Breakfast with Brother Dave: The Blessing of Intergenerational Friendship

In Wendell Berry’s most recent novel, one character appears only briefly but has a profound effect on the book’s namesake. Jim Stedman accompanies Marce Catlett on the road to Louisville, a journey that ends in bitter disappointment and sparks the story of the Burley Tobacco program, the work’s central theme. Berry’s summary of Stedman is succinct, but one I read with personal familiarity:

In that year, Marce was forty-three, Jim Stedman twenty-five years older. He had been, from Marce’s boyhood, the neighbor, the older friend and teacher, that a hard-headed boy needs as recourse from his father—as, in fact, an ally of his father.

When I was a kid, my parents were extremely particular about the company I kept. They were hospitable but selective about where and with whom they would permit me to spend time. Their criteria wasn’t as simple as church attendance or “good family.” For my father, moral fiber included work ethic as well as spirituality, and while he’s not a sociologist nor has he ever read Christian Smith or Peter Berger, he understood correctly that worldviews and character are more effectively caught than taught. To that end, he cared about the men I would be around, for he understood no influence would be passive. These men would either help or hinder his work as a father. He found a staunch ally in Dave, and I gradually noticed that if I was going anywhere with Dave, I rarely received the typical round of questioning that followed other plans to leave the house. These days I see Dave several times a month for breakfast, and similarly when I tell my wife I’ll be with Dave, I don’t face the interrogation that can sometimes accompany my plans with other companions.

I first met Dave and his wife, Edna, when I was eight or nine years old; we met at church. The same church my father now serves as pastor, and where Dave still serves as a deacon. The military had moved our family to Michigan, where we had no family, but we found community in a small local parish. Dave had recently retired from General Motors after working there since he was eighteen, mostly in trades. Our church building was an old school facility with a big to-do list and a small budget. To me, Dave was an electrician, an expert at tree removal, a roofer, a plumber, a furnace repairman, and a specialist in lawn care. The membership consisted generally of older folks, and there were several widows in the congregation, many of whom had no one to mow their grass, fix their dryer, or repair their roof. My father was and is the hardest, most capable worker I know, but Dave brought a certain gravitas to projects that only a lifetime of technical skill and a barn full of tools collected throughout that life can provide.

Dave was generous with his skills and resources, but chiefly with his time. Early on, I wasn’t much help—I slowed things down more than I sped them up—but eventually I became a reliable manual laborer for the day’s agenda. I wasn’t the only one to get these opportunities; Dave frequently offered to work with kids from church, especially those who might not have been blessed with the home life I had. He’d often pay us for any work done at his property. Somewhere along the way, without anyone announcing it, I transitioned from boy to man. Rather than having to be monitored for basic tasks or followed up with for further direction, I began to contribute independently. It was around this time that I was told I could now refer to “Mister Scheffler” as “Brother Dave.” Our conservative sect of Christianity had little use for formal titles, but the use of “brother” was an informal way to communicate both familiarity and respect.

It wasn’t just the work. Our family often shared meals with Dave and Edna. I bonded with them both, especially Edna, around John Wayne movies and other Westerns. It was Dave who took me on my first youth hunt, where I missed a doe at point-blank range. “You didn’t want to drag one out this late anyway,” he comforted. My father and I still hunt his land every year.

Dave shaped me in ways I don’t think either of us realized at the time. All those hours we spent in the truck from one place to the next or grabbing McDonald’s, he was talking and I was listening. He reinforced my father’s emphasis on hard work and clean living, but he also expanded my imagination. He had purchased sixty acres or so in his twenties, built a house, and farmed forty of it himself while working sixty hours a week for GM. He had done a little of everything, and while I never saw steers or turkeys or pigs on his land, I heard the stories and loved them, and I loved being on his land.

When I moved back to the area a little over six years ago, I began getting invitations to breakfast with Dave. Early on, I was a guest at a pre-arranged meeting, invited as an observer. This allowed for old friends who already knew most of each other’s stories to retell them for someone who hadn’t heard them. I felt privileged to enter this sacred space of shared memory. Eventually, I became a participant, not merely a listener. Now, almost weekly, he and I go together, mixing talk of his past, our shared present, and my potential future. In many ways, I feel grandfathered into the membership of the rural community I live in. I know the stories of the land and of people I’ve never met. I am adopted into this shared consciousness.

The pendulum has swung a bit. When I was a kid, Dave picked me up to go work; now most days I pick him up for breakfast. His back relegates him to an advisor on most projects, but his voice is more valuable than he realizes, and his presence is always welcome. After helping and watching him do things for others for twenty years, I am able to do a few things for him now, which is a privilege for me and others, though perhaps humbling for him. He and Edna have modeled for me and my wife how to age with dignity, not bitterness or regret. I pray our current cadence enriches his life as much as it does mine.

This relationship I have with Dave has also served as the building block for a host of similar friendships with Darrell, Kiervan, John, Tom, Bill, and Jim. C.S. Lewis warned against what he labeled “chronological snobbery,” which he defined as the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” It is not unrelated that Lewis also recommended an intergenerational reading cadence:

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook.

I believe a similar cadence should guide our friendships. A ratio of one older friend to every three younger ones (or vice versa, depending on the reader) might help us all avoid a sort of generational snobbery—the kind which assumes the young are ruining the country or that the old have already ruined it.

God has gifted me with great friendships, but my friendship with Dave and others like him has uniquely oriented my life. These friendships don’t just give us wisdom; they give us permission to grow up, to take risks, to come into our own. I’ve been enabled to process difficulty with a bird’s-eye view, to see hardship through the lens that life is rather long and that the frustrations of my own generation are merely a different verse in the same song that has been sung for a millennium. If I only spent time with my millennial peers, we’d bemoan 7% interest rates together; Dave remembers when interest rates were 16% in 1980. I’ve also been empowered to reach for things like land ownership or to make career changes. My friendships with older peers give me valuable decision-making knowledge, but also confidence in my decision-making ability, thereby limiting the anxiety that cripples so many of my peers. There is an ease to being in one’s own skin that comes from external affirmation. It is no small thing for a man to hear another man he respects say he’s proud of you, especially when that voice isn’t related to you.

In my experience, the older often welcome the company of the younger. However, the elders do not always dispense their wisdom neatly and succinctly. My generation loves quick, easy answers. We love to go to YouTube or a blog for the list of steps we need to take, but this is not how relationships work. They take time, but their yield is greater. There is not a more fertile seedbed for intergenerational friendship to blossom than the church, where people gather from a shared place to express a shared faith. This Sunday, perhaps invite someone out to lunch who doesn’t share the same birth decade—or even the same millennium.

Image Credit: “Oak Tree in a Mountainous Landscape” (artist and year unknown)