David Eugene Wood – A Very Good Man
Born March 7, 1938. Died July 17, 2023.
“When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world…he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin in the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
David Wood was quite the gardener, tinkerer, home auto mechanic, lay carpenter, intellectually curious reader, a giver of his love and attention to his family, and a self-taught, lifetime student and practitioner of the Word. He cared very deeply about those he loved, both family and those for whom family members cared deeply. He was the sort of man who made a lasting difference because of the what, where, and why of the things he cared about. The things he ‘touched’ were made better because the nature of the change was substantively and qualitatively different; the effect was longer lasting even if, or perhaps because, it was more subtle and consistent and reliable and authentic.
He was not what you would call a gregarious man but that doesn’t mean he didn’t engage with people. Quite the opposite and especially at church. He was there when a need became known, or he saw a task that needed doing. Need a group of men to build and then improve a church camp for youth over several years? Count him in – truck, tool bag, hammer, skill, and will. Can anyone drive a bus to pick up children in the community on Sunday mornings so that they can get at least a hint of what church is all about? Oh, and enlist your family, too, to lead songs or perhaps teach a quick lesson during those trips? You’ll have to arrive at least an hour before church starts and get home an hour after everyone else has. Sign us up. Mentor/pen-pal/teacher and lessons-scorer for adult students in New Guinea who have signed up for the World Bible School correspondence course? Dave’s your man. Adult-level Sunday class teacher, communion preparer and server, opening or closing prayer leader, worship service coordinator, deacon, devotional host…yes to all.
And then there was actual gardening: in most years, a modest plot nearly every place he lived that had enough yard for such but, for a few years, an entire acre of virgin soil broken, tilled, de-rocked, fertilized, planted, weeded, and harvested all by hand, straw hat on his head and sweat-stained blue shirt across his back, to provide fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers, asparagus, onions, and okra for the family dinner table or to share with co-workers or someone in the congregation who probably needed such but couldn’t afford to get it at the store.
Helping people move, assisting his wife in taking a meal to a shut-in, checking the fluids and tire pressure on a family member’s car, agonizing for them (and with them when he could) when tragedy struck and beaming with happiness when something came along that was really good for them.
At the center of it all, driving and shaping and steadying and grounding his engagement with life was his Faith. Unshakeable. Instilled in him, when a boy, by his mother in their regular attendance at the Overland Church of Christ; rediscovered by him at the completion of his military service when he ensured he and his wife, and their young family would accompany his mother to the old congregation on relocating back to the St. Louis area; then strengthened with subsequent congregations as the family moved and planted new roots elsewhere.
How do you measure the goodness of a life? Most people would say that it’s all about a person’s character, whether they were a good person, a reliable and loyal friend, the type of father or mother a child would remember later in life as someone who loved them, disciplined them, encouraged and mourned with them, and served as an example of the type of person they want to be when they find themselves in the same position. When a good person gets upset, it’s what they get upset about that matters and the why of it…and the same can be said about what makes them happy and what they think is important.
David Wood was a good man who led a very, very good life.
David Eugene Wood passed in the early morning hours of July 17, 2023, at the age of 85. Born on March 7, 1938, in Cuba, Missouri, he spent most of his early years around St. Louis, leaving at the age of 19 to join the U.S. Navy as a way to support his mother and to ‘see the world.’ It was while visiting his oldest brother, in California, that he met the love of his life, Robin Irwin. After marrying Robin and completing his military service, that included deployments to the Western Pacific in the late 1950s and very early 1960s, he and Robin returned to his hometown of Overland, near St. Louis, to raise a family in the 1960s and 1970s before moving the family to Claremore, Oklahoma, in 1978. A hard worker from boyhood—stoking the coal-fired furnace when he would get home, alone, to a dark house, while still in grade school, or selling newspapers in taverns in the early 1950s, at 12 or 13 years old, so he could save his earnings to buy “the most wonderful bike a boy could possibly have – a lime green English Hercules 3-speed racer with hand brakes – he settled in with the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation (later, McDonnel Douglas) in the late 1960s; an opening in their Tulsa operations enabled the move to Oklahoma. He worked for the company for 30 years, eventually retiring from there but moving on to another aerospace company before again establishing himself with St John Medical Center in Tulsa, where he would work for several more years.
A devoted husband to his wife, Robin Ann Wood, of 63 years, and father to their son, Dakota, and daughter, Laura, Dave was defined by the things that mattered most deeply to him: his family, his service at Blue Starr Church of Christ for 40-plus years, to being a man of God, steadfast in his work ethic and upright living, tending to his garden and various projects around their home, ensuring his family was well-provided for in every essential, and living his life in a manner that was honorable, virtuous, and dependable.
He was a steadfast and loyal friend to those whom he admired and felt kinship in faith and values. He was the steady center of our family, reminding everyone to “watch for deer!” whenever they were heading out on some errand or driving home after visiting for a spell. A self-made man in education, skills, and awareness of the larger world, he refused to be distracted from the few things that were at the core of everything: his faith, his family (both immediate and the ever-expanding extended family of in-laws and grandchildren), and his love and commitment—second only to our God—to his beloved wife.
Though the family rejoices and is wholly comforted in knowing he is now with his eternal Father, and will be forever, he will be deeply, deeply missed by those who love him and who looked to him for guidance and an example of what a ‘good man’ can and should be.
In 1995, he would write:
At age 57, I have many memories of events that occurred before my wife, my children and grandchildren became a part of my life. These events are a part of their history also, so I want them to know some details of their heritage. Memories are things that a person can only attempt to share with someone else. But how does a person such as I, unskilled in the art of translating mental pictures into words, accomplish this? How do you describe a memory in a way that you can accurately share it with someone else?
Well, he did a beautiful job of it in the several pages he wrote about this childhood, sharing his memories of his past, and our heritage, up to the point he said goodbye to his mother in September 1957, when he left to begin his service with the Navy. After that, his story was told in action and by example, and the occasional tale about some event in his life that came to mind, usually prompted by something that was occurring in our own lives. It was a way for him to connect his past with our current and future. He “changed us” in ways that imprinted himself and gave us something to remember for a lifetime.
He leaves behind a garden of extraordinary beauty: his wife Robin Ann Wood, now in Bixby with their daughter; his son Dakota Wood and his wife Dixie (Jones) Wood (of Virginia); his daughter Laura (Wood) French and her husband Richard French (of Oklahoma); grandchildren Aubrie Wood (Virginia), Liam Wood (North Carolina), Emma Wood (Virginia), Rachael (French) Constien and her husband Clay Constien (Oklahoma), Austin French and his wife Sydney French (Florida), and Dakota-Brian French and his wife Brittney French; and great-grandchildren Cooper Constien and Carson Constien (of Oklahoma), and Damon French (of Florida).
“The steps of a man are established by the Lord, And He delights in his way.” Psalm 37:23
Love you, Dad.
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