Morning

Every Friday at school, I make coffee for the staff. I've been doing it for a few years as a way to bring people out of their caves and get them to mingle a little with others as well as just to enjoy a Friday morning. Teaching, especially teaching high school students is tough-real tough. It was kind of a way I got to minister to others. Free or real cheap coffee and snacks before school. Well, I started with just a quick announcement the day before, giving people a head's up that in the morning, there would be a nice snack for them. Those announcements grew from a sentence or two to full blown short stories. So, to stay in the tradition of Coffee Friday, here is an example and from now on, you will also be privy to the blessings of a good cup of joe.

Gus Timmerson was a cowboy. He had been a cowboy for seventy-two years, ever since he could ride the Morgan his papa gave him when he was four. He could saddle the horse on his own at 5. He won his first junior rodeo with barrel racing at 12 and was on his first cattle drive the year before. He married his high school sweetheart who was also the apple of his young eyes in grade school, which was the same two room school house in that remote part of eastern Montana. They had four children together and just a year before this writing, Gus Timmerson, buried his wife from an extended fight with cancer. Now, in the backyard of his years on Earth, a history of two broken hips, a broken arm, the blizzard of ’86 that almost took him and his herd, all the things that life had thrown, and at a time when most would find the rocker on the porch of that back yard a comforting thought, Gus Timmerson was going back to school to get his college degree in, of all things, Modern Art.

Gus Timmerson loved to draw and paint what he drew. Wherever he was on his 1900 acres, either on horse or in his Ford truck, Gus kept a sketch pad with him. He would draw whatever he saw, simple things, and common things. Things most of us miss-he saw. At night, he would sit either on the front or back porch and have a fine, aged drink, his border collie, Mindy, laying at his feet, and looking at something that was finding its way onto his paper. One of his grand children suggested college one day and the idea stuck. It had taken him ten years, the first of them at the community college and the rest he would make the hour trip into Billings.

So, on a cool spring day, Gus Timmerson walked down the aisle of the University of Montana at Billings in a black robe and a mortar board, underneath were a pair of well worn jeans and cowhide Ropers.

And when his name was called as he crossed the stage, the legacy of Gus Timmerson, his four children, sixteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, were the loudest of all.

It’s never too late. Coffee is free on Friday-Coffee Friday. If you don’t drink coffee, it’s never too late to learn how. Oh, yeah, snacks and tea are also available for you tenderfoots.