I sold insurance in one county for thirty-eight years and filed my own son under refuses reality for twenty of them. It took a stranger’s finding to make me reopen the file.
He calls me on Sundays at four, or I call him, and it has been the same call since about 2019.
“Daddy.”
“Merritt. How’s your water?”
“Line’s fine. We lost the pump on the upper tank Thursday but that was the pressure switch.”
“You get it?”
“I got it. Bud Sams had one.” A pause. “Sylvie made honor roll.”
“Well, that’s fine. That’s fine. Tell her Papaw said so.”
“I will.”
And then we talk about the weather for four minutes and hang up, and I sit there with the phone in my hand, and I have done that four hundred times.
I sold insurance in this county for thirty-eight years. I opened the agency in 1981 in a rented front room on Main with a card table, and when I sold it in 2019 I had eleven hundred households and four people working for me. My business was other folks’ worst mornings. A man calls you at seven in the morning and his roof is on the ground, and you tell him what he has, and what he has is what he decided to have four years ago on a Tuesday when he was in a hurry.
Here is what I have said about my older son for going on twenty years, in this house, at the church, and once at a Rotary lunch I regret: Merritt refuses reality.
I will lay out my case, because I made it many times and I made it well. He passed his property and casualty at twenty-two. He worked for me three years and was good at it, better than good with the older customers. He had a book waiting on him that was worth more than any house in this county. In September of 2010 he left, at twenty-five, and gave me a reason I could not hold in my hand. He is forty-one years old. He maintains a church camp up a gravel road in this county for thirty-eight thousand dollars and a house to live in, and his wife teaches, and I pay for his daughter’s teeth, and neither one of us has ever said out loud that I pay for his daughter’s teeth.
In 2019 when I cleaned out that office I found a box of his desk things from 2010, and in it was a used paperback — one of those books about the sixteen personality types — with the price still penciled inside the cover. A dollar fifty. There was one passage underlined, about a person needing work that agrees with what they believe. And in the margin beside it, in his handwriting, with the year on it, he had written two words.
No such job.
He was twenty-four when he wrote that. I read the underlined part and I read the two words and I thought, well, at least he knows, and I put the book in the drawer of my desk at the house, and it stayed in there seven years.
I am seventy-two. Neva died in March of 2023 and I have been in this house by myself since. I am going to Ron Whitson’s office in November to redo my will, and the whole matter — the entire matter, every bit of it — is the arithmetic of what has already gone out the door and to whom, and whether a man is obliged to even that up at the end or whether evening it up is the last insult he gets to deliver.
INFP Traits: What He Says Instead of No
That camp runs off a spring.
There is a spring box up in the hollow above the dining hall and a gravity line down to two tanks, and that is the whole water system for two hundred and fourteen acres. In 2016 they were talking about taking a bigger group in July and Merritt told the board no, and the board asked him to work on it, and he built a second tank, and I will tell you what a second tank does. It holds more. It does not make the spring give more. A spring gives what it gives. It does not know that you need it, and there is nobody to take it up with.
I did not follow that when he told it to me, and I did not care for it much when I finally did.
Now the trait, and I have had years with it. My son does not say no. In forty-one years I have not heard him say the word to me one time.
What he says is I don’t know that I could do that. What he says is let me sit with that. What he says is I hear you, and he does hear you — he hears you better than anybody in this family — and then nothing happens. For two decades I read that as a boy who could not make up his mind, and any man who has sat across a desk from a customer who cannot make up his mind will tell you what that costs by Friday.
It also does not look like weakness up close, which is the confusing part. He is not wringing his hands. He will hold a position against me all evening on a thing he has actually settled — how his mother ought to be buried, whether Sylvie gets a phone — and hold it politely and not budge one inch. So I had a boy who was immovable about some things and could not answer a yes-or-no question about the rest, and I filed the whole business under unserious, and I need to be fair to where I was standing when I filed it, because I did not have the other half of it yet.
INFP Careers: Thirty-Eight Thousand a House
The camp is Beaverdam, up above Flag Pond, two hundred fourteen acres, and he has been the caretaker since 2012.
What that means: he mows about eleven acres of it, he keeps two hundred feet of gravity line, he rebuilds cabins in the winter, he does the septic, he plows, and in the summer he is the man three hundred children see when something has gone wrong. He wrote the grant in 2021 that put the new field lines in — sixty-one thousand dollars out of the state, and I found out about it from the church bulletin. He handles a budget I did not know he handled until this month; when I finally asked him the figure he told me and I made him say it twice. His title on the letterhead is Facilities.
Thirty-eight thousand dollars a year, a four-room house, and the propane.
I ran a business, so let me say the plain part about this disposition in a workplace and let it stand. What an outfit gets out of one of these is a man who will not shade anything. He will not tell a family a policy is better than it is. He will not put a number where you want the number, and he will not go along in a meeting to get out of the meeting. An outfit will take all of that, and be glad of it, and pay him what it pays the fellow who mows, because none of it shows up anywhere it could be billed.
What an organization decides a disposition like this is worth, and what thirty years of it adds up to on a household’s balance sheet, would have to be totted up by somebody who has been on the receiving end of the check. I have only ever been on the writing end. Nor does the identical disposition come back off a room the same way on everybody who walks in carrying it.
While I am at it: an agency is a book, not a building — eleven hundred households who renew every year and mostly do not shop it, and a consolidator will buy that book at a multiple of what it earns, and the multiple is a bet on how many of those households stay after you are gone. Which is why the book is worth a good deal the day you sell and nothing at all the day you die. I explained that to my children more times than they wanted.
INFP vs ISFP: Two Answers, Five Days Apart
The offer came in October of 2018. There was a base number and there was a two-year earn-out on top of it, and the earn-out was contingent on a family member staying in the agency through the transition. That was their condition, not mine. I asked both my children in the same week.
Corinne is thirty-eight and does the large-animal side for a practice in Erwin. I found her in a wash stall with a mare’s hind foot between her knees and a hoof knife in her hand, and I laid the whole thing out for her, and here is what came back:
“No. I’d be in a chair.”
I told her there was a good deal of money in it, and I named the figure, because I am my father’s son and I believed the figure would do the work. She got the knife going again.
“Daddy, I’d be in a chair, in a room, on the phone, for two years.” She set the foot down. “I’d rather be dead. You want a Coke?”
Four seconds, and a Coke. I have gone back over those four seconds a great many times. She was not being flippant and she was not sparing my feelings. She knew what she was and had known it since about the age of nine, and the question did not require looking into. And I will say straight out that Corinne has always been the easier of my two children to be the father of, and I do not think that speaks well of me.
Five days later I put it to Merritt, at this table, and he asked me four questions and every single one of them was a good question. He asked what happened to Lorene and Dana if the earn-out failed. He asked whether the transition meant selling the new company’s products to my customers. He asked what I wanted, which nobody else asked me the whole time. Then he said he needed to sit with it.
November he was sitting with it. The first week of December I called and he said he was still turning it over and I could hear that he had not slept. The nineteenth of December I drove up there and he came out to the truck and stood in the cold with no coat on and told me he could not get to the bottom of it yet, and I said the deadline was the thirty-first and it was not a philosophy question, and he said, “I know it.” He looked terrible.
The thirty-first went by. Nobody said no. The condition lapsed and the deal repriced and we closed in March.
Here is the difference, in my language rather than a book’s. Corinne’s answer was about the chair. An actual chair, in an actual room, for an actual two years, and she could see the room, and sitting in it was not among the things she would be doing. Merritt’s was never about the chair. It was about who he would be by the end of the two years, and there is no number for that, and there is no way to check it, and every week he did not shut it, another version of it stayed standing.
And run it the other way, because I have run it the other way about four hundred times. Give that boy his sister’s way of closing and the answer comes back in October, I restructure, and the thing prices where it ought to have. Give Corinne her brother’s way and there are no eleven acres out at Flag Pond, because eleven acres is a thing a person buys by shutting off every other thing she might have bought.
INFP Strengths and Weaknesses: The Number
Three hundred and forty thousand dollars.
That is the difference between what that agency sold for and what it would have sold for, and I have it on paper, and I have looked at that paper more than a Christian should.
I am not going to be dishonest about the strength, because it is real and it is the same machinery. That boy has never in his life told a person a thing he did not believe. Not to be kind, not to close, not to get out of a room. In 2009 he talked a widow in Limestone Cove out of a policy I had already written her, because he did not believe she needed it, and then he walked back into my office and told me he had done it before I could find out from the renewal. I was furious for a week. That woman is eighty-four years old and still in this county and she still calls that agency, which has not been mine in seven years, and asks for him by name, and they have to tell her every time.
That is not a small thing. In my line it is close to the whole thing. I built thirty-eight years in one county on being the man who would tell you the truth about what you were buying, and I would ask you to consider where he learned it, and then consider that I have spent twenty years calling him unserious for taking it further than I did.
Now the other side of that same spool, and it is not sensitivity and it is not timidity. When a man’s standard is what he can live with in himself, a great many ordinary things become impossible for him. They do not announce themselves as impossible. There is no notice and there is nobody to appeal to, including him. And the bill for that does not always come to the man who wrote it.
Christmas Day, 2019. Nine months after the close.
They were all here. Ruthie had brought a ham. Sylvie was five and under the table and Abel was a baby in the other room, and Corinne was at the sink, and I had been assembling a sentence since March and it was a good one, because I have never in my life said an ugly thing badly.
I said: “Merritt, I want you to know I’ve made my peace with it. A man can’t help what he is. I just wish somebody had told me at the front end which of my children was going to be a hobby.”
Ruthie set her fork down. Corinne turned around at the sink. And Merritt said, “Yes sir,” and got up and started clearing plates, and cleared every plate on that table, and then they stayed another two hours because his wife made them stay, and we watched a ballgame.
Ruthie thanked me for supper on the way out. Merritt shook my hand at the door the way he has shaken my hand since he was nine years old, and said it was good ham, and they drove home up that gravel road in the dark.
I have never taken it back. I have gone over it a thousand times and I have never once picked up a telephone about it, and I want to be clear that this is not a thing that happened to me. I built that sentence over nine months and I delivered it in front of a five-year-old on purpose, because I wanted a witness.
INFP Relationships and Compatibility: Being Graded Without a Hearing
Here is the thing about being close to one of these that nobody puts in the pamphlets.
You are being assessed. Continuously, finely, against a standard you have never been shown, by a man who will not tell you the result and who does not experience it as assessing anybody. Merritt has a position on every single thing I have ever done. He has had one on the Sutherland business since February of 2008 and I did not learn there was a matter until this month.
You do not get a hearing. Not a poor one — none. The finding gets entered, the file gets closed, and you were never served notice that anything had been opened, and meanwhile the two of you are talking about the ballgame at Thanksgiving for eighteen years. I have written a great many denial letters in my life and every one of them had a reason on it and an address to write back to. There is no address on this.
And he is not cold about it. That is what makes it so peculiar. He was down here every Saturday for six weeks after his mother died, and he cut this whole hill and cleaned her closet out because I could not, and did not make me talk while he did it. There is nobody I would rather have in a house where something bad has happened.
What all of that is like from the chair across the supper table every night of a life, rather than from a driveway on a Sunday afternoon, would have to be told by whoever has sat in that chair, and it will not be told by me. And a disposition like this does not come back off a man the way it comes back off a woman in this part of the country, which I have watched with my own two eyes and which is not my subject here.
Ruthie told me at the funeral home in 2023, when I said something about the camp, that she would have moved to Kingsport in a heartbeat in 2010 and that nobody ever asked her.
I think there is more to that than she says. I have always thought there was more to that than she says.
INFP Under Stress: The Only Time He Ever Raised His Voice at Me
My daddy was Ottis Honeycutt and he carried the mail out of Erwin on a rural route for thirty-one years. He drove that route in his own automobile and wore out three of them, and he knew every dog and every drunk on it, and when he retired in 1984 the post office gave him a certificate and a coffee mug. He thought a job was a thing you did so that a house had a roof, and he thought that anybody who expected more out of a job than that was going to be disappointed and had it coming. He never once asked me if I liked selling insurance. It would not have occurred to him that the question existed. I have wondered lately whether that is a poverty or a mercy and I have not settled it.
Now. September of 2010.
That boy came into my office at four in the afternoon and told me he was leaving, and I did not take it well, and I said several things, and one of them was that he had let me build something for twenty-nine years for nobody. And Merritt Honeycutt, who has never raised his voice in this life, stood up in my office and shouted at me.
He said: “You never asked me one time what it was doing to me. Not one time. You asked me every week how the numbers looked.”
Then he shook — I mean his hands were going — and he sat back down and he apologized to me. He apologized. Twice. And then he could not finish the conversation and he went out to his car and sat in that parking lot forty minutes, and I watched him through the blinds and did not go out there, and Lorene at the front desk did not say anything to me about it for four years and then said one thing.
I have replayed that fourteen words about the numbers more than any other fourteen words in my life, and here is what I have got. It was true. I did ask him every week how the numbers looked, because that is what I ask everybody, because that is the instrument I was issued, and it never once crossed my mind that it was a question that could leave a mark.
That is what this looks like when it goes past what it can carry, and it is not what you would expect. It does not get cold. It goes to pieces and then it accuses, in exact language, out of an inventory that has been kept for years, and then it is horrified at itself, and it apologizes, and the apology does more damage than the accusation because the accusation was true.
And I will put something in here plainly, since I sat in that chair and did nothing for a month but be angry. Hard weather passes. If it will not pass — months of no sleep, nothing getting started, the accusing turned around and pointed inward and staying there — a father cannot reach that, and a pastor cannot, and neither can one word set down on this page. Get a physician into it, or somebody licensed to do counseling. I would rather be thought blunt than elegant about that one.
INFP Behavior: What Corinne Said in the Barn
The eleventh of August, this year, I was out at Corinne’s to look at a gate post that had heaved.
She has eleven acres out past Flag Pond with a barn on it that is worth more than the house, and she bought all of it at thirty-one with money nobody gave her. I had gone out to look at the post and I had also gone out because it was a Tuesday and the house had been quiet since Sunday, and I would not have admitted the second part to anybody standing there.
She had a heifer in the head gate and I was holding a bucket for her and we were talking about nothing, and then I said the thing I have said in front of that girl probably a hundred times, which is that if her brother could have got to an answer by Christmas of ’18 the whole family would be sitting different today.
And Corinne said, “He did, though.”
I said, “Did what.”
“Made up his mind.” She was doing something to that heifer’s eye. “He called me the Sunday after you asked him. First week of October. Told me he was out and asked me not to say anything to you till he could figure out how to say it.”
“October.”
“First week.” She let the heifer up. “He said he’d tell you by the weekend. Then he called me about every Sunday for two months and told me he’d tell you by the weekend.”
I stood there and held that bucket.
“Corinne,” I said, “that’s eleven weeks.”
“I know it,” she said. “I’ve been mad at him about that for seven years.” She started coiling a hose. “Are you eating? Daddy. Are you eating.”
I drove home and I did not call my son. I sat down at that desk in the den and I called Ron Whitson’s office and moved my will meeting from November up to the ninth of September, and I knew exactly what I was doing while I did it, and I did it anyway, and I have not moved it back.
What Is the INFP Personality Type: No Such Job
I got the book out of the drawer that same week. Seven years it sat in there. Count the whole country once and it comes to around one in twenty-three — one of the few boxes where the men’s and women’s columns nearly touch.
I — the deciding happens alone and arrives finished, and you were never going to be in the room for it, whoever you were to him.
N — he does not see a chair. He sees every man he might turn into by sitting in it, all of them standing there at once, and he cannot stop seeing them. That is your eleven weeks.
F — a matter gets settled by a private determination about right and wrong that never comes out for discussion. Tenderness does not enter into it anywhere; he is the least sentimental man I know about anything that counts.
P — nothing is shut until the world shuts it. A deadline is another man’s opinion about time.
The letters are the top sheet. Underneath, the framework runs four working parts and ranks them by how well a man is outfitted for each, and it is the ranking that makes this one a different risk from the one standing next to it. Here the private finding is the fully covered item and the outward machinery is the exclusion — machinery meaning deadlines, and structures, and getting a hard sentence said to a man’s face in an office. In between sits a branching that does not run out of branches. Which gets you a fellow who had his answer the first week of October, could not deliver it in eleven weeks, and then let me go on believing for seven years that he had been undecided, because undecided is an easier thing to be than a coward.
Now I have to put in the part I did not know until this month, and I had to ask him for it on a Sunday and he gave it to me in about six sentences.
February of 2008, the Sutherlands’ house burned in Limestone Cove. Arlon and Vesta. They had actual cash value on the dwelling because in 2003 Arlon asked me what he could take off to get the premium down and I told him, correctly, and he chose, and I wrote what he told me to write, and I did nothing wrong, and it was all in the file. The house cost a hundred and ninety thousand dollars to rebuild and the check was for sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars, and I sent my son out with it because I had a closing.
He was twenty-three. He sat in Vesta Sutherland’s sister’s kitchen and put that check in her hand answered her questions about it for an hour and a half, correctly, and came back to the office and never mentioned it. Not that day. Not for eighteen years. And the next spring, in a dollar-fifty paperback, beside a sentence about needing work that agrees with what you believe, he wrote no such job.
He did not decide in 2010. He decided in a kitchen in February of 2008, and two and a half years went by before he could get it said out loud, and eight more before he could tell me why. By that measure eleven weeks was quick.
As to the count: something on the order of four in a hundred, and close enough to even between men and women that it stopped me, given how differently it runs for a man around here. As to the other percentages a person will find quoted — an underwriter looks first at how a body of data got assembled, and this one got assembled out of people who went hunting for the questionnaire or had it put in front of them at work. Data that selects itself tells you a great deal about who selects and almost nothing about the county.
Now the part where I price the apparatus, and then I am done with it. There is something real being measured underneath: take the reading in January and take it again in February and it prices out where it did the first time, and an instrument that repeats even that well is not nothing. Where it thins is the last move, the one that turns four readings into sixteen named sorts of people. Nobody has ever paid for that move with evidence in the amount of the confidence resting on top of it. I looked at it the way I looked at a credit report — it goes in the file, it is not the applicant. And the whole of it describes a great many people at once and no one of them. Wherever the description comes loose from you is the seam worth your attention, because the parts that fit you are shared with four people in a hundred and the seam is not.
INFP Cognitive Functions: The Finding He Never Read Out
The first working part is a finding. It is private, and there is no procedure attached to it anywhere. The book calls the four, in his order, introverted feeling, extraverted intuition, introverted sensing, and extraverted thinking, and I had to read that page twice.
Mood is the wrong word and preference is the wrong word. Call it a determination about whether a thing is right, reached somewhere I have never been admitted, held to a fineness he could not demonstrate to a soul, and settled for good once it is reached. Eighteen years on the Sutherland business. Eighteen years, a check for sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars I still hold was correctly written, and him carrying a determination about it the entire time and passing me the rolls.
And it does not require agreement to keep functioning, which is the part a man in my line has trouble with. Every finding I ever made had to survive somebody: a company, a state examiner, an attorney. His has never had to survive anything at all, and it has never once weakened.
The second habit is the branching, and it is the engine and it is the affliction. Ask him a question with two answers and he does not get two. He gets forty, and each one of them is a whole life with a version of him inside it, and they are all vivid, and none of them is more real than the others until something outside him closes the door. That is the eleven weeks. That is also, I have to allow, the grant he wrote in 2021 and the four different ways he had of fixing that spring line, none of which I would have thought of.
The third part runs on the file. He is not sentimental about what is behind him, and he keeps it exactly, and he checks today against it. February of 2008 does not sit in that boy as a memory. It sits as a document, and he consults it.
The fourth part he was issued almost nothing for, and it is the one every business and every family on earth runs on: the machinery. Deadlines. Getting yourself to say a hard sentence to a man’s face in an office at four in the afternoon. He can be asked to do it and he cannot be built to do it, and the eleven weeks cost this family three hundred and forty thousand dollars, and I want that sentence in here, right next to the other one, because both of them are true and neither cancels the other.
INFP Personal Growth: The License
He has kept that license active for sixteen years.
Continuing education hours, the fee, every two years since 2010, for a thing he has not used one day and will not use. I have asked him about it twice. The first time he said he might need it sometime. The second time he said he didn’t know, and I believe that was the honest one.
What gets published about growth for this one is all boundaries and communicating your needs, and I have watched a man who cannot say the word no work his way through a fair amount of that material.
Here is the only growth I have witnessed with my own eyes and it took eighteen years and it was six sentences long. On the second Sunday of this month I put a direct question to him about a check I sent out in 2008, and then I kept my mouth shut through the answer, which so far as I can determine is the first time in my life I have managed it. And he told me. Plainly, in order, without one word of accusation in it, and it cost him something to do it — I could hear it costing him.
So he has it. He has always had it. What it wanted was a man to ask him a question with a date attached and then be quiet, and I had forty-one years to be quiet in and I got to it at seventy-two.
I still believe I priced that policy correctly in 2003. Arlon Sutherland asked me what came off, and I told him, and he chose, and there was not one thing in that file I would write differently today. My son and I will not be agreeing about that, and I have stopped trying to have the argument.
I am keeping the meeting on the ninth of September. I have told myself four times that the will is just a document and that a document cannot say anything a man has not already said, and I do not believe myself, and I am going anyway.
Yesterday evening I took the license down off the wall in the den. It has hung there since 2007 in a frame Neva bought at the drugstore, and the wall behind it is a different color than the rest of the wall.
I put it in the desk drawer, on top of the book, and I got the drawer shut.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.