I went to the county dump on Friday and decided to stop and see my old friend Jack, who lives a couple blocks from the dump, and one I hadn’t seen in some time.
He lives on a one acre corner lot. There used to be junk spread over his one acre. For a long time, he considered the junk his valuable possessions. The junk is now gone. He put some fencing around his yard and smoothed the ground. He has a small patch of gravel marked off as his driveway which runs next to his house. He doesn’t have a garage. He was finishing work on a storage building that was about 20 feet by 12 feet and quite tall with a Gambriel roof (Dutch) when I drove my red pickup down his 30 foot driveway and parked near his storage shed.
Jack goes to the same church I used to go to. That’s how we met. Jack is poor and 90% illiterate. He appears slow because he was hit by a car in the 4th grade and then from the 7th grade on his father kept him home from school to work in his equipment business. In his 20’s, he was in a serious car accident while drunk and was told he might die, and if he lived, wouldn’t be able to walk. He told me a number of times that he’d often wished he’d died. But in the end, his will to live proved the doctors wrong on both counts, but the accident took a toll on his mental and physical health. He reads some and cannot spell. When I first met him, I offered to teach him to read and write; he came a few times lessons, but then quit.
Jack’s dad told him that when he died, he would leave the equipment business to him. But when the dad died, he left him nothing. Neither did he pay Jack’s Social Security during all the years he worked for him. In the end, I suppose he figured that he couldn’t really leave his company to an illiterate. It hurt Jack even further when his mother got the company and all the land and money which was worth about a half million dollars. She told him his father left him nothing and she wasn’t going to give him anything either. He took her to court and settled for $50,000. He used about $34,000 to pay cash for a house across from our church when property was cheap. He banked the $16,000 that was left.
Jack got married at 18 and has three girls. His wife started carrying on with another man and divorced him. He was taking drugs and drinking a lot at the time, and ended up losing contact with his daughters by time he got clean and sober, which he has been for the last 20 years or so. He’s now in his 50’s and hasn’t seen his daughters in over 30 years.
Jack wasn’t much respected by the congregation of our church. They laughed at him behind his back and were often rude. But Jack ignored it with blissful acceptance. I’m not sure what made me do it, but I decided to be Jack’s friend.
To be continued.
If you are interested in reading past blog entries that are not in the Pasquini Family Blog, please go to dukerone.blogspot.com I post to both blogs, but the dukerone blog has entries going back a few years.
