’s the right thing to do.

I, personally, am a volunteer board member with the Tennessee Valley Exhibition/ Morgan County Fair (I’m pretty close to being a coward when it comes to giving blood; and if you know I had anything to do with building a structure, don’t stand under it). During the course of the year, the Fair Board trades out labor with other volunteer groups around the county. It just so

Hot-air balloon

happens that last May I got assigned to help with the hot-air balloons as a member of a crew that follows them to where they land during the Alabama Jubilee Hot Air Balloon and Music Festival.

Thanks to fellow AFC employee and Fair Board member, Liz Glaze, I got hooked up with Dean and Vicky Durr and their children from Waynesboro, MS. They were excellent people and working with them first unfurling, then inflating, then holding on to the reins of their lumbering, fire breathing, floating work of art, Dean’s Dream, was an honor. For helping out with their craft, they generously gave me a ride on the first and, as it turns out, longest voyage of the festival.

That experience transcends any other flight I’ve ever taken and it’s one that I’ll never forget. A simple handshake and a “thank-you” would have sufficed. Wonder what would have happened if I’d brought a pound cake?