High Water Boy

Back in the day, rowdy boys (as we were known by anyone over 70) wore Toughskins jeans.  I vividly remember a rust colored pair of pants with reinforced knees and sturdy stitching in the ... ahem ... area where the pant legs attached, that could have withstood a nuclear blast (though I am happy to report never having had to subject them to that test).  We were sent out the door summer, winter, spring, and fall in Toughskins.  Video games didn't become a household phenomenon until I was nearly ten years old  (yes, indeed life was possible as a child without them),  and we did the unthinkable and played out-of-doors. Far from being vaporized by the rays of the sun as some readers with gamer's thumb might think, we actually enjoyed roaming the fields and woods that surrounded our home.  I remember we used to slide down one particularly steep wooded hill on our bellies or behinds, as the mood may strike us, like human surfboards adrift in a sea of fallen leaves, prickly weeds, rocks, decaying logs, saplings, trees, and dirt.  We generally came home at the end of the day looking like something that had been dropped from a plane over the city dump.  And remarkably, our Toughskins bore it all like some sort of alien armor; withstanding the tortures their rowdy bearers subjected them to day after day.

My family was poor, plain and simple so you made what you had last as long as possible. Generally the clothes I wore weren't new, but they were new to me courtesy of a cousin or a yard sale, and I never minded.  And since Toughskins could easily last five or six generations before finally being retired (or so it seemed), I wore them until I could no longer fasten them around my waist even though the legs broke a good inch or more above my shoes - high waters, as we called them.

I've often wondered what my mother must have thought as she watched us playing in the yard, or as she looked back to see us trailing along behind her like ducks in a row as we filed into Mt. Olive Baptist Church tucked next to an ancient cemetery where the winding gravel road reaches its highest point on the hilltop.  Did she feel some sense of regret as she saw us in our ill-fitting hand-me-downs?

My pastor and friend recently reminded us of 1 Samuel 16:7 when Samuel was looking for the next king.  It was the custom for prophets to anoint, and thus appoint, the next king, and Samuel was looking for qualities he expected the king to have.  He should be tall, strong, handsome, and wearing Toughskins (or the equivalent of the day) that fit. Certainly not high-waters.  However, God taught Samuel an important lesson by rejecting all of David's brothers. 

1 Samuel 16:7  But the Lord said to Samuel, "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him.  The Lord does not look at the things man looks at.  Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."

In other words, it doesn't matter to God if you are wearing hand-me-down high-waters.  And mom, it didn't matter to us either.