Even a Blind Sow

“Eine blinde sow find alsemow ein chest,” my dad says to me the other day.

He does this occasionally—breaks out into Pennsylvania Dutch, the language of his childhood.

So I’m not surprised. But I can tell he’s said something about a pig, so I’m confused.

What we’re working on has nothing to do with pigs. It’s a history presentation he hopes to give next year when he’s 93. And we’re constructing a chart for an accompanying slide, trying to get numbers to line up in a grid. As he watches me work, he’s the one who figures it out. It’s supposed to be the other way around.

“Good for you, Dad!” I say.

And that’s when he spouts out the Pennsylvania Dutch, which translated means Even a blind sow once in a while finds a chestnut.

But this isn’t a good analogy. For one thing, the pig part doesn’t work. And besides, for being ninety-two, he isn’t blind about technology. Actually, for any age, he isn’t blind.

He might no longer travel with ease. Or walk around his town. Even moving from room to room brings challenges.

But secure in his office chair and using his computer, he reads documents in national and state archives. He accesses newspapers from far away and long ago. He traces ancestry and accesses personal collections through history websites. He reads out-of-print books in the HathiTrust Digital Library. And from what he learns, he creates documents, saves them in files, organizes them in folders, and backs them up on an external hard drive. And when he doesn’t know how to do something, he figures it out.

He does all this to follow his passion—teaching people about history, especially the church history of his beloved Casselman Valley in western Maryland and Pennsylvania. And he sticks to this task for hours each day, scouring source after source, looking for exactly what he needs.

Come to think of it, maybe my dad’s analogy does work. He probably does feel blind sometimes, as he searches here and there, often with no results. And he’s sure got a pig-headed tenacity when it comes to this foraging.

“Look at this!” he says when I poke my head into his study.

And sure enough—he has found a chestnut.