He Was Like Wyatt Earp

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"Just leave them alone and they'll leave you alone." Those words were pearls of wisdom from my old man. They work, too. Over the years I've crossed paths with many wasps-or hornets, or yellow jackets, or, heck, I don't know what they're called - but I know they sting! Unless, as Dad taught, you just leave them alone. Then they'll go away soon enough.

I was thirteen years old. We were working on the car together-replacing worn out universal joints in a drive shaft. That's an important part of the story because you need a fair amount of lubrication to press out worn u-joints. WD-40, and lots of it.

About Dad, there's something else you should know. One indelible memory each of his kids has is a picture of him hard at work with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip like it was fixed there in epoxy-with gnarly long ashes, as if screaming to be flicked, hanging on for dear life.

Picture it: drive shaft in the vice on the workbench, the stubborn u-joint, sweat beading on his brow, his cigarette-you get the picture-and a can of WD-40 in his hand. Enter a wasp, yellow jacket, hornet, or whatever in the heck it was. It arrived and began making a nuisance of itself. It buzzed around his hands as he worked. It rose up and butted repeatedly into the fluorescent light above us. It dove to the side of the old man's face, as if it were inspecting the perspiration there. It darted about, causing me great anxiety. Not Dad. He paid the bug no mind. The old man was cool.

But there was a limit to his patience.

The wasp continued its circuits: hands, light, face, bench, and back again, over and over. His rule notwithstanding, eventually my old man had enough. "Pain in the ass," he quipped, his cigarette riding the movement of his lips like a surfer on a wave. What happened next was one of the most memorable sights a thirteen year old boy could ever hope to see.

He was as smooth and as deadly-fast as a wild-west gunfighter. In one perfect fluid motion, the old man whisked the cigarette out of his mouth with his left hand, masterfully flicked its ashes with his thumb en route, raising the cigarette just a few inches before his face, while at precisely the same time grabbing the can of WD-40 from the bench with his right hand, spinning it in his palm to line up the spray nozzle, the cigarette and the hovering menace a mere foot in front of him.

Whoosh! In a flash, it was over. A burst of WD-40 over the top of his makeshift tobacco-stick igniter, the resulting bolt of fire caught the unsuspecting bug mid-flight, scorched its wings, and sent it crashing down to the workbench, quivering its last. Then, just as fluidly, the spray petroleum was returned to the bench, the cigarette to his lip, and the old man took a deliberate, long drag on that cigarette like an actor in a movie after the sex scene. Like nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was back to work wrestling with the u-joint.

One problem with Dad's flame-throwing, insect-repelling display: It apparently never crossed his mind that the next chance his thirteen year old son had, he would be out there with his friends, retrieving a cigarette butt from of the ashtray, WD-40 in hand, and asking, "Now, where do you suppose we can find a wasp?"

Darin Michael Shaw is both a writer and serves as the Senior Pastor at Christ's Church in Amherst, New Hampshire. He's considered by many to be an expert on big buts... of the bible. You can read more at http://www.darinmichaelshaw.com and http://www.interactivesermon.com

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