Buck's Legacy

and mine

Behind a trunk in the guest room, where I’ll see them but they’re out of the way, there are four 12” x 8” hard-bound, hunter-green books. I found them when we were cleaning out the house after my father died. One is a book he’d written that I never knew about called One Good Idea. I think mine is the only copy. The other three books, he obviously wanted someone to keep, to hand down. Why else would he call them Buck’s Museum Collection, Volumes 1, 2, and 3?

I’ve only flipped thru them. Some of the pages are copies of handwritten essays, most are copies of typed, finished essays. There’s a table of contents in each volume, so they’re organized despite different formats. I know I’ll read them some day. I’m just not there yet.

I’m like my father in a lot of ways. He was a dreamer, an innocent, a person who read and wrote and thought and talked and needed people to listen.

Until a few months ago, I was in a weekly poetry group for over five years, wrote a poem or two a week. That’s at least 250 poems. There are a handful of good ones, but most need work or abandonment. I want to put the good ones together into a small book. I tell myself it’s because I want to give a copy to my friends. But the deeper truth is that I want there to be a bound collection. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to imagine its future – how it may find its way to a second-hand bookstore, or one of those free libraries outside a home in San Antonio or Oklahoma City, where a curious reader might pick it up, read a poem or two and be moved somehow. In that way, my words will live on, and I will, too.

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Some of you may be interested in the kind of thing my father would write. Here’s the opening two paragraphs of his book, One Good Idea, written around 1999:

At 25 I could not have conceived of writing such a book as this. At 50, I hoped that someone else would do it. At 75 I saw a real need for it, because many of my fellow citizens are experiencing Globalism. As Americans, they have an instinctive grasp of the principles which have governed this nation, but explanations of the current world order have been scarce. Possibly this lack exists because leading American political and business figures have been so consumed with pressing domestic problems that they have neglected the education of the public regarding rapid changes in international arrangements. 	

Like many of us I have looked for an ideal policy or noble leader to secure our relations with other nations. Finally, I acknowledged that there was a shortage of both. Instead of discouraging me, that conclusion induces me to look ahead and identify the main trends of global life, from the perspective of one who thinks the world is understandable. Even to state such a goal is presumptuous because the world is so complex and diverse. However, ordinary citizens are called to understand and support the fascinating job of dealing with the complexities of a world which is, in its maturity, facing a bright future. Others will stand up to do the work. I offer some insights which have come my way.