Picking Sunflowers

Once upon a time, my Dad told me a story on the way home from work.

I have the good fortune of being able to carpool with my dad to work. This is fortunate for me, because it means I don’t have to spend much of my hard-earned cash for gas, and it gives me time to read books instead of paying attention to traffic for an hour and a half every day. Plus, it gives me the opportunity for quality conversation with Dad when I feel so inclined, although most of our trips are relatively silent.

Today, however, he began telling me about his day at work, and after awhile, asked “Have I ever told you about picking sunflowers?”

“No,” I said, so he told me.

“Well, it was when I was about six or eight. My dad was a member of the Jaycees, which means Junior Chamber of Commerce, which was a group of young men, under thirty-five, and they worked for the improvement of the community. They put up the shelter in the park. I remember a bunch of them put on their hats and tool belts and got together and built it. I thought it was a church group or something to do with church, because they always met there, but I was little.

“Sometimes they would do projects to put some money in their coffers to fund these things that they did. One time a farmer called them and said he had this cornfield that he wanted to combine, but it was full of sunflowers, and he couldn’t combine it with all those sunflowers in it, because they would contaminate the corn and he wouldn’t get a good price at the elevator. So Dad and the other men went out to walk that cornfield. [Cousin about the same age] was visiting at the time, so he and I got to come along.

“The sunflowers were all different sizes. Some were big and some were little, and they were cutting them out with corn hooks, because that was the way you did it.  Dad could reach six rows, with me and my cousin on either side, because you could reach more rows than you could see, and you could do more rows at once as long as you noticed all the sunflowers. So he had us on either side of him and he could do six or eight rows that way instead of just three.

“Well we started out, and then all of a sudden I noticed that everyone else was getting way ahead of me. I was pulling up all kinds of little sunflowers, and they were missing them. My cousin was keeping right up, and I was getting further and further behind. I was quite worked up about it, because I was doing it right and they were all doing it wrong.

“I called out to them that they were missing all these sunflowers, and my dad came back and explained to me that we didn’t need to worry about the little sunflowers. They wouldn’t get big enough by harvest-time to cause any problems. What we needed to worry about was the big ones with the heads on that had seeds, and the ones that would form heads by the time the combine came through. ‘The ones about as big as you,’ he said.

“Well I hadn’t known that. I had got so caught up in picking all  the sunflowers, and hadn’t thought about which ones were going to cause problems and which weren’t. I was like that when I was little. I tended to get caught up in the details.

 

“I have never forgotten that, because life is like that sometimes too. Sometimes you don’t need to pick all the sunflowers, just the ones that are going to cause you problems. It doesn’t pay to get worked up about things that aren’t going to matter in the long run anyway.”