BobT

When people ask me how things are going, I often reply "up and down"; a fair characterization of my nights at work. Presently I fly from Elmira to Newark, to Rochester and return to Elmira. This takes place four times a week, and each turn is about 14 duty hours. Having been a professional tinker from age 20 to age 40, I am hoping to be one of the lucky few who are able to work until they drop.

To celebrate my appreciation of flight I offer picture number one, taken through the windshield of my 1946 Commonwealth. I am heading for a Saturday "breakfast with the guys", one morning in October last year. The sun is just up, and I am about a thousand feet above the hilltops heading northwest to a diner that adjoins a grassy runway. Every hour I spend in the airplane is an hour I am stealing from productive labor, but I never regret it.

Moving along with the concept of unproductive labor, Donna and I took a short walk out back to the neighbor's woods where I have been cutting firewood (Literally, tons of firewood, but that's another story). The walk grew to cover some of the places we walked when we were "a-courtin' way back when", and from there, we started walking down the creek. It was a hot June day in the midst of a string of hot days and the creek at the bottom of the gorge was cool.

It was Donna's idea to walk in the creek rather than alongside it, but there was no choice but to get wet if we wanted to walk very far. There are several small waterfalls and gurgling pools, and soon we would sit in them and just look and listen. With the sun filtering down through the trees and sparklng off the ripples of the stream, with the calls of springtime birds and the melody of the flowing water, we could believe that we were in paradise. There have been stormy days, and there will be more in the future, but for the moment none of them mattered.

Donna took the next picture, of me at the bottom of the largest waterfall. It is a bit out of focus, but it is more of a documentation than a piece of art anyway. I took a nice picture of her in the same place, but the expression on her face looked like she was being electrocuted, so picture number three is of her sitting on the bank of the creek.

The afternoon's short walk had grown into a three- hour absence. Brian and Danni were both around when we emerged from the gorge, all wet and dumb- looking. All they could do was shake their heads and say "stupid kids!"

Brian spent a year and a half as a self- employed used car dealer, but finally couldn't afford it anymore. He now works at the local car fixit- place, and is pleased to be in a heated shop that is stocked with the best of equiptment, special tools and diagnostic data. I am pleased that he is there too, because he is working with an entrepreneur, not a manager.

I am very proud of his work though. Last summer he bought a Ford Escort that had been hit hard in the rear. He took his portable sawzall to the local U-pull-it salvage yard and came home with the rear half of a similar car. Over the next week he grafted the good parts together and made a stunning little car. Another big project is just now wrapping up. He sold a Ford Explorer to a fellow who rolled it off the road several months later. He bought the wreck back from him, mostly because he couldn't stand to see a good chassis and power train go to waste. He had a good Mercury Mountaineer body of the same vintage as the Explorer, so he has put the good body onto the good chassis of the rolled explorer. It involved, among other things, stripping everything off of the Mountaineer body for the swap. There was not a single nut bolt or screw anywhere on the body when I helped him lift it onto the chassis. It will be his car when it is done shortly.

He also enjoys woodwork, and built the bar in the picture below. It is made of oak veneer plywood trimmed liberally with red oak that I harvested from our woods three years ago. Another of my treasures (besides tons of firewood) is about a thousand board feet of hardwood lumber cut from the woods out back.

Danielle graduated from Elmira College a year ago, and is certified as a chemistry teacher. She worked as a long- term substitute last year, but no vacancies opened up over the summer. She now has a half-time position with a local charity that operates an after school study and enrichment program. She also tends a motel and works at a local winery.

In the picture below, she is standing next to a research project that she was flown to Seattle to present. It is an outgrowth of a summer job she had at Elmira College, cataloging a 100 year- old botanical collection of local specimens. It is cerebral stuff, and doesn't make sparks and noise, so I don't fully understand it.

That's it from Montour Falls. Send me your stories and pictures and I will post them for all!

Oh-Oh!.. I wrote all this and forgot to mention that Brian got married the weekend after the reunion. It is tough to be a guy and have to remember things like that. His wife, Michelle, is from the Elmira area and holds the number- two spot at an anchor store in the local mall. She and Brian compliment each other very well

The picture below includes my mother, at the left. Mom sold the house on Long Island and moved into a retirement village near here on the first of this month. My brother Stephen and I were anxious for her to move, but she decided "when and where" and managed all the aspects of the move herself. Everything about the move seems to have been an excellent decision at this point. She is right on the way home from work for me, and Danielle enjoys "showing her around". Mom grew up near here, and both sides of her family were farmers in this area for generations. She is not a stranger to the area.