Shootin' it Straight - Doin' Things

In stories that make their way onto paper or a glowing screen, names are often changed to protect the real folks behind them. The standardized Jane Doe or John Doe usually gets the job done. But let’s be honest: they’re overused. So, for this tale, I’ll introduce you to “John Poe.”

John Poe is a character from my youth, clear through to today, and he’s the one who coined the phrase “doin’ and doin’.” That’s doing trimmed down into the proper Jackson County vernacular—where the “g” is unnecessary baggage.

So, what exactly does “doin’,” as spoken by John Poe, mean? Well, it could describe a leisurely trip to town with a pit stop at the farm store. Or it could mean sweating it out in the hayfields for ten straight hours. Either way, if you kept your mouth shut and your ears open, you’d pick up more than a few tricks. Maybe it was something simple, like using a box-end wrench to screw in a gate hanger. Or maybe it was his preferred barrel length for a .38 Special.

To my knowledge, Poe never spoke a cross word without overwhelming reason. He moved with an unassuming shuffle, but he managed to accomplish a whole lot in a single day. He was always quick to hand me the keys to his tractor, truck, or clear me a  chair at the kitchen table for a meal.

Doin’ and doin’ is a lot like piddlin’. I still spend many days around the home front just doin’. I’ll wander the yard, tinkering with some motorized project I’ve put off for too long. I’ll line a few fishing poles with every intention of heading to the water. I’ll smear a quarter of the needed foundation sealer onto the garage block. Somehow, all of that might happen while the smoker is rolling out its sweet pork-scented bait, with Waylon drifting from a beat-up speaker in the corner. Of course, it may also take three Saturdays to get done what a focused man could polish off in one.

Doin’ and doin’ is an art form. It moves slow, like warm molasses, steady as the drip from a faucet that never quite shuts off. To a younger, more ambitious version of me, it might have looked like laziness or wasted time. But to the me of today, it’s a way of moving through the day with an itinerary of sorts, yet still laying my head down at night knowing something got done. It’s a rhythm that lets the workaholic side of me unwind and just coast for a while.

If I’m lucky enough to make it to retirement in halfway decent shape, one of my loftier goals is simple: to spend more days in the shade, just doin’ and doin’, like my friend, the anonymous John Poe.