Don Quixote Rides Again

Don Quixote rides again

American Native legend: The end of the trail – when dreams die.

An old friend, Udell Brown, of the San Carlos Apache American Native tribal council once sat with me when I was discouraged about an assignment I had there. He said, this is how you look at your assignment. You determine that when you get to class, you will have one book, instead of twenty, no students, an empty classroom, and patience. You will keep going, track down those who have enrolled, and make a difference in their lives. Then if you get to class and actually find that you have one, or two students ready to learn, you will feel like a complete success.

The story line is the same. I have changed the characters just a bit for the sake of making a point. Don Quixote is myth, but his fame is legend. Was he crazy? Was he misguided? Or, was he really trying to tell the world that certain things need to happen to fulfill life’s purposes?

A young man named Glenn Jacobs was always on the wrong side of the bus. If everyone wanted to turn left, Glenn would naturally want to go right. If proper society said that writing the appropriate title of a pile of manure on a nice fresh stack in the school yard was not polite, he did it anyway. If creating a very politically incorrect essay on his law entry exam would mean certain exile from the ranks of budding law students and lawyers, he would make it happen. If creating an entirely different arena for elementary students by allowing them to have “shelter” for their thoughts while reading, he would do it by providing cardboard boxes they could retire to and read as rewards for good work. He loathed “busy work” and fought valiantly to seek means of assisting students gain wisdom. Not even close to acceptable, his notions were cause for banishment from the ranks of the teaching profession.

He went to war in Vietnam and was severely wounded, hauled to Germany, then back to the United States where he recuperated for months at El Paso, Texas. Never to be outdone, or outwitted, he and his marvelous wife Dorothy (remember! She has always been the strong one) would do insane things like shove him while he was in his full body cast, in the back of their Volkswagen station wagon and go to a drive in movie. He also convinced our father, Glenn Sr. to travel around with him somehow hanging above the seats of the Lincoln Continental he drove, all while adorned in a towel and body cast.

Then, he did the unthinkable. He was the chief editor, cook, and bottle washer for a weekly newspaper he and Dorothy wrote, edited, generated ads, and distribute for twenty years. Was it conventional? Did it create wealth and fame? Did it assist him in accomplishing his earthly mission? You be the judge.

Glenn was examined by physicians and found to have a real bad tumor, I believe on the frontal lobe right behind his nose. Determination was made to extract the tumor by, as Glenn reports, removing his face, removing the tumor then stitching him back up. The possibilities of paralysis, mental incapacity, and death were very real. In miraculous fashion, just prior to the operation, a brain surgeon came in from Germany and asked additional questions regarding his health history and found that because he had a specific, non-typical male characteristic, the tumor could be maintained and controlled with some kind of non-traditional medicine that could only be found in Germany. The medicine was procured and Glenn has lived these many years through the grace of God and his miracles given to us as mortals.