JUST ANOTHER DAY

        Or is it? Have been to Arizona and California and back again for last 3 years and have no9t wrote much. We sold the farm, we being the family members who were left after Mom and Dad  had passed. It wasn't pretty by any means but necessary. It was hard getting rid of everything and moving out. But it has been over 3 years and I have said little on the blog about it. I have tried to reconnect but it was hard getting set up to do it.  And just doing it. 

     Which is where i am now as i once again begin to pound away at my old keyboard in the pecking style i have been familiar with. My plans to write isnt wityh any forethought so please bear with me as i get my sea fingers back under me. I live in Pikes Peak  campground which is north of the Kimboltom  exit of I77 in a trailer that is situated in a gated comunity. Sounds funny but it has its features including a swiming pool that is nice and open all summer long. I have a nice tan a i daily try to swim to improve the circulation in my legs. my ability to walk any distance has been hindered by circulation problems. I refuse to let it stop me and swimming is helping me. another reason to return tyo the keyboards is to daily get my dose of organized thought it takes to write a short story or experience. 

    There are still things i need to say and hope mi can convey them in a clear way. So  let"s  start. I will include pics of my California trip including seeing Sequoia National Forest.

         This is a picture of the General Sherman tree that is the largest tree in volume and height in the world . 

It is hard to imagine these trees are up to 2500 years olad or more . This is another pic from a different view of the General Sherman tree. This one also shows that this is a grove of these old virgin trees. Since i visited the park , global warming has showed that these giants are vulnerable to fires and at one point they had to cover the base with tinfoil because of sparksadvancing from below. they also suspended tourism for a week till the threat of fire subsided. 

          I am going to stop at this point and will continue with my California trip the next time i write. I would like to go into my personal thoughts as to how this park is run. Positive suggestions to handle the masses of tourists visiting the site.

 

b to b2

       Well to continue  on with the story of the truck change and having just found a camping site. we being myself and the camp owner decided we were going to take the truck to the local repair shop. i am not going to mention the name of the shop and only that they couldn't take it right away but instead it would have to wait for Monday. so it was Thursday at this point and so i waited till monday and took the truck in and waited for them to check it out. 

       They seemed to think it was a speed sensor and there preliminary guess was right . the problem was it also melted a nylon bushing on the main tailshaft that the speed sensor rides in and gives you your odometer speed by which you judge how fast you are going. and that all these little pieces parts about a good handfull was floating around inside a a supposedly wet transmission. 

      But there and again was the problem that the tail shaft assembly was dry despite having a fill plug that was never checked although i had a local garage with a reputable business insist that they did check all relative fluid levels. it makes no difference as it could just as easily been a tailshaft seal that went bad from the truck sitting all those years. this is why you should not let a vehicle sit for more than a month at a time. you need to keep all these seals moistened. the problem is getting it fixed. They put the truck back together and put transmission fluid in dry tail shaft area and let me drive the truck home till they had the time to pull the tail shaft completely off which required removing the emergency brake cluster. They said this will be at least a two day , maybe longer job and wanted me to leave the truck. well being that far away from home and having nothing to get around in was a real pain in the butt. so i rented a pickup from enterprise car rental . This allowed me to freely visit the surrounding area, go to hospital in the event i need to., and all those fun things we take for granted. 

       Well i dropped off the truck and then went about visiting and didnt bother them for that whole day as they were going to remove the tail shaft assembly to see the extent of the damage and replace all necessary parts. And again the second day i heard nothing but i did stop by their business to see the progress that was being made. although the tail shaft was designed to be taken apart, the mechanic was having trouble separating the one part from the rest of the transmission and was afraid he would break something. He was frazzled by the whole thing and suggested i take it to a regular transmission repair shop where undoubtedly they would face d the situation before. so they put it back together and don the property owner where i parked my trailer took the truck another 30 miles to another repair shop. 

     Don had expressed interest in buying the truck because his son was a commercial welder and the truck was set up for welding. i was just going to play with the welder, and i had it in my mind that if a situation like this came up , that the welder would be a good point for resale, This whole transmission repair was throwing some serious wrenches in my travel agenda. Don jumped at the chance when i suggested to him a price for all welding related equipment. for me to sell all this welding equipment and buy a truck was going to lighten my load considerably , considering that gas prices took a hike the day i took off and have been steadily climbing. the welder was part of my generator for any off grid camping i was going to do. But in the end to me it was a chance to get back on the road and in better comfort with a lot more fuel efficient vehicle.

       Don and I took the old truck to the repair shop where i assume it still sits today because the guy was dragging his feet to get it in. Then we took my rental vehicle and went truck shopping , and finally found a decent deal in the f150 I have now. If I had not made the decision to sell the truck , i would hardly be as far as i am today on my journey. 

Back to Bloggin

     

Back To Bloggin

 It literally has been over a year since I blogged , and really i have no excuse for my absence, outside of pure lack of drive. i have had things to say, but just lacked the wear with all to sit down and force myself to type. a lot has happened since the last time i blogged. we sold the farms and I am still in the process of moving.   

     Though i moved out of the farm , I am still moving, now from one place to another and trying to accustom myself to developing a comfortableness to my travels. Having a cold hasn't helped along with troubles of a mechanical nature that was associated with my choice of the first truck. also I am still getting used to the camper and finding out what works and what doesn't. 

      Currently I'm in Clovis,N.Mex. and in  a nice reasonably priced RV  trailer park for the next two days. iI started from home and made it to the southern edge of Kentucky before having any problems with the truck. Getting ready to leave and packing up years of stuff at the house where i was on the farm was a different story at some point i will go into more thoroughly. but as i was coming into Williamsburg , Kentucky I noticed the speedometer wasn't working right and that the truck wasn't shifting right. Also I noticed an odor of burnt oil ,although the oil pressure was still good in the engine , i had no clue what was going on with the transmission. my first thought was to find a place to do the basic checks i need to give me a better idea. there was a truck stop and a Walmart parking lot which is an RV'ers best friend when travelling. 

        I filled the truck with gas and checked the engine and transmission oil and both looked normal. I grabbed a bite to eat, and ran into an apparent resident of the Pilot truck stop I was at and I talked to him about his traveling woes, apparently he was at the end of the line with his RV. he still thinks he can get it to run but from the sounds of it he had been holed up in the Pilot truck stop for awhile. a few minutes talking to him , made me want to make sure that his fate wasn't going to happen to me. I decided to head next door to the Walmart parking lot in case I couldn't find a campsite for the night. also i climbed under the truck and didnt notice anything suspicious as to what may be going on , but I just needed a spot that was open and not much traffic to safely really inspect the truck and transmission. Walmart parking lot offered that to me. Also i needed time to find a campsite. 

        Although i still found nothing wrong with the transmission and it was still shifting though making a noise but nothing that sounded serious. I found a campground online that seemed like a good place to be , not too far out of town and the owner answered and told me had several sites available. So i just headed out to his place. the route was twisting and strangled at times as it curved around the mountains while dragging the trailer , but the truck , though shifting hard was going through the motions and never once let me believe that it was going to strand me alongside the road. My hope was to find a a place to park the trailer for awhile till i could trouble shoot the problems with the truck. one of the reasons i chose a fifth wheel trailer over a bumper pull trailer, is that if i wanted to leave it someplace , it is much harder to steal a fifth wheel trailer as it does a a bumper pull. also the weight is centered over the rear wheel and that increases the traction on the truck and eliminates sway. it is also more maneuverable. 

       Anyhow i made it to the campgrounds and was able to get set up. after talking to the owner of the campground i felt that I may have came to the right place as he seemed knowledgeable about where to get it fixed and it was a relief that i wouldn't have to drag the trailer to a repair shop or live out of it at the repair shop. I had no water onboard except bottled water because when i left Ohio it was still freezing daily. my next blog will go into my trials and tribulations with the truck from that point.

Here We Go Again

     

    It is no coincidence seeing me back again writing, I had full intentions of doing so. I just wanted it to be more meaningful and updated to latest technology. This I intend to use to write another sci- fi book I have had visions of in terms of dreams and plot that I was stumped on up until about a month ago. I have been toying with the idea of the dream and how I could use it in my novel, to not only give an air of mystery and suspense, but also unveil a vision I have for a future civilization.

       I thought about using present day technology and future considerations of how we will exist in the future with concerns of global warming, and lack of quality food and water to sustain the mass population, overcrowding, depletion of natural resources and an expansion in human population that will require more resources from a planet that is now limited to what it has to offer.

        We need everyone to think of how and what they can do to help all humans survive, even if that means limiting reproduction. Third world countries will push the population to 7 billion by 2050, just 30 years from now  that isn’t that long, or a little over half my life. We are currently at about a population of 5 billion. Our societies are diverse and some are steeped in political and religious upheaval, some are just there , not really advancing man or his cause. War is a constant companion to all societies with lethal population destroying bombs of the like we have never seen before and hopefully never will.

       We don’t know this as at best we never know for sure what ur future will be like. We can only plab and hope for the best. As an individual we have a tendency to be complacent and say that we are only capable of so much and in the scheme of things , this is almost nothing.  But we are capable of much more than you think . individuals like alexander graham bell Thomas Edison, and albert Einstein as inventors and individuals made significantand life lasting discoveries that have changed the course of history. To think you as an individual are in capable of making a difference , than think about how our life would be different without any of these three being around. Yes we may have came to the same conclusions eventually , but what they had thought of saved countless lives and in some cases changed the course of history. You can easily make a difference and as a group we can move even farther with a group think olicy. A hundred minds solving a problem is always better than one. Sharing our thoughts and working towards a better society in general.

       Does Utopia exist?  If it did everyone would flock there and tell you what is wrong with it. Some would tell you how to fix it, or what they would have done to avoid it in first place, and we would be bored after a couple of days and want something different. Bliss in each of our minds means different things. It could be laying along a beach, basking in the sunshine getting drunk, partying with friends and family. It could be the early morning cup of coffee sitting in yard watching the dew rise off flowers and see a doe and her fawn eating in distance and the sounds of birds chirping, it may be helping an autistic child or talking to an older person, it may be a good book in a comfy corner. We all have different visions of what we expect total bliss is supposed to be.

      Is it supposed to be stressful with politicians spewing hate and spending billions to be reelected while the poor and destitute would be happy with a warm meal and a piece of sidewalk to rest the next night without fear of death or being hassled  because you have nowhere else to go. To spend money supporting a system that on a regular basis rounds up and locks behind bars, people who only want what everyone else has and that is a chance to make their life better. Drugs, greed and human trafficking are common place and being afraid to live in your house for fear someone will break in and hurt and rob your family. Where walking down the street may make you a victim of street violence ending in death.

           This is only going to get worse if we don’t change the way our society is headed. Educating our young and letting them experience a life we lost long ago. Our digital gadgets are not preparing us for much as long as all we get from them is games and a canned society that is as fake as the president that is supposed to lead us. This is a sad reality of what we have to look forward to. We need to expose our young to so much more and in order to do this, we need to step up to the plate as adults and teach our kids. Teach them self-worth. We need to have kids that don’t crave death, or suicide, in place of living, and that we all depend on each other. We need to think outside the box so to speak, and see how some are able to survive like the Amish.

       Religion is the glue that has held the Amish community together and yet they as a group are from a far from perfect society. Although some of what they do is admirable when considering traits of a perfect community. So I will attempt to include thoughts and visions of what I feel are a perfect society that would work for all. I will try to lay this out in the framework of the novel as I go along.

     I also plan to share and keep to a time table as I did with my last novel and posting online in my blog as I go along. You will be able to follow along as lay out a plot, and insert facts and figures as deemed relevant, or possibly add inks to check out my sources as I go along. It will be a narrative and it may be in three different time eras. At no point is any of this real or meant to be a reflection of any person, I know . I may refer to national event as a means to further the story or advance my theories.

     As far as I know this will probably be the last novel I will write. If I do anything I may write articles in support of my novel in the future should it become necessary. All proceeds from any sales will go to making this novel a reality. It will have a good ending for all. It is if nothing else be an outline for others to follow up on. I will own full rights and will transfer accordingly. Hopefully I will be able to negotiate a book deal upon completion. Follow me on my blog and if this ever does come to fruition, I will gladly sign your copy. In some places I may insert pictures and artwork as necessary to further illustrate my ideas; these are my property and would hope you respect that fact. I never claim anything as mine that I don’t have a personal interest in. I will try and footnote or link sources I use from someone else. This is a forward to my book and I hope you enjoy and get something from it, if nothing else maybe a chuckle. 

Here I Go Again

        not going to use caps and all that fancy English language stuff tonight but will go back and ck spelling when finished. so save your comments for another time. just want to update those who know me what i have been up to. not much.
       i have found out i have to have a new hip after the last surgery on my back did not alleviate all my pain by a long shot. i did well initially after the surgery including swimming a half mile daily. but then i had to stop swimming because i couldn't walk to parking lot to get in vehicle and come home. from there over the last 4 mos. it has gradually became worse to the point i can barely walk 100feet, and not even that if i didnt have a cane to assist. the dr. wanted me to to have physical therapy again and i refused till i had an xray of my hip. they found out i had no cartilage left and that it was basically bone against bone with necrosis of the joint.
        he also mentioned it was beginning to be a problem in 2013 but i still had cartilage at that point. so 6 years later and one back surgery to correct, they think they may have found the source of my pain. on may 3 i am scheduled to have hip replacement on my right hip. so far the left seems to be ok. i guess the biggest disappointment in all this for me was the fact the medical profession with all their tools focused in on one area and fixed it and called me cured. making me think i was going to have to live with this residual pain the rest of my life. that sucked.
       and indeed if not for my insistence to keep looking for source of pain i may have been subjected to even more crippling possibilities. the modern medical profession has blinders on. no one wants to go out of the scope of the work they had intended to do or specialize in . mri and cat scans were taken of my back as well as xrays, but none went into my hip region with any clarity to call out any problems i might be having. to look at the whole person and source of the pain instead they focused on what they do best. patient wasn't important as long as i didnt die on or table.
       my quality of life has been slipping and limiting my ability to do things i used to do. i made up my mind to only chainsaw carve for myself and a select few friends understanding that i may never be able to resume my craft with the passion i did before. i did one carving last year for mom. glad i did . i placed it in the back yard and mom enjoyed it up until she passed away early last month.
       so here i am the tallest and biggest of the boys and yet i had to drag myself into the funeral home and couldn't be pall bearer for either my mom or my aunt fran who also passed away this year. losing mom was tough but we knew she could not keep going on the way she was. having lost mobility it was tough to see her confined to bed. several of my blogs were about mom and me sharing moments in time. i should have spent more time with her at last but was having a hard time getting around. the thought of getting into the jeep and getting out one more time was hard to take. i cant walk and have to use the lawn mower , the jeep or the golf cart when ti is running to get around.
        i also lost 10 ducks and my goose, gooser. the dogs had been hassling the ducks so they took up residence in the pond over the hill and daily i would t5ake the jeep and go over the hill and fed them in snow rain what ever. at one point i became stuck in a snow blizzard and couldnt get the jeep back up the hill. i had to leave the jeep and walk as hard as it was up to the top of the hill and just dived over the side and ended up in back of my house.; i stopped 3x to rest , refusing to sit down in snow and to keep moving after a moments rest. it was a tough trip. i made it. in the end the bitter winter froze over the pond and i am not sure if the ducks frozeto death or coyotes had them , but no traces of them were found after repeated attempts to find them. had i felt better i may have tried to move them over the hill and into a shed. they never took well to that shed although they were beside it all their life.
          but i have seen a return of 2 wild ducks to our pond that have nested around here before. i hope the dogs leave them alone but doubt that will happen. i still have racy and she hasnt changed much. or doesnt listen well either. plus other dogs have came into picture threatening not only ducks but also my chickens. i still have 7 . as far as eggs , racy has been getting most of them . but i have managed to find a nest i hope they use more and is safe from racy. i built a laying cage but racy busted into it and is still having her way. i would punish her or scare her but cant walk fast enough to get close to her when she is getting the eggs.

        this is a couple of pics of gooser and area of woods over thye hill after an ice storm . i miss gooser as he would talk to me regularly.

 this is a pic of a statue i did for a friend i worked for at beaver excavating when i was their.

      an artist who does sculptures in zanesville was visited by me again as i drove with a friend samantha to a seminar on growing wild edibles in woods environments , like ginseng and bloodroot. the seminar was at nelson ohio at wayne national forest headquarters. it was interesting , and learned a lot. but was for a younger person than myself .
      so here i am now and with samanthas help in the greenhouse we have 50 plus baskets of hanging flowers , petunias primarily and we also have some perennials we will have for sale this spring. the perennials are coming along nice and hopefully will be ready for mothers day or shortly there after. not sure on the price yet. but we are looking in the 10 -15 dollar price range. my colors were limited to primarily white and red. red attracts bees and hummingbirds. i will also be doing a large sunflower planting and other flower plantings for my bees which are thriving despite me.

         the above picture is a sculpture from the artist in zanesville . and from a view above bridges in zanesville the lower picture represents what the sculpture looked like from afar, taking into account the whole of zanesville.

        if you look at the red brick building in the corner of the roof you will see the the statue above. sorry the artists name i forget, but could find for you if you would like to visit his museum. well worth the time and money to get there.

        well my next month will be slow getting used to my new hip. being a combination of high tech ingenuity , i hope they left those nerve endings out that are causing me so much pain now. to just walk again would be nice.

         thanks to my new friend samantha and her help on the farm. she is a blessed soul and doubt that i would have had the integrity and drive she does at her age  to put up with my dumb butt some times. without her my life would have been harder and a lot less done. she gives me hope that there are some milenials out there that are more in touch with reality more so than some of my own generation. she understands the principal you have to give to get. give of yourself by helping others out and in return karma will bless her with many returns. i hope her life is filled with knowledge and happiness.  

         i am looking forward to writing a new book . i thought of editing the old one but instead would like to just move on , so to speak. my new book will be science fiction mixed with reality in a social experiment. a perfect society or is it? i dont know if i am going to post on my blog like the last one, but am still considering it. maybe i will start next month as i have to take it easy for awhile and gradually work my way into activity again. what a pain in hip or ass life can be sometimes. i am not complaining  too much , as i look on dating sites and see numerous women who are now widows at my age. this means they have lost their loved one and have to move on.

       i think i could take a hole in the hip better than a hole in the heart. i feel for those that have lost loved ones. mothers , aunts , fathers, brothers and sisters, whoever friend or foe , you never know how much you miss them till they are gone. 56000 hits on here and counting. thank you readers.  

Gee !!!

pic of pond over the hill from years ago. 

          I have been kicking myself about not writing in my blog for days now. Daily I think about it and yet no action. So while sitting here waiting on supper to cook I thought I would at least write about what I accomplished so far today. Not really doing this for anyone but myself and will try to be brief so I can get posted and place online in blog.

         Today was an easy day and really not a lot to say. I did pick up meds at drugstore and took care of daily cleaning including myself. sat around too much watching TV, and watching favorite program of Yukon Gold. I took the tractor over the hill to feed the ducks at other pond where I have a campsite and started to improve the road leading up to the dike area. I intend to have a road across the dike where I can take visitors on jeep rides up into the woods. I can and do that now. It is pretty cool. In a way I am glad the ducks have decided to hang out over the hill as it does get me out and lets me see what is going on over the hill. It is quiet and peaceful over there when I am not running something. I call it deer spring and will include a fall pic of it I took earlier.

       I have had a washout and had to reinstall an over flow pipe and that is settling in fine. Need to add additional height to the dike and in the process of fattening it up also to make it larger and more aesthetic. I will selectively cut trees around the pond area and open things up a bit more as well install that road across the dike. I have plans of building a small wood structure that looks down on dike area where one can go and relax and kick back . Will have a deck outside and will be built mostly primitive. I do plan on putting in a large window in one corner or two to allow one to view from inside better. I have a small woodstove that could be used as a cook stove I plan on using there. I will use the kiss principle. Keep it simple.

        I need to. This summer has been the worse with my back. Not sure if it is any better after the operation but I have considerable pain, but x-rays show good spacing of discs in my back. So it must be arthritis and bone spurs as well as a cartilage in my hipbone doing goofy things. I have hardly carved at all this summer. And I am now just getting the bug to try some but have visions of making myself worse if I try. I was swimming but feel that may have exacerbated my back pain, and since I was swimming I have started a regimen of pills and currently have something inflaming my skin. I have dark splotches under the skin and large round sores on my legs and cant go back to swimming although it isn’t contagious it looks like heck and I am sure if I was in a public pool and saw me coming I would have to question whether I was safe to be in pool.

       They had this commercial on TV and had this lady my age who had scoria tic breakouts on her skin. She was cute so I nicknamed her scabby , as I thought too bad I couldn’t meet someone like that , heck if it wasn’t for the scabs she would be almost perfect. She was actually selling prescription medicine that only people with good insurance could afford to buy. Anyhow scabby kept her in shape by doing yoga and other daily activities you could include in a 60 second commercial. But scabby didn’t have a boyfriend. Well I haven’t seen scabby for a while. Apparently that crap she was using must work and she is healed and no longer needs the insurance or the money she made. Who knows, maybe she even found a man.

       But the problem is I am scabby now. I can’t remember the medicine she used and it probably isn’t covered by Medicare. Doubt if my dr. would prescribe it , but have already tried a slew of different salve and creams as well steroids which I think may be causing it. so now I am taking away meds till I find out what is causing this inflammation even if it means that I need to give up pain meds. What a pain in the butt, so to speak as that is where it hurts the most in lower back. Don’t know what the answer is , and questions abound. But will seek answers where I can and how I can. In a nutshell this is me , not a lot has changed but will try and update better. I haven’t forgotten and I have some new stories to tell. Would like to say I will be more regular about writing but that always gets me in trouble. So until next time this is scabby –out.

Mother Goose Land day from Hell #100

a whale of a story-Once upon a time 

      Our Sundays at home when we were younger consisted of grandpa and grandma coming to pick us kids up for church. As soon as we were at church we would hurry away to Sunday school as at least there was something to do in church besides watch Grandpa snore and Grandma jabbing him in his side to wake him up. Sometimes when standing singing hymns I would swear he was going to fall over in the pews as his voice would travel off, and then when he felt himself going into sleep a little too far under, he would jump awake and sing with gusto. Must have been all the good living was wearing him out because all this would happen as soon as he was in church and sitting in the pews, it was then  you could see his eyes go foggy.  

        After church and as soon as we finished saying our goodbye’s we would hop in the 69 green Ford Fairlane station wagon , Grandpa would light up his Sunday cigar and we were off to Burger Chef at the time or Mc Donald’s , where we would all sit around under the golden arches or in the sleek stainless steel signs of the future and eat quarter hamburgers and French fries till we would explode as this was a rare treat for us back then and only an ample reward for not having embarrassed Grandpa and Grandma during church service. I remember one time Grandma buying something like 20 cheeseburgers, 6 chocolate shakes for all and 10 French fries for our family and fed six of us for 8 dollars back then .  I can barely get out of Micky D’s for that now myself. That was a stuff your face all you could eat till miserable dinner also and yet grandma thought that was terrible but still offered to get more if we needed it. I think they loved their Sundays with us kids, or at least they were good pretenders.

      Then we would head out for a drive or sometimes we had our special place, and that was Mother Goose land , where Grandpa would again light his cigar and stroll hand in hand with my sister and Grandma as they went around the storybook place . Grandpa only smoked cigar on Sundays in his good suit and in the good car , as the rest of the week he choose to chew tobacco and often could be seen with a wad in his mouth and the thin dark spittle would puddle at the corner of his mouth as he relentlessly gnawed away at the dark foul tasting chaw in his mouth until he had to spit, and sometimes he would lean out the door of the car or the truck and release the wad of spit in his mouth at a traffic light. Or sometimes it would be out the door of the moving truck leaving a brown permanent stain arching from the door to the bumper. One would swear you could see the pavement melting as we drove along in the distance looking back at  where the dark brown spittle would etch the pavements surface.

    Sunday was a no Mail Pouch tobacco day for Grandpa as Grandma would not let him touch the stuff in his Sunday finest,  and so he relegated himself to smoking cigars and keeping clean, something he had to work at as he showed my sister Sherry and Grandma  around.  Jim and I  though was  different story . We would look at all the different things there at Mother Goose land but we would just head for the old jet  plane without an engine and relentlessly time after time we would work to pry open the cockpit of the old fighter so we could hop in and see what it felt like to be a fighter pilot in the Korean war and pilot one of those bad boys. It was an old relic of a not so long ago war at the time and still looked pretty sleek. You could slide in and out where the engine used to sit, but the cockpit was out of reach as it seemed they had rigged it on purpose to keep kids like my brother and myself out of it.

      I was probably 13 and Jim was a couple of years older then, young enough to be able to enjoy the parks features yet to old to hang around in the petting zoo. We would take turns watching for people coming up and down the paths so no one would see us jimmying the cockpit to try and open it so we could crawl in, until one visit we managed to get it open a crack and then it threw  open as it slid back and revealed its musty hot warm interior as the sun baked the top of the plane heating up specially inside the cockpit till you could barely sit inside. It didn’t stop us as first Jim jumped inside and soon I was taking my turn pretending I was a fighter pilot killing bad boys and banking the plane into the ground as I would grab the joystick between my legs and turn it hard and right as I pretended to make machine gun noises and blast my brother off the wing.

     Things were going great till my brother decided I needed more realism and decided to shut the cockpit. I was hesitant to have it closed and told him so. He insisted as he wanted to know what it felt like. I should have gave up the seat and let him experience it for himself , because as soon as the cockpit cover closed I swear I heard it lock and at first it was pretty cool to be inside like a pilot would be,  but real soon it was heating up and within a couple of minutes I was sweating and wanting out. We both tried to open the cockpit but it was a no go , and then I was forced to really look around inside and see if there was a lock mechanism that was keeping it from opening and I  couldn’t find any. Jim was blaming me for pushing the wrong button and desperately tried making suggestions of things to try.

      We thought there must have been something we did to unlock it as we had tried numerous times on previous trips to the park  to unlock the plane but could never quite figure out how to do it. We were getting scared and especially I was as it kept getting hotter and hotter and we knew soon that Grandma and Grandpa would come looking for us  and we would be in trouble . So we were hustling to get out of there. Soon other people came down the path as we struggled with him outside and me inside to get the cockpit door open as these visitors to the park would stop and look inside from their perch on a platform at the poor sweating boy as my brother would laugh off any suggestion I might really be in trouble.

      A small crowd had gathered by this time and from my view I could see I had half of downtown canton viewing me as I slow cooked my way to fame inside the cockpit. . Surely something could be done to save myself. Then my brother came up with the idea of using the ejection seat to trip the canopy lock insisting that it was perfectly safe. Others round him that had gathered warned him that although the seat itself was gone, that maybe the ejection seat still worked and images flooded through my sweat soaked mind that maybe if I ever get out of that situation I would never listen to my brother again as it was at this time I could imagine the seat exploding off its base and the canopy still locked catching my body as it slammed skyward in a bloody crescendo , not quite the way I wanted to go out, and neither was sweating to death inside a tin can so it prompted me to seek other means of escaping my peril at the time .  I swore , and I made the conscious decision to forget the ejection seat and seek another way. I turned in the seat and with both hands pushing on the canopy and with several people outside pushing back on the canopy from outside it finally lifted up in its  track and slid back with ease allowing me to exit as I was now drenched in sweat.

      The small crowd minus Grandpa and Grandma and Sherry now roared with delight  as pictures were snapped and congratulations were offered , as well as helpful advice like I hope you never do that again, were repeated time after time. I would have never locked the cockpit door in the first place , as it was Jim that felt I needed more realism in my fantasy plane ride. We hurried away from there. Word had spread before my release from my cockpit of doom that maybe the police and fire department should be called as surely I could easily suffocate from the heat. Steam had built up inside the cockpit and obscured their vision of me inside and from me seeing the crowd outside. I just wanted to get out of that area before we ended up in more trouble. Jim and I  ran down the path to the petting zoo and soon found Sherry and Grandma and Grandpa sitting in the shade watching the small animals . We acted like nothing was wrong although my shirt was wet with sweat as well as my pants and when Grandpa and Grandma asked me why I was so wet ,I told them I was running a lot to get back their with them. They seemed to buy the story and I was finally so relieved to be back in the fresh air.

     On our way out we passed the old fighter jet and Grandpa made a remark as to whether we were going to check it out as we usually did and both Jim and I told them we already did, and so we passed the old jet , all the time my heart was in my throat that no one that had seen us before would recognize me again with them and tell them the story. They never knew.

    For many years I would exit off he Tuscarawas street exit and if the tree foliage would allow it I would look down off the side of the exit and I would see the gleaming silver fighter jet and instantly my thoughts would return to that day. Finally the park fell into disrepair and the fighter jet removed forever. Maybe it’s a good thing but it did teach me a few lessons. One don’t listen to my brother, and two if I do listen , shoot myself in the head before he does he me in , the pain is not quite so bad as the crap he put me through. republished july 4th , 2018.