May 2017 – Mostly From Memory

While I’m Vacation

I’m in Jena, Louisiana today for my brother’s pastoral installation service at Christ Temple Pentecostal Church. He’s been the pastor since about February. He’s been downloaded that whole time, but now they’re about to install him. Jena is a small town, but not a dead or dying town, like my hometown. Bro. Crawford Coon, former pastor here in Jena said, “The biggest industry in Jena was a 300 lb Avon lady.”

Pastor Zachary Brant Wells

Anyway, Jena, Louisiana is a long way from Winchester, VA. I first drove to Cullman, AL to see my family. And to eat Blue Bell Ice Cream. I’ve had ice cream everyday since I’m on vacation. I got a chance to go see Pop, Nonna, and Gram. Pop gave Wesley a case pocket knife. Wes loved playing on one of Pop’s tractors. We stopped in Inverness at Lloyd’s, a restaurant that has been in business since 1937. Get the chicken livers and onion rings.

I’ve noticed over the years of travelling that as you make your way south, the people are just friendlier. It seems to happen between the times that you fill up with gas. You’ll fill up one place and the attendant is cordial, but the next time you stop, you’re suddenly in the South and people, even gas station cashiers, are just glowing with hospitality. And they talk different, turning every vowel into a diphthong.

We caravanned from Cullman to Jena and my brother in law, Kamron, speeds. I’m not talking about my usual 9 miles over the speed limit on the interstate, but 20 and 25 miles over the speed limit. Even in constuction zones he was driving in a way that would have made Dale Earnhardt sweat. It was all I could do to stay in front of him.

As I have written, I still don’t know how to take a normal vacation. I packed five church outfits for a seven day trip.

Here are some pictures from my trip so far.

Normal Mostly From Memory broadcasting will resume the first week of June. Thanks for reading.

Zane Wells

Faulty Equipment

“Y’all boys are rough on equipment.” That’s what Mr. LaDuke said after my cousin Kent had broken three ax handles, a weed-eater and wrecked a moped. I guess we were pretty rough on equipment, that’s why half the every day tools and gear that we used in the hay field were broken to some degree. Pop was forever adjusting the square baler, which was always shearing pins, whatever that means. Most of the trailer jacks were bent. The old Ford truck had a tricky clutch that I never could get to cooperate. For every piece of faulty equipment, there would be a new oral operating manual that must be followed in order to get that particular item into proper working condition. These instructions were far from intuitive, and in some cases nothing close to the original manual, but I guess it was cheaper than replacement.

This rings true for every other place that I’ve worked over the past twenty years. The copier at one job requires you to jiggle drawer A before you can print. The computer at another place requires a restart before you can use the audio. The espresso machine at another place requires additional warm up time. There are always locks that require an odd key angle and a prayer. And vehicles that require you rev the engine to keep from overheating at a stoplight. I’m sure you’re thinking of a piece of equipment at work that you’d like to hit with a sledge hammer.

Probably the most dangerous faulty equipment that I have worked with were vehicles that required you to start them by bypassing the solenoid. I’m not dead certain what that even means, or why we had to do it, but basically, instead of cranking the engine with a key, like a normal person, you lay a screwdriver across the positive battery terminal and the negative terminal into the solenoid. This bypasses the solenoid relay switch and starts the car. Oh, and the key needs to be in the on positing in your ignition. 70% of the time it works 100% of the time.

This process is pretty simple on a lawnmower. Sometimes you see sparks fly off, but that’s part of the fun. If you have long arms and longer screwdriver, you don’t even have to get out of the seat of a zero turn to start it with this method. It’s a little bit trickier when you’re doing it on a truck. At one particular job, there was an old Ford Bronco that required this staring method. We were in downtown Winchester, VA getting a new lawn mower tire installed when my boss, Shawn, first showed me how to jump start the solenoid to start the truck.

I was so proud of myself when it fired right up and I got ready to back out into the street, with my lawn mowers on the trailer behind me. As soon as I put the Bronco in reverse, the engine stalled. I had to pop the hood, crawl out of the vehicle, and jump the solenoid with a pair of pliers. It fired right up this time. In reverse. The Bronco began backing out into the busy street. Panicking, I flung the pliers down and raced to catch the runaway vehicle. Fortunately I had left the door open and only had to run about twenty feet before I jumped into the moving vehicle. Once I got into the drivers seat and got the truck stopped I started breathing again. I was going to play it cool and just keep driving, but as I put the vehicle into gear I realized that the hood was still popped. I’m sure the people in the tire shop got a good laugh seeing me scramble so. I’d have laughed too. A couple of years later that Bronco burnt to the ground in a Wal Mart parking lot.

Equipment tends to wear out with normal use. But sometimes it gets help from clumsy employees, abuse and misuse. I can hear Mother’s everywhere saying, “This is why we can’t have nothing nice!”

Pop’s Hat

I had to draw the line when he told that drinking too much cold water while you were working was bad for you.

Pop was always getting on to us for not wearing hats while we were working outside. And he was right too. It’s not too hard to catch a sun stroke working in the blistering Alabama heat, and more than once I remember getting a splitting headache because I had forgotten my hat. You get all dizzy and your vision kind of goes black, it’s just a whole lot easier to wear a hat. Pop also believed that you should wear long sleeves to keep yourself cooler in the summer. He was probably right about that, but I never tried that. I had to draw the line when he told that drinking too much cold water while you were working was bad for you.

Pop didn’t just tell us all that, he lived it. Pop never forgot his hat. There are probably people that have never seen him without a hat. He usually wears those mesh back trucker style hats in the summer, and full on cotton baseball cap in the winter. He wears them perched on top of his head. I have often wondered how they staid on.

Pop used to get Zach and me up at the crack of dawn to deliver hay. We’d get up early to beat the heat in the barn. Sometimes we’d make several trips from the barn to the client. sometimes it was a horse farm, sometimes a hardware shop, sometimes just a customer who needed to feed their cows, and even construction company. Now construction companies are not particular about the quality of the hay they get, since they only need it to spread for erosion control after they’ve planted grass. The horse customers are extremely particular, but that’s a different story. You could bale up a briar patch and sell it the construction companies and they wouldn’t care. Pop called that kind of hay mulch hay. Which I’m not sure is the proper term, but it get the point across.

One morning Pop had us load up a trailer and truck full of mulch hay to take to a construction company on the outskirts of Birmingham. Pop drove, Zach road by the window and I sat in the middle. That’s what I got for being the smallest. It didn’t matter how early we got to this place, it seemed like it was always scalding hot in the metal trailer where we had to unload that scratchy mulch hay. Once we got finished and piled in the truck, hot and sweaty, Pop rolled the window down for us. He always preferred the breeze over the air conditioner, and he wouldn’t let you run the AC with the window down. Which makes sense, but I’d rather have run that air conditioner. Pop had just merged onto highway 280 when a big 18 wheeler flew past us and Pop’s precariously perched hat almost went with it. He took both hands off of the wheel and grabbed his hat and socked it back down on his head. It’s a wonder that we didn’t have a big wreck, make the news and turn Vulcan’s light red all in a flash. After the smoke had cleared, Pop looked over at Zach and me, smiled, turned on the AC, and rolled up the window.

A New Job, Manias, and Writing

For the most part, my job at Frederick County Parks & Recreation as Registration Specialist was to set at my desk all day and wait for the phone to ring. The other part of my job was to make sure that the website was up to date and people could do everything they needed on the internet without having to call me. It seemed like all of the people that had their act together were able to find whatever information they needed and register online. I talked to everyone else. I’ve had quite a few interesting phone conversations. There is an art to talking to an angry person on the phone, perhaps it translates into real life. Stay calm, don’t raise your voice, and don’t be afraid to pause in order to the first two things. Most of the people I talked to weren’t angry though.

This is what I said whenever I answered the phone.

“Frederick County Parks & Recreation, This is Zane, how can I help you?”

This is what I’ve been called in response to that.

Hector

Eddie (4x)

Andrew (5x)

James (12x)

Zach (Thrice)

Shane (10x)

Ayne (4x)

Dane (14x)

Dame

Blaine

Andy (Thrice)

Rain (Twice)

Damian

Ames

Lane (Twice)

Zade

Zachary

Dave

Shay

Wayne

Sam

Wade

Benny

Rob

Lance

Jamey

Dean (x2)

Ade

Cade

Alan

Zay

Zeke

Vance

Ben

Nane (X2)

D’Wayne

Jane (X4)

Zion

Zang

Jason

Danny

Zan

An honest mistake I know. Zane is not that common of a name. But I started this list out of boredom, not to hold a grudge. I also started writing out of boredom. Accidentally. In the downtimes when the website was running smoothly and the phones were silent I would work on this blog. I really enjoyed it.

My last day at Parks & Recreation was March 31st. I am now working as Church Administrator at the church where I’ve been the bi-vocational Youth Pastor for eleven years. I’m now able to tackle all of the things I daydreamed about doing when I was at Parks & Recreation.

Like J. Thaddeus Toad, I am a man given to manias. I have tracked the cycle and it usually lasts around one to three months and I’m then I’m over whatever it was that I was crazy about. In the past year I’ve gone through film photography, mid century modern furniture, wanting to build a lap steel guitar, and bicycles. I’ve learned that something is not a mania if it lasts longer that six months. Writing is not a mania.

I wrote all of this to tell you that I am in the process of writing a book. And to thank everyone for reading this blog. Please forgive me for getting out of rhythm posting the blog, I’m not quitting, I’m just focusing on the book.