Memories don’t slowly creep up on me, no, they slam me upside the soul and I am stopped dead in my wheelchair.
The place on Middle Pike was where I really grew up. I was thirteen, fourteen when we moved to Plain City and I sincerely hated it. I never gave that little town a chance even though I met my first wife in high school and we got pregnant, married and graduated and lived in that town for ten years raising our beautiful daughter. I still never gave Plain City a chance and god knows I tried more than once.
I especially didn’t give the house on Kilbury Huber a change. Dad built that house for mom. From day one that was supposed to be mom’s house and it became dads and the boys very quickly. I think mom also had her steaks driven deep in that black dirt. My mother fed the same birds for forty years until the mortgage crash of 08’ and mom and dad lost the house eventually. We had to move them into a little cottage house in Plain City which I think mom loved. The old homestead place on Kilbury Huber was falling apart. Dad, dad was too sick to really let the move sink in. Dad didn’t last a year in the new place. Maybe a year, I don’t know.
Middle Pike was where dad made his boys become farmers even when they didn’t want to. Ed Dorgan owned the place we rented and dad helped Ed farm his two hundred acres. Ed was a college graduate in Veterinarian Science and was the son of a rich doctor so Ed really was a wanna-be farmer Vet who was damn glad that dad and us boys showed up.
Paul loved the whole idea of farming especially farming with dad. Paul was close to dad where me and dear brother were more drawn to mom and Thad, well I don’t really know which direction Thad moved toward. Thad was pretty much a loner in all aspects.
Ed had all the dressings of a farmer. We had pigs, sheep, cattle, chickens, horses, dogs, cats and crazy drunken guys that worked with dad in the factory.
We were just far enough out of any town so that we could basically get away with anything. The police of West Jefferson didn’t care what the crazy farmers on Middle Pike were doing.
Tomorrow I go for a simple operation where they are putting either a graph or another weird vein extension for dialysis. It’s not bad enough that dialysis is a terrible experience they have to also incorporate weird and terrible operations and additions that become infected and such to the whole equation.
So don’t ever take for granted that the world is round, that God in heaven is always there, that love will prevail and that our souls are real. Always hold on to these beliefs as ultimate truths and never let go my friend, please never let got. We are on a long and wondrous journey my friend, don’t ever let go.
I think it is called faith.
I am still researching the whole matter.
My dad decided to build a cement and brick building at the place on Middle Pike. My father had never build anything in his life but that didn’t stop him from building this enclosure for barbecues. It was a magnificent example of human creativity.
My brothers and I decided to build ourselves a log cabin in the grove using the fallen trees and creating a mortar out of mud. The completed house stood for many years after we were gone.
As I was going through a very extensive nervous breakdown I decided to build for my daughter a playhouse. Instead of just a little playhouse I built her a small home out of skids from Scotts were I worked. I built a foundation, a real roof on the place. I built cabinets inside with two windows and a front door. It just fell down after thirty years of standing.
For some reason my family has always been able to build buildings of some sort. Things that satisfied a certain desire and we were able to pull this off without having any knowledge as to how to do it.
I completed the playhouse but never got to see my daughter play in it. Not long after completing the god damn thing I broke my sobriety by going and getting a bag of weed and a bottle of wine and sitting in that fucking playhouse and getting wasted. I finally realized that if I wanted my family to survive me. I had to leave.
It’s all some terrible haze that day I finally left. It was a sequence of messages sent to my brain that was not going to let me back down. I was going to leave. I sat on the back steps with my daughter and we both sobbed and I tried to explain it to her. I think she understood. I think she has proven that with the love and support she has shown me now. My gratitude to what my daughter has done and what my brother did in Lima can never be shown for just how much they mean to me. I wish there was some way of showing this, telling them but there’s not. I have to believe that in time they will know what I know and we will be consciousness, we will be as one.
Ed Dorgan somehow got his hands on a 1939 Massey Harris. Man this was a long strange tractor. Ed and my dad and others decided to make a modified pulling tractor out of it so they modified the frame and set two 427 v-8 engines back to back. The tractor was a death machine.
Ed even pulled in a couple events but ended up selling the thing to someone.
Ed and my dad and two of dad’s brothers always had big ideas that they would actually try to accomplish and some of them they would actually get close but for the most part they were dreamers and they raised dreamers for children who in turn raised dreamers.
My life has been one magical event after another which started at a very young age. The reason it bothers me so much that my roommate whispers to himself is because when I lived alone I would create entire universes of realities. Now I must admit that there is something about the whispering that just makes it feel so god damn creepy but really the only difference between me and this goofball is that I had enough sense not to do it around other people.
I sometimes feel like I’m just going to start whispering back things like, “go kill Albert. Kill Albert. Go kill Albert.” But I don’t
cool peace
hippy mike
love
spirit
groovy