Writing Again

I’m working on writing up my adventures in the various jobs that I have had. I decided I could easily write a 300 page memoir just detailing the wacky things that have happened to me at my various jobs.

Here are a few:

Ranch hand at the age of 12
Cashier at a gas station
Janitor at a Post Office
Bank Teller
House Cleaner
Painter
Kindergarten school janitor
Special Ed Bus Driver
Newspaper Delivery boy
Working for the Sanger Courier
Working for Boeing Defense and Space
Custom Food Group
Ericsson
eInstruction as a Network Administrator

One of my NY’s Resolutions is to start writing more and to compile the writing that I have already done. I love blogging because it keeps track of everything for you, but what about all the stuff that I don’t blog? Where is it? I recently realized that I cannot located a single copy of the only complete book that I have ever written and that has led me to a realization that not only do I need to find that book, but I also need to write more.

So here is a piece to start off the New Year even though it is really just New Year’s Eve.

No Title Yet…

I’d learned at a very young age that people fall into very distinct classes – people with money and people without. We were most definitely in the latter. My parents who at one time devoted all of their lives to their careers quit their lucrative jobs and started focusing on ministry. When they read in the Bible to store up treasures in heaven, they took it heart. We went from living in a brick house in The Colony to living in a mobile home park that we got kicked out of because we had more than two children in our family. Blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall inherit the Earth, and since we were both poor in spirit and poor in the flesh then I was sure we were going to inherit a good portion of Heaven someday. Eventually we moved into an apartment complex in Dallas where I learned that if you dug cans out of a dumpster for a week that you could earn enough money to go rollerskating on the weekend. We called it dumpster-diving back then and I believe it is still called that today except I don’t need to do it anymore. I no longer skate.

The dumpsters were really large and brown. Sometimes they were roach infested, but we didn’t care. We needed cans because we needed to go rollerskating. I remember climbing in with my sisters and throwing the cans out. Sometimes we would take turns because there was always a story floating around about one of the neighbor kids who was still in the dumpster when the trash truck came. Rumor had it that he got picked up and then compacted and that didn’t sound fun and so we needed someone to always be on the lookout for a trash truck because being compacted would definitely dent our rollerskating plans.

We eventually moved out of the apartment complex in Dallas to the much safer and more rural area of Sanger, Texas. Here we moved into another mobile home on 2 acres of land located in a flood plane. You don’t know the joys of a flood plane until you get to experience swimming in your front yard with gallon milk jugs under each arm for flotation devices. Our mobile home was moderately nice, but after while it fell apart. Particle board floors when they get wet will warp and rot and eventually you will fall through. We did and the floor had to be replaced. Unfortunately, when you live in a flood plane rats and roaches will invade your home because it is nice and dry. To this day I still rinse plates before using them because I always feel like something was probably crawling on them when they were behind closed doors.

Eventually our first mobile home got repossessed. We had already purchased a used and much smaller mobile home and placed it behind the first. It was white and metal with gold shutters. The white paint was oxidized and you could see the metal peeking through what was left of the paint. The windows were the old style that could be cranked open, but so small to be inescapable if there was ever a fire. This particular mobile home was small, so small it only had two bedrooms and so I slept on a bed in the living room.

Despite the small size this particular mobile home featured two front doors. One allowed entry into the living room and the other was placed near the front door of the master bedroom. Apparently someone realized that the windows in this structure were sure to be a death trap in case of a fire and so they installed an extra door for easy escape since running 10 more feet might be impossible in a fire.

Speaking of fires, after a while my dad thought we needed to add on to our existing mobile home and so he purchased a much larger mobile home that had been burned. So in essence he purchases half of a burned mobile home and attached it to our current home so that the two pieces formed a very crude looking “L”. Neighbors joked about us as if we were indeed the Beverly Hillbillies, but since we lived way out in the country we had few neighbors and so there were really just a few jokes.

The new “wing” of our residence was uncarpeted and unenclosed on one end and it would require a lot of work to actually join it to our existing structure and so for a year it just became a storage bin. Old clothes, boxes of pictures, anything unused or unecessary went into the storage wing. Plans were made repeatedly to enclose the extra space, but nothing was ever done to it. Time ticked away as it so often does and eventually my dad lost his job and so he was unemployed for six months. During this time efforts were made to add under-pinning to the storage wing because for so long it sat there on our property with it’s undercarriage exposed. It was ugly and emabarrassing like a grandmother naked from the waist down.

Dad decided to not only under-pin the storage wing, but also to build a massive front porch/water barrier structure made out of used cross-ties and sand. These crossties were bought for 200 dollars from the railroad company and my dad and I carted them to our house and piled them up so that I could spend every moment of my free time helping him build this extensive front porch barrier thing.

We slaved over this porch nailing cross ties together with homemade nails that we crafted by sharpening long pieces of rebar. I loathed the work and envied my sisters who got to stay inside in the air-conditioning and clean house and make dinner. Cleaning house and making dinner were a couple of my specialties since I had been doing both since the age of 7. Carrying crossties that weighed almost my exact weight in the sweltering heat and listening to a skill saw all day was about as pleasant as having your hand shoved into a meat grinder. Let’s just say it was not a good summer.

Apparently God looked down from Heaven and saw the insurmountable work load that was being forced upon me and decided to give me a momentary reprieved. A huge storm blew in one Sunday afternoon and our “L shaped structure” as the Newspaper would later call it, burnt to the ground after being struck by lightning.

I happened to be a friends house when I was told of this event and when my mom came she was crying. She told us the house had burned down and I could not have been more delighted. Since moving from the big city to small town Sanger I felt like I had done nothing but work. Mowing a huge yard, feeding rabbits and chickens and horses, repairing holes in floors, moving crossties, shoveling sand. I was ready for a change of pace.

We eventually moved to a much newer and nicer mobile home and I remember seeing how much nicer it was than our previous residence and thinking “Wow, this place is so nice we won’t have to do anything to it!” How wrong I was.