I had not taught in two weeks on my days off, because I had some house maintenance duties at my dad’s house and at the rental duplex that I have. After running the designated circuit up to the third floor in my father’s house, we decided to just tear out the bad wires and three way switches for the hallway light. My dad took two three way switches and with short pieces of wire and wired them together to simulate how they would work in the wall. Then he put a tester on all the different combinations of switches as they would be in actuality and he tested them out. He showed me all this. He is the ultimate teacher because he teaches by example. Now we are going to have to replace them in the walls on the third floor and run another designated circuit to one of these switches from back at the fuse box. My dad has rented the top of his house to a lady for over forty years and I’m not sure he has ever raised the rent. Her son Bobby I have known since I was a kid. And I had not seen him in a while. He was home because he just got laid off. Instinctively I called him Bobbalutch. He used to help me deliver papers on my paper routes when I went out for football. He has a little bit of a speech impediment and talks in a real shrill voice at times. It sounds kind of like Mike Tyson’s voice. And the instant I heard his voice it brought me back to when we were kids. He never married and he lives with his mother on the second floor of my dad’s house. When we arrived he was standing in the living room without a shirt on. And we looked at each other a little pleased to see each other. He was telling me that he was the union steward where he worked for a while. He had that job for 26 years and they fired him for being late a couple of times. He assembled sports protective equipment on an assembly line. After talking about the sad state of the work world we talked about different members of our families. Memories were coming back to me in waves. I remember he had a pretty good sized box turtle when we were kids. They let that turtle roam all over that apartment. Bobby was a good worker on the paper routes and he was honest. And he took a lot of shit from other kids because of the way he talked. As I recall I was somewhat of a protector of Bobbalutch. Somehow we had a hundred different ways to say his name – Bobbylou, The Bubster, The Bean Meister. None of these names came out of malice. Some protector I was, more like a midget little mascot. But kids are brutal bastards and I tried to look after him. Now all these years later he feels like a brother to me. His mother said that he likes to drive so I told him about a job out where I live, driving school vans for handicapped kids. It was nice to see that we were brought up good because I was calling his mother Mrs. and he was calling my dad Mr.. All these memories were almost too much to bare. But life is funny like that. We are all carrying around so much information. Again I found myself trying to be a protector. Hey, I know I had my protectors growing up. That is what life is all about. The strong taking care of the weak. And we are all strong and weak at different times of our lives. And my biggest motivation is knowing that I would have been better off being bigger sooner. I have to believe that my glory years are still up ahead. I know it is not very businesslike looking back but sometimes I just cannot help myself. Suddenly I just remembered something that somebody told me at work. And that is, I was told that Sinead O’Connor sang Danny Boy so well on one of her Cd’s that no one else had any business singing it. This is the way my mind works. I think like I write, scattered all over the place. That’s how I lived, pursuing pleasure and reason separately and sometimes together. Anyhow, so much for reminiscing. The other maintenance job I had was to snake the main drain down at my rental house. It backed up in he middle of the basement and all the toilet paper dried out around the floor drain. So I figured that there were tree roots invading the drain pipe again and they needed snaked out. My dad came out to my place to help me on this job. Actually I had to go out to his place to get him and the snake. And he was telling me how to drive. Then at one point he got radical on me. And he started yelling at some yuppies when they cut in front of me. Then he went ballistic when we drove past a tattoo parlor. He told me that tattoos are all bullshit. I agreed, I told him I did not understand how all these young girls are marking up their bodies. When we got to the house he always has a new way of doing something like snaking a drain. We didn’t have a fork to get the snake around the trap so we used a big coal shovel. I always learn something working with him. After we got the drain unclogged I took him out to Construction Junction where they sell used construction materials and he started talking about his hair getting long and how he was going to have to cut it. I asked for the hundredth time why he does not use the haircut coupon that I got him and he said that was for a special occasion. That was the only thing that I ever taught him was how to cut his own hair. And always seems to come up jokingly in conversation. After we looked at all the stuff at Construction Junction I took him to the East End Food Co-op to get a fresh squeezed carrot juice. Since he has diabetes he passed on the carrot juice and bought a bottled ginger water. I could not talk him into going to a talk at the botanical gardens about a guy who took photos of a lot of the steep staircases at and around Pittsburgh. So I drove him home. And, I was going to write a little bit about what we ate today but I ate too much the night before and am sick of eating, and thinking about food. Any book about nutrition should include a little disgust about the whole notion of eating in general. So this is my silent protest….