Let Me Tell you about my Friend and Mentor, Emmett Daugherty

In 1974, I graduated from Lee County High School in Beattyville, KY, and needed a job for the Summer, before I started college at Morehead State. A good friend, Toni Wolfinbarger, told me her sister’s boyfriend was leaving Newnam’s Funeral Home and they needed someone to replace him. I talked to Cooge Newnam and he hired me.

That Summer I worked mowing Cooge’s steep backyard, sitting on the porch with Emmett Daugherty, Ronnie Paul Begley and Henry Sizemore; watching future customers go by, vacuuming the chapel, and even helping embalm people.

One day, Emmett’s aunt, I think it was, passed; so we took her up on the gurney in the old rickety elevator at Cooge’s and embalmed her. Emmett was the coroner and did most of the embalming work. I probably helped him with ten or twelve people, from children to the old. I watched him closely, especially the time it was his aunt. He was silent, his movement precise, efficient, and though I could usually never read emotion from him, I could tell that particular job affected him deeply.

Emmett taught me how to take flowers from the funeral home to the grave side and place them as they should be, how to set up the tent and take it down being sure to get it back in the truck exactly the way I found it; and much of the other work I did that Summer. I had never been around someone so precise and painstaking. I had always tended to be slapdash and disorganized.

On slow days as we sat on the porch talking, a question might come up, to which no one had an answer; a question such as: what type of tractor did Eddie Albert drive in Green Acres? Emmett talked less than the rest of us, but if we looked and he appeared to be seriously considering the question everything would stay quiet. Then, he would either tell us the answer or he would announce: “I don’t know.”

No one said: “I don’t know” the way he did. We knew he had carefully considered the question and since he knew a lot of things, we would all be patient until he was done reflecting on it. As a young man aspiring to know things and impress people with how much I knew, I learned from Emmett, it is more important to be honest with yourself and others, than to impress them with what you know.

Emmett lived so as to make the lives of others easier, more organized, less difficult. He thought more than he talked, and never seemed concerned with how other people viewed him. The question of who he was, was the one he never had to answer: “I don’t know”.

I loved Emmett Daugherty as a friend and mentor. I wish the family and friends comfort during this time.

Thoughts on Social Media

Do you walk around imagining status updates you might put on Facebook until finally one wells up inside you and you rush to your phone or computer and type it in, and then check back often to see if anyone has liked or commented? The desire to connect with others in this way seems entirely new, but surely those of us who do it, must have had some sort of desire like it before Facebook made it possible. What would that have been? Would it have been wishing to tell those we most love exactly what we were doing right then, thinking, planning, thought funny; a comment a child made, we wanted to share with our friend/relative? We may have wished for these things, but it was not easy to do. We could not always be calling someone up and saying, hey: “I hope I did not interrupt anything important, but our nephew, little Joey, just said:  ‘Rainbows are colorful.’ Isn’t that neat? Yeah, I thought so. Okay, bye.” They would have thought we were going crazy, right?

But now that we can send people messages, tweets, statuses, emails, etc., we know they will only get them right away if they are connected and if they are connected it is still their choice whether they respond or not; so it does not make us seem so presumptuous, or intrusive (crazy). They can always ignore us, we figure. But can they really? I mean, if you post something, or text or message someone; don’t you start getting suspicious if the usual people do not respond to you? Don’t you wish you could just ask them right then: “Why did you not reply or respond to my status update? Were you using the bathroom, because if you were, that is certainly understandable, and if you were driving, thank goodness you did not, because I want you to be safe, but if you were sitting there looking at your phone and you did not respond, what does that say about our relationship? Did you respond to other people who were updating, texting or tweeting instead of me? If so, does that mean I have come to be a bore to you? Is this the beginning of the end of our relationship?”

Is it going to be possible for us to be as productive as we were before this new need crept in to our lives? And will our desire to do great things, say to write scientific articles or literary works (those of us who are paid to do such things) begin to diminish now that we can get our jollies impressing Facebook friends, those who read our blog, or those who follow us on Twitter? Will those of us who have written for audiences prior to this, but where that audience has been reading our stuff weeks or even months after we created it; find the allure of less credible or professionally-relevant feedback - but more immediate feedback; too great to resist?

I have to admit, I am struggling with this when it comes to poetry. I have written poetry throughout my life, but prior to around 2008, when I became a Facebook user and 2010 when I created a poetry blog, I wrote maybe three or four poems a year. Now, I may write that many a month; and when I post them to my blog, even if few people view them; it still feels as if I am “published” and my dream of getting my stuff out in physical form, or even in e-book form, does not seem as urgent. The paradox is that I am more productive, but less likely to ever have my work judged by the traditional judges of such work.

Recently I had a company print all the poems from my blog: gloamtoglimmer and for a few bucks, they sent it to me nicely bound in the regular mail. I have it on the coffee table in our living room and ever so often since, I will have an extra minute and I pick it up and read a few of the things I have written. Some of it seems pretty good and I wonder: is this all that will ever happen to the things I am writing? Will I just keep posting them to my blog and having a few friends see them, for the rest of my days? And then when I am gone, what will happen? And honestly, I often end up further asking myself, what does it matter what happens to anything after I am gone? I mean, I will be gone, for God’s sake. In fact, it would not even matter if everything I wrote was acclaimed as the best ever written. I would still be just as gone and any feeling of pride over it will accrue to those who knew me and lived a little longer, but even they will be gone before too much longer and then it will be only those who admire such work in general, but after a while; what does that even matter?

Sometimes I find myself thinking, maybe the connections we make to people in real time or at least in fairly rapid fashion; are the most important ones. We feel them right then and if we string enough of such feelings together over enough years, might that not be sustenance for our spirit sort of like eating nutritious food is for our bodies?

There are so many more parts of this, but alas; I must get up from here and do something productive; maybe not more productive, let’s just say, productive in a different way, like taking the clothes out of the washer and putting them in the dryer. I will be checking back to see what you think. ☺