This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek

  Both the house and I were well on our way, but we would need more than just the tools I had to complete the job. It was going to take a woman’s touch to make the house a home, but God wasn’t going to let that happen until I had done my part and the house was ready. And He wasn’t going to bring love my way until He knew my heart was where it needed to be too.

  Twenty-Five

  SOMETHING GOOD

  I just wanted a little bit of something good. What I got was a lifetime of something great.

  It didn’t have to be amazing or beautiful. It could just be okay. And that would have been enough. I got down on my knees in the spring of 2001 and asked God to let me experience love that wasn’t terrible. That’s all I asked for.

  But what He gave me was beyond my wildest, wildest dreams.

  After years of longing for and never really having or feeling love, I got on my knees one final time and turned it over to God. Everything. All of it. I opened that last little bit of my hands and humbled myself and emptied myself to Him. And then I rose to my feet and tried not to be the man I had been for the last thirty-five years. If I was ever gonna have something different, I would have to make different decisions. And so I did. Or at least really tried to.

  I began really searching my heart to see what my intentions were for everything. To question my own integrity even when no one else did. To expect more of myself because I knew I was capable of it and I was tired of living life empty and alone. Little by little, the world moved. At first it was so slight that I hardly noticed. I would find myself asking, “How are you doing?” when I would see someone, and really meaning the question, instead of just saying hello. And people could tell that I meant it, and they would answer by actually telling me how they were doing. Telling me things they never would’ve before. I would humble myself and ask, “What does that mean?” when someone used a word I didn’t understand. I tried to be the reverse of my old self. Partly because I didn’t trust myself and the decisions I had made but also because I wanted to see where a completely different path would lead me. I didn’t just say, “Jesus, come into my heart and change me.” I took responsibility for it and did my part.

  But mostly, I repented.

  I never used to like that word. I don’t really like church words, like repent and born again, and, honestly, a hundred others that you hear a lot of Christians use in conversation. I always felt like they were showy and big—words meant to impress the listener, rather than the speaker being sincere. So I avoided them. I still do, except for repent. I’ve learned to really love that word. It’s where the change is. And where the power is, in my opinion.

  It’s not enough to say I’m sorry. I believe that you have to show it. And repent is a biblical word for meaning what you say, then putting your money where your mouth is. My cousin Aaron told me a story about how, when he became a Christian, the church he was attending in Illinois at the time required him to have a time of repentance. He had to go back to everyone he had wronged and apologize to them, to try to make amends for the mistakes he’d made. That was scary stuff, he said, but in another way, he loved it. And it worked. It took him six months, but when it was done, he was a completely different person or on his way to becoming one.

  I could see why. That was crazy-talk. My first reaction was of terror, but on second thought I could see how magic could come from it. I had a feeling that that kind of making amends would be so humbling to the person who was doing it, that change was bound to happen. It was almost forcing you into another life because you were blowing your old one wide open. That terrified but excited me at the same time. I had seen the change it had made in Aaron’s life and in others’ lives, and I desperately wanted to do whatever it would take to be the man I knew I needed to be. The man God wanted me to be. So I went for it.

  I picked up my phone and called old girlfriends and told them how sorry I was for hurting them. They were shocked and probably skeptical. I can’t blame them. But it was real. I really was sorry. And I really did want to change. I did my best to face up to everyone and everything that I had been hiding from and scared of in my past. And as frightening as it was, it was so much more rewarding to do. Humility is always a good thing. I’ve come to learn that you can never lose if your intention is to humble yourself and put others first. There is no downside. Not one.

  And it wasn’t for only six months; I’m still doing it. Or trying to. To apologize right away when my ego takes off running and leaves God and others in the dust. I’m still trying to remember that this life really isn’t about me, no matter how many times the man in the mirror tells me it is. That serving is always better than being served. Giving better than receiving. And that love is always the best choice. Sometimes I get it right, right away. And at other times, I still have to learn the hard way.

  Twenty-Six

  FARMER BOY

  I like to tell people that I might not have deep pockets, but I sure got a lot of them.

  I’m not sure why, exactly, or even when I started wearing bib overalls all the time, but around the time I bought the farmhouse, I started wearing them a lot. Maybe it was because they were so comfortable or because I had spent eight years in the Marines and something about the overalls reminded me of a uniform. Or maybe it’s just one less thing to worry about. I’m not really sure. I just started wearing them and never stopped.

  For the last ten or fifteen years, I’ve pretty much worn nothing else. Just bibs. And I’ve got all kinds. Dark blue, light blue, black, white, tan-colored, striped, you name it; I’ve got it. Or had it. Some are blue-jean bibs for daily wear, some are heavy-duty cotton that can hold off a pretty extreme amount of cold, and some are super lightweight custom bibs that Carhartt made for me for summertime last year. I’ve got lots of Carhartts and some Keys, a few Libertys, and even some Big Smiths, but they’re all pretty much the same. They’re built mostly for work and for comfort, not for looks. The funny thing is, though, the way they look has made a big difference in our lives. They’re part of why a lot of people know who we are. I guess my wife and I are just easy to spot. The guy in the overalls with the pretty girl. That’s us in a nutshell.

  They call it branding. I call it lucky. Sorta like what Forrest Gump might say about his running: “I just started wearing them . . . I had no idea they would take me anywhere.” But they have. In a world of singers and performers who look the same, my overalls are part of what makes Joey and me look different.

  I myself like them for a different reason, though. I like them for all the men who’ve worn them over the years. Mostly farmers. Farmers, factory workers, and other working types. In the history books you’ll see scores of men wearing them in photos from the Great Depression and before. All of them doing hard labor. Doing jobs no one else wants to do. Work that doesn’t get much pay, and even less glory.

  Men like Joe Farlow. He’s my neighbor down the road. He and his Shirley have been living in the same little house for sixty-something years. He farmed and did a number of other things, but he’s long retired now. I mostly see him these days when he’s walking out to get his mail from the rusted white box by the road and I’m passing by. Just a wisp of the man he once was, but he’s still wearing bibs. Joe probably weighs less than a hundred pounds soaking wet, but he is one of thousands, millions, who’ve worn them their whole lives. They never knew any different or wanted to. They weren’t trying to make a fashion statement. They were just getting dressed to do the job that was waiting for them in the barns and the fields, sitting on red and green tractors or on stools beside milk cows.

  I also have loved wearing them because they’re pretty much a natural girl repellent. The whole time I was married, I don’t really remember any women looking my way or giving me much of a second thought. I liked knowing that. I’m guessing Joey did too. “One less thing,” I would always say. One less very important thing, actually.

  But my wife thought I was handsome in them, and that’s all that really matters. She looked at me the way a man w
ants his wife to look at him. And I know that she knew that she was the only one I was ever really trying to impress anyway. So that was nice. It always feels good to do the best right thing. And that was one of them for me.

  I have my moments these days when I think about wearing something else. Some jeans or shorts. And I will sometimes, mostly around the house or working outside. Who knows? I might even decide to start wearing jeans again full-time, one of these days. Or khakis or something else. Just because I can. And also because I don’t want to be defined by something on the outside. I’d rather be known for what’s inside of me. The man that I am, not the man that I look like I am.

  But for now, I’ll just buckle up my straps and keep working—if that’s what typing on the computer is. A gentleman farmer. That’s what someone called me one time. The kind who writes more about sitting on the horses in the pasture than actually sitting on them. I’m working on that, though. Putting down the pen and picking up the reins more. Spending more time living life and less time writing about living. That is part of what my wife helped me to do. Helped me stay balanced. I am having to learn it on my own now, and it’s not easy.

  Twenty-Seven

  KILLING MYSELF

  It was my first truly unselfish act. The first one of any substance that I can remember. And nothing came of it. Nothing, except everything, that is.

  It was January or February 2001, and my sister Marcy was living here in Tennessee, fifteen or twenty minutes from us. She’d had a tough, tough life. Pregnant at fourteen, a mama at fifteen, Marcy had quit school to raise her son, Mikel, when she was in the ninth grade, and she never went back. Within a year she was in a shelter for teenage mothers—a government-run place to protect girls like Marcy from the men who said they loved them but had a funny way of showing it. While I was dodging make-believe bullets overhead in boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, Marcy was a thousand miles away dodging fists. And she wasn’t good at it. Her teeth magically fell out, two or three at a time. They seemed to come loose every time her boyfriend got mad at her.

  For the next few years she went through hell. She and her little boy. I came home on leave one weekend and had to spend two hours asking around, just to find out where she was living. She was on the lam but not running from the law. She was running from the guy who was running from the law. Over coffee one morning I saw the new tattoos on her arms and the age in her eyes. She had grown old and wasn’t even eighteen yet. I wasn’t much help. I think I gave her twenty dollars and a hug and pretended as I drove away that somehow that was gonna fix everything. It didn’t.

  A couple of years later she came to visit me in California. I had been married only a month or so and was excited that Marcy and her son were coming to stay with us. In our little apartment in Anaheim, it was a fun time to be together again. My sister and I laughed and played in the swimming pool and talked and talked. I thought she was doing well. She said she was, and I believed her. I wouldn’t find out ’til much later that she had gotten on that plane in Florida not to come see me but to leave someone. To get over something. To put a hurt behind her that was so deep it would take twenty years to face it and speak even a word of it without losing her breath and almost passing out.

  Marcy had had a baby—another baby boy—a day, maybe two, before getting on that plane. And because she and her first son were barely surviving on their own, my sister couldn’t bear bringing this one into such an unstable, scary world. So she gave it away. She gave that little bundle of red-haired joy to some wealthy strangers who had things she didn’t. Money. A house. A job. Two parents.

  She had to get on that airplane. Either that or go running down the street after the fancy car that drove away with her second child. A child that she still has never seen to this day.

  Her life would not get much better in the next ten years. It would change but not improve, not much.

  She would come live with us again in South Carolina, and again her teeth would be falling out—her face and jaw so swollen you couldn’t tell where her chin began and her ear ended. But this time it was not because of fists but because she lacked nutrition. Her teeth turned black and fell out after long, terrible bouts with pain and swelling. But Marcy wouldn’t complain. She would just bear that pain and all the rest of it because she had no insurance and no assurance that anything good was on the horizon. The only thing she was sure of was that she loved her son and he loved her.

  In time, Marcy met and married a good man. Don Gary. A good, good man. He drove a trash truck. He still does. He had insurance and provided a trailer for them, then another trailer, and then finally a house. He would be the first bit of stability that she knew—not just in her adult life but in her entire life.

  Marcy spent her twenties and thirties waiting tables and bartending, helping Don make ends meet. They had three more beautiful babies together—Magen, Brenda, and Donny. Marcy loved being a mother. Like our mother, it is what she took the most pride in, I think. That and getting a bargain. She loved to take her little ones “garage sale-ing” to see if she could find the best deals. Marcy was a master at it. She often took my kids with them, and when my girls found something they wanted and Aunt Marcy didn’t want to pay full price for it, she made sure to say in front of the person hosting the sale, “I’m sorry, honey, but Mama can’t afford to buy that for you.” And pretty soon, they’d just hand it to my kids and say, “Just take it, baby. It’s okay.”

  Fast-forward a few more years, and Marcy was living on Carter’s Creek Pike, not too far from us. I had bought the farmhouse a year or so earlier, and God was working on my character big-time. He was opening my eyes to things that I never saw before. To hurt and pain that was right in front of me that I’d never even noticed. And one day it was Marcy’s.

  I came up with an idea. I would take a little bit of the money that I had and help Marcy open a restaurant or a secondhand store. Something that could give her some pride. Something that could be her own. I remember when the idea hit me—where I was and what I was doing. It was so random, out of nowhere. But also so real. As if it had already happened or something.

  I was going to make Marcy’s dreams come true.

  And I did, or I was, at least, part of it happening. But not in the way I thought I would be.

  There was a little run-down restaurant a mile or so from our farmhouse called Granny’s or Pottsville Mercantile or something like that. I had gone in a few times, but it was rough. Really, really rough. I couldn’t imagine how it could stay open much longer, so I offered to buy it or lease it. I really had no idea what I was doing. I was thinking that for two thousand dollars, I could do anything! They weren’t interested. Not at all.

  So I moved on. I called about another place, and the owner told me about a guy in Mount Pleasant who had an empty building across from an old hardware store on the square in that little town. I went down, looked at it, and then leased it. My younger sister, Candy, helped me make it happen. And then one Sunday I invited Marcy and her husband to meet me at a little restaurant on the square in Mount Pleasant called Lumpy’s. (I didn’t realize it yet, but that restaurant also has a catering hall upstairs called Pearl’s Palace, and it would play a big part in my life in the next year or so.) So we all went out to eat. Afterward we walked Marcy down the street, and we looked in the windows of the stores that were closed. She gazed for a long time into one in particular, saying, “Isn’t that neat? It looks like there’s some old shelves and wooden bins in there.” When she turned around, I handed her an envelope. As she opened it up and saw a couple thousand dollars, I said, “It’s yours.” And she started sobbing. Hysterically. I knew no one had ever done anything like that for her. She couldn’t stop crying. I held her as her tears ran down my shirt. It was so, so beautiful.

  So she moved her yard-sale stuff in and opened a little store called Aunt Marcy’s Uniques and Antiques, and I helped her fix it up. And to be close to her, I rented the hardware store across the street so we could spend time together,
have coffee in the mornings, and slow down and enjoy life together. It was heavenly.

  Though Marcy wound up selling almost nothing because the town was so run-down and no one was shopping for her brand-new, old “uniques” she had bought at a garage sale the weekend before, something even more beautiful came of it. Joey.

  It was because we were there that Lumpy’s asked me to start hosting a songwriters’ night upstairs, once a week, and it was there that Joey walked in and saw me and changed my path and everyone else’s. So though I didn’t exactly make Marcy’s dreams come true, mine did. And I think it happened because I wasn’t worrying about my dreams or my girls or finding someone. I was giving. Instead of taking. For the first time, really.

  Within a year Joey and I would be married, and Marcy’s little store would shut down. As would my songwriting studio. And we all moved our lives back to Pottsville where our farm was. To the casual observer, it might have looked like we had failed. That I had failed. But I hadn’t.

  Three years later we were sitting at my kitchen table. Joey, Marcy, and I. And Marcy randomly said, “You know, Jo, you and I should open a little cafe up in that little building down the road that is shut down.” And a couple of months later, they did. It became Marcy Jo’s Mealhouse. And it changed Marcy’s life. And Joey’s. And mine. And thousands of others . . . one bite at a time.

  Twenty-Eight

  MY NAME IS JOEY

  She ran up those steps two at a time and landed there, right in front of me. Faded jeans, dusty boots, and a button-up shirt. I had no idea my life was about to change forever.