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Today was a build day. No biking. We had two sites with mostly general maintenance, painting, yard work ad light carpentry. My site was the house of a 81 year old man named Bill who recently had a leg amputated due to sepsis. He and his wife applied to the local Fuller Center for help and were approved. He was a contractor/roofer in his working days and had a lot of opinions on how we should do our work, which included mowing the lawn, painting the back porch and sealing up eaves on the house. Unfortunately, his voice was reduced to a whisper which made him hard to understand. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that our site lead, Dan, a middle aged man from Ohio, has hearing problems. At one point, in frustration, Bill said, “I’m a mute trying to be heard by deaf people!” Over the course of the day, he softened and was very appreciative of the work, in the end.
The executive director of the Fuller Center in Price is a woman named, Terry Tibbs. She’s one of these “ball-of-fire” type women who are involved in everything in their community, with usually about 20 projects going at once.
While she was transporting us to the job site, she told us that her son is a railroad engineer. I told her that one of my favorite things to do on a bike when a train goes by is pump my fist to get the engineer to blow the horn. Makes me feel like a kid. I told her I did it yesterday on the way to Price and the engineer responded.
She said that might have been Brady (her son), since he worked that route yesterday. She called him up on the car phone and seemed to get him out of bed. Once they established that it was probably him, they began chatting.
“What are you up to?” Brady asked.
I’ve got a bunch of bikers in the car and we going to a job,” Terry responded.
“You picked up a bunch of biker?!” Brady exclaimed. “Boy, Miss Tibbs is going to have a fun night tonight!”
Brady went on to tease his mother in the most scatalogical way I’ve ever heard a son talk to his mother. She was embarrassed in a very amusing way. “Stop!” She’d say.
Most of it I can’t repeat hear. But, suffice to say that it was mostly spinning off the theme of his image of a group of Hells Angels in the car with his mother. It was very funny.
Later that evening, Brady came to our dinner to confirm his mother’s insistence that we were cyclists, not outlaw motorcyclists. Turns out Brady is a 50 year old grandfather, with a wicked sense of humor. Making his mother a great grandmother.
Here’s Brady with me and fellow cyclist Peter Asmuth.