At the pinnacle of what I used to think of as my career, a family emergency forced me to abandon my fast-lane Washington lifestyle and return home to the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.
          My mother had fallen ill and the family needed a temporary replacement for her as the receptionist in my father’s rural medical office. I was assured that I would only be needed for a couple of days, so how could I say no?
          I could handle my mother’s job without too much trouble because I was practically raised in the office. For most of my life I’d helped out, to extent I was able, during nights, holidays, and weekends. But when I returned after a decade living away in the big city, I saw the place with new eyes.
          It was a dizzying transition. In the blink of an eye, I traded forests of white marble columns and vast domes of gold leaf for more than half a million acres of colorful autumn foliage gilded by the slanting yellow rays of the late afternoon sun.
          As my two-day stint stretched into weeks, months, and then years, I slowly shed my identity as a U.S. Senate lawyer, or any kind of lawyer, and became a not particularly noteworthy but deeply satisfied participant in some genuine public service, humble though it was.
          No more cross-country jaunts in Lear Jets or joyrides on nuclear submarines. It was enough to take the occasional bone-jarring sprint across the cow pasture in an antique twelve cylinder convertible Cadillac, trunk lid permanently removed so the behemoth could be used to haul hay.
          It’s hard to overstate the difference between a world like Washington where my colleagues and I would frequently ask each other, “Is that with a ‘b’ or an ‘m’?” to clarify whether we were talking billions or mere millions, and a world where the only way some people had to get any cash at all was by foraging in the woods for walnuts during a short harvesting season.
          Because money was scarce, my father treated hundreds of people for free, somedays everyone. But his patients weren’t the kind to feel comfortable accepting charity, so, when they could, they’d drop by and leave off some token of thanks for his kindness. The fact that this sort of exchange has become a hackneyed stereotype doesn’t take away from its charm. Sure, he got the traditional food items like fresh fruits and vegetables, whole-hog sausage and home-cured ham, beans and cornbread, fudge and divinity. But more often than not, he got paid with less predictable sorts of things.
          Sometimes the gift was actually a burden, but, whatever it was, Daddy always accepted it gracefully: a tiny blue jay that had fallen out of its nest, a cardboard box containing four deodorized baby skunks, an orphaned raccoon in a boot.
          He got all sorts of things: a cutting of an admired maple tree, a twig that grew into a magnificent climbing yellow rose, a half stick of dynamite probably stolen from the mines, a rusty Confederate sword found in the woods, Indian arrowheads turned up by a plow, a handful of bungee cords scavenged from alongside the interstate, and the back half of a 1934 Chevrolet pickup truck that would “make a good trailer to haul things in.”
          During the years I worked with him I got to share in the pleasure of seeing these interactions. The sweetest thing I ever saw him get was an offer of friendship from an elderly retarded man who stuttered out a shy invitation for Daddy to visit his very rural cabin where he suggested they could sit together on his porch and watch the squirrels play. He generously added to the bargain by telling Daddy, “You can sit in the chair.”
          No amount of money in the world could ever outdo a deal like that.
          The most unusual thing he ever got was the still-warm body of a red fox that a patient had seen get hit by a car. Daddy took the beautiful corpse to a taxidermist and then displayed the magnificent creature for decades until my mother could no longer vacuum the dust out of its thick fur.
          My favorite thing he ever got paid with was given to him when I was a teenager. It was made by a ninety year old widow who was so crippled with arthritis she lived confined to only a single room of her house. Daddy made free house calls on her for many years and, in return, she sewed him a quilt. The night he brought the quilt home he gave it to me with tears in his eyes. He said he couldn’t bear to look at it because of the hours of painful effort he knew it had cost her.
          Ever since that night the lovely quilt has hung on the wall beside my bed, wherever I lived. It’s a giant pink star on a white background. I’ve spent decades marveling at the thousands of tiny stitches placed by her gnarled fingers.
          Nowadays the quilt reminds me of what a real career is all about. It’s not about the direct deposit of currency from one bank account to another or getting on C-Span while you work. It’s about the one-on-one exchange of time and attention, warmth and concern.
The star quilt is a testament to a rural community, an epic poem from an old lady to my father. It says a lot about the blessings of really noticing the people around us. It says everything you’d ever need to know about love and kindness, patience and courage, and Southern lives, well lived.