My Three Lives (ePub)

"My Three Lives" offers a snapshot of several ways of life that have almost disappeared. Farming in 1940's and 50's rural Pennsylvania often still depended on horses and was only slowly adopting the forerunners of today's machinery. The first third of this book describes in vivid detail how farm families lived, what they ate, what they did for fun, and how they supported each other through disasters such as barn burnings. While attending high school in a nearby small town, the author developed a love of music, languages, and learning that drew him away from farming and its hardships to an almost equally difficult second life as one of the first male nurses. Often the only man in nursing programs, he offers the reader hilarious accounts of hospital humor that make up the central core of the book; but it is his third "life" as an itinerant pastor for groups of churches in Pennsylvania mountain towns that provides a glimpse of life many moderns will find difficult to believe. On any given Sunday, Pastor Tom drove the narrow and sometimes dirt track miles between as many as three churches and delivered a different sermon to each according to its sometimes difficult to understand principles and beliefs. He and his family used all of his farming skills in the primitive parsonages that were the best the remote villages could provide, but they became part of these sturdy and independent families, grew to love them, and served them for 22 years. In 2004, Tom and his wife Kathy, surrounded closely by four of their five children, bought retirement land for a small farm just a few miles from the original family farm where he grew up. He continued to attend local churches and even served one small congregation as a part-time minister until 2013, the final year of his three lives.