When I was a boy, my incomparable Grandfather, “Tex” Fulkerson, taught me an incredibly important life lesson about bent nails at his Arkansas farm. (Tex was an amazing man…a WWII veteran, a Scoutmaster, a fantastic storyteller, a hunter and fisherman, and the referee for wrestling matches between the cousins. More about some of those stories on another day).

I just finished the installation of a prehung interior door in our Tennessee cabin called, oddly enough, “Patriot Dream”. The door increases the width of the opening from 23 inches to 30 inches, a difference that will admit a small wheelchair. The putty is drying, and all that is left to do is a light sanding and final stain. (Doing an installation in a preexisting space was “fun”. I had to adjust the framing, move two electrical fixtures, cut and install furring strips to account for the difference in thick cabin walls, and splice in a new threshold plate.)

But here is where the bent nails come in. When I was spending one unforgettable week with Grandpa Tex at the age of 13, I decided to work on the cousins’ treehouse. The former occupants of the property had left a pile of lumber We went to get what we needed. There were plenty of boards, but most of them had nails–rusty nails– sticking out of them. Tex had brought a hammer, and as we pulled out each board, we patiently knocked the nails out. They were rusty–and dangerous. (So were the inevitable copperheads under the pile of Arkansas lumber, but that is also another story). Tex then told me this: “Rob, ALWAYS knock the nails out of old lumber before you put it away. First thing, you don’t want someone to get hurt later because you were too much of a knucklehead to take those nails out. But also, when you do it right away and pull those old nails out, many can be straightened and reused. These old, rusty, bent nails in these boards are useless and dangerous. But if you take the nails out right away, you can unbend them and store them. You may need them again.”

Tex was a man of deep faith, but not big on preaching. His wife, Mildred, had a small upright organ in the living room and could play hymns…in fact, she kept a hymnal on the instrument. (But she was away that week, and Tex and I lived on a pot of Mulligan stew, refreshed every couple of days from fish off the trot line or a rabbit felled by a shotgun blast). That night, over a bowl of that stew, Tex came back to the story of bent nails. “Rob, when a man lives the right life, he is like a new, straight nail. Everything goes easy. If you get bent, you need to pray to get right. Cause God can unbend any nail”.