ch.7

 its my party

        lee and ann pulled up in lee's old f-150 pickup truck to my house . . the old vw. van was being stored in my garage and kept ready for the trip, as the snow was just beginning to stick to the pavement making driving hazardous. . ann didnt care that lee's finances and his old f-150  were limited as farming isn't the best provider at times. there are always things you could sell if you needed money but then you would just have to buy them back later when the price was higher so lee just tried to make do with what he had.since his dad  was getting senile due to old age and Alzheimers. putting him in a retirement home would be the end of the farm as lee was struggling to make ends meet now , the nursing home would be the last straw but it seemed inevitable,

      ann was out of the old truck first grabbing her overnight bag from the back of the front seat. i rushed as fast as my body would allow to take her bag for her , but lee instead jumped in and took it for her. we all said simultaneously" heeeyyyyy, how you doping" , and we did a big group hug and laughed . it was all part of our past as it had to do with this drunk running around a bar saying " heeeeyyy how you doooooing'? until  he came to our table  as ann lee and myself were laying in wait for him as he was about to say hey to us , we all 3 stood up and said" heey how you doing?"it floored the old drunk and he looked at us like we were crazy and just turned and walked out the door. well kinda , as he bounced off the wall first. but we were kinda crazy and still are,

      we headed to my guest house . 300 square feet of compact homeliness designed for 2 people with an electric loft designed by myself and built by lee and ann when visiting me . the loft bed would lower by cables and could be suspended at different heights allowing you to stay close to floor level if you like or raise you up into the peak oif the house and virtually blocking out everything below you. you step in the house and the bed is above you and with a flip of a switch it lowers on cables attached to each corner simultaneously. a brake is attached to the cable wire as a safety feature allowing you to lock in any position. this is all built on a trailer frame and made to look like the decked out small home it was. charming is the adjective i most often hear. normally i would rent out to fishermen on the weekend and make a couple of hundred dollars and had made plenty of rentals in winter also . it is beside my cabin here along the muskingum river and where i have my carvings. people stop all the time trying to buy my carvings , but my carvings are not for sale now. some of my favorites are preserved inside a cabin i built special for them. they are pieces of me as i always put a little piece of myself into everyone , but now my back will hardly let me shuffle around . so now i paint and write and carve with a knife . do what you can do and bloom where you are planted , are motto's i tend to live by. 

so i rent out the house and people enjoy my carvings and fish for 200 hundred a night, or 2 for 300. not a bad deal  i think and so does the bunch  of people who wait to rent it. 

    i will never get rich but then i couldn't afford to much money anyhow as i would have to change my lifestyle and i kinda like it as it is, and so does ann and lee. immediately they set to unpacking and settling themselves into their home away from home. i had turned up the propane heat in the little fake fireplace and with the insulation and tightness of the little cabin's construction it was no time till the cabin was comfortably warm.winter had descended on southern ohio with a vengeance and it seemed to follow ann and lee down i-77. i thought at times it would have been nice if they left it up there as i was supposed to go out on the town with lee and ann to celebrate my bir-christmas party as i call it. being born on the 22 nd of December doesn,t offer itself any real advantages . in fact you tend to have one or the other over lap like Christmas and your birthday celebrated at same time. the lines get more blurred when gifts are involved. soon you are just getting one gift and 2 cards, then just a gift. life was tough having a birthday around christmas. and another thing i have in common with lee was that we had the same birth date. one of the things that was a laughable moment was one day at the BMV while trying to get my license renewed . i had to mention my birth date and lee just started laughing. i said, " whattttt?whats the problem and he laughed harder.

     " we both have the same birth-date you know." 'lee says

      we had known each other for over 3 years at that point and  thought we knew a lot about each other but apparently some things slip through the crack. i never told them my birthday as i didn't want to make it a big deal . and i couldn't recall them ever mentioning theirs. what was amazing to us was that it was so strange the topic never came up until that day when lee overheard me. it was good for a laugh and to strengthen our bond as friends though. with both lee and myself having a birthday the same day , we since then had spent our birthdays together with ann always a willing participant. 

     it was my night to  chauffeur them around the bars as they painted the town red. i had quit drinking 33 years ago and i feel very strongly about drinking and driving as i was one of the reasons one shouldn't drink let alone drive. but since i didnt drink and wanted to go it was up to me to drive and we did as we headed for marietta , ohio. (to be cont.)

13.