Jack is a real person and just like I describe.

JACK’S CREATION KIT

I can remember the first time I saw Jack. It was then I realized that human beings came in kits . . . ready for assembly.

I appreciate the blessings I’ve been given: a sense of humor, a good . . . no, uh, a full . . . no, uh, a quick . . . no, uh, a sense of humor. So please don’t think I’m ungrateful.

I can watch a good veterinary surgeon C-section a heifer in twenty minutes and admire her. Although it does bring back a surge of memory wherein I’m stripped to the waist on a windy knoll, my knee in the incision to keep the intestines contained, wielding a four-inch suture needle and ten feet of umbilical tape whipping in the breeze. But it doesn’t bother me.

I can attend a horse-training class in which the trainer takes a twelve-year-old Belgian/Arab stallion that’s never been touched by human hands, and in fifteen minutes, that same horse will be driving a crew cab pickup with manual transmission. As I listen, I see flashbacks of lashing lunge lines, broken poles, steel panels bent double, concrete posts upended, rope burns on the palm of my hand, and the emergency room ceiling. But I’m not jealous.

At rodeos, good ropers effortlessly cast their silken strings around speeding beasts while visions of tangled lines, duck-out horses, balky steers, dust clouds, and thumbs the size of Polish sausage flit through my mind. But I feel no envy.

Everybody’s good at something, I always say. But when I saw Jack standing on the stage with a guitar in his hand, he looked like a Greek statue of Hercules. Broad across the shoulders, narrow at the hip, tall, a face chiseled from marble, and a full head of hair. Surely, I thought, he can’t sing.

He opened his mouth and a deep booming operatic note came rolling out. Well . . . the guitar must be a prop. Then he played a rippling set of passing chords up and down the neck. I soon found out he was a magnificent songwriter, sincere, God-fearing, modest, and impossible to dislike.

It was then I realized human beings came in kits. Each kit with equal parts comes trundling down the giant assembly line in the sky. My kit had the misfortune of being next to Jack’s.

“Let’s make this one special,” said the angel in charge. “Let’s give him calves like ostrich thighs. Where can we get ’em? How ’bout this box? He’s supposed to be a cowboy poet. He won’t need calves or shoulders, or hair for that matter.

“Jack needs a voice that sounds like heaven’s announcer. We can take most of this poet’s vocal cords and just leave him a big nose. He’ll get by. . . .”

So by the time Jack and I reached the finish line, together we had the makin’s of two complete average humans. But they’d robbed so many parts out of my kit to build Jack, he was really one and a half humans and I was made out of what was left.

Seeing us side by side, it’s easy to understand the kit theory of creation. Sort of like comparing the king of the jungle, a magnificent lion, with a hyena-anteater cross.

Oh well, I kinda like ants.