Hobbs Freeman’s amazing days rich through grace

Published 12:00 am Monday, June 22, 2009

Sunday, two days after Hobbs Freeman’s funeral, I was at my desk at home. For some reason, I pulled a notebook from a stack.

Opening it, I saw it was the journal I kept during a 2006 trip to Iraq. A paragraph on the page before me was about my iPod and how I had loaded it up with hundreds of songs of all types. It said that once the overseas flight had gotten under way, I pulled out the iPod, inserted my earphones and pushed the “random play” button, The first song was “Amazing Grace.”

“Remember to tell Hobbs about this,” I wrote.

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Hobbs didn’t like “Amazing Grace,” or, worded more correctly, it was his least-preferred hymn. I thought only a few people knew that, but I was wrong. During Hobbs’ funeral, his pastor, Charles Holden, said one of the Holden daughters, upon learning Hobbs was semi-conscious in intensive care, suggested they sing “Amazing Grace” at his bedside — to rile him in hope of rousing him.

Once, I asked Hobbs about the hymn and he told me he had no question of its beauty or its message. The problem, Hobbs said, was that it was overused, especially given that there are so many other hymns and songs of all types just as beautiful and just as meaningful.

Milton Hobbs Freeman was born in Fayette, son of Dumont and Eloise. Their names resonate with everything good about landowners in the rural South. They were all solid people, slow to anger, quick to admire and appreciate the works of others, in awe of nature, appreciative of the bounty of the land, slow to take credit for anything, distant from anything mean-spirited or dishonest.

Hobbs went to art school, then to the Air Force and for a while ran a family business, a grocery on Main Street in Fayette.

For most of his life, he wasn’t encumbered by those of us in the paycheck-to-paycheck grind, but his was hardly a life of leisure.

In fact, if there were a motto for Hobbs Freeman’s life it would be, “Don’t wait.”

Whether it was cutting, splitting and stacking firewood, hauling and replanting giant shrubs to keep them from being destroyed in the name of “progress” or anything else requiring backbreaking labor, Hobbs would do it. He loved historic preservation, not for nostalgia, but because he loathed waste. He saved everything, finding new uses. He loved to visit, tell stories and listen to the stories of others. He didn’t wait for his life to happen. He lived it every day he was given, refusing to get in a rut or routine with a too-familiar hymn or anything else. So much more to learn about and appreciate.

Hobbs’ greatest legacy will be his art in all forms, diverse and deceptively simple in appearance. His ability to take cast-off items and reveal their beauty is something all of his friends admired and have been talking about since mid-May when word spread that he was in the hospital — a rare event — and it didn’t look good. “It can’t be,” we thought. “He’s just 65 and Dumont and Eloise both lived full lives until 87.”

But it was.

Of all the songs sung at Hobbs’ funeral — and “Amazing Grace” was not one of them — one that came to my mind and has remained there is “Neighbors” by Charles Sandage of Beebe, Ark. A portion:

Choose your friends for their power,

Trade your love for their gold;

It seems like a sign of the times.

But some folks remember

What neighbors are for,

And some of them

are neighbors of mine.

Building cities of steel,

Building highways of stone,

We’ve forgot what this good earth is for.

But somewhere there is land that’s

still held in God’s hand,

And some of it lies near my door.

Hobbs’ may not have liked “Amazing Grace,” but he knew grace was real. It abided in his soul. And it enriched all of us blessed to have been counted among his neighbors.