Good fences make good times

I didn't always have such a cushy job.

One thing about having to work for a living from the time you could (legally) drive a car is that you learn to appreciate the employment you have as an older adult.  I have had many jobs, the first being the typical paper route type, of which I had two different routes.  Wait, back up a minute. There was that convenience store short, short, short term job I had when I was roughly thirteen before the paper routes.  A school buddy of mine named Ronald, a nice red headed kid, hooked us up with an after school gig where we mopped the floor and stocked a few shelves after the store closed and made a few bucks.  I think that ended when I slipped once and used the term "pissed off" in front of my parents and my Mom got...well, pissed off.  I blurted out that I had heard that term from the store owner when we didn't complete some task as we should have and, well, there went that job.

So, after the store job, I had two paper routes, the larger one fetching enough funds to buy my first ten speed bike and a blue jean jacket, the rave of style in those days.

I looked studly in it.  Does anyone remember the term "studly"?  No? Anyone? Anyone? Okay, so I looked cool in it. On my ten speed.  Which was also blue.

There were a few other pre-college jobs;  The Dallas Morning News, where I worked in "Quality Control".  The title of the department had nothing to do with what we did.  Essentially we filed the ads that they would pull to lay out, shoot the plate for the page to be printed, and then file them back in a large wall of slots.  The coolest part of this coveted position was the ability to read the entire week of newspaper comic strips before they went to press. Well, all but Sunday's comics, or "funny papers".  Those were full color and kept elsewhere.
You wouldn't think a sophomore in high school would find that part of the job so cool.  But we did, because we sat around. A LOT.  Easiest minimum wage ever made.

Then came the summer of 1979, following graduation from dear old Kimball High.

My best friend in life was good friends with a guy whose father owned a fence company.  Being that neither of us were from what you would call rich stock, we had to work for any money to go anywhere or do anything, so this was prime full time employment.  And I didn't even need to drive to work because they would pick me up from home every morning.
Yeah, almost like in the movie Good Will Hunting.  Except we weren't THAT poor, we didn't drive down the street and pick fights at random, and we had Texas twangs instead of "Bah'sten" accents.

These were good times.  Now I don't know if we found so many things amusing about the job because the heat wave of 1981 (my second summer at this job) fried our brains, or because we were early college age guys enjoying the last days of essentially care free work before we joined the rank and file of working stiffs having to make car and house payments with their employment income.  We all still lived at home rent free, our cars were old hunks that were paid for, and our dating lives were...sporadic.  So the money we made either went into the bank to eventually pay for books or it paid for FUN.
Most of the fence we built - in fact, ALL - of the fence we built was galvanized chain link.  We did have one wood privacy fence job fencing around some pool pump equipment for some woman who had sons our age, and this job ended with us borrowing said sons' swim trunks and hitting the pool.

Like I said, good times.

The first fence job I worked was a large chain link fence job for a really, REALLY old woman somewhere in North Dallas who wanted to keep "those stupid keeids" out of her yard. That job almost gave the crew supervisor - the owner's son - an early heart attack.  She couldn't hardly be pleased.
We had some close calls with death, too, on this job.  Other than the heat of 1981.  We once had a load of sand in the back of our 8 foot bed 1979 Chevy Cheyenne crew cab pickup and blew a tire while traveling in the middle lane of south bound Interstate 35 near downtown Dallas.  As luck would have it, the tire tread remnants wrapped around the rear axle and clinched the emergency brake cable so tightly against it that it jerked us to a quick stop IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FREEWAY.

I swear that - sounding dangerously close to Rosanna Rosannadanna - I thought I was gonna die.

But we didn't.  Months later, while driving down that stretch of historic road, I used to show friends, with pride, the deep gouge in the concrete running from the center lane of five lanes all the way over to the shoulder that was created by our left rear rim - sans tire - when some good Samaritan helped push our truck over to the side of the freeway.  Amazingly enough, there were no accidents.

We didn't get much fence built that day.

There were also shenanigans that helped pass the time. You know, pranks.
One day I was too slow getting a nut threaded onto a bolt being held by a straining, trembling hand of a co-worker through the hole of a fence bracket that holds the chain link fence against the pole. So, in retaliation, later that day one of the crew laid some of the fence bolt nuts out in the sun for a few minutes and then casually let one of them drop down my "plumber butt crack" whilst I was crouched down working on....something.
I swear I thought they were going to wet themselves watching me move faster than I ever had in my life to shake that red hot nut down my pants leg.  If we hadn't been so dehydrated I think they might actually have stained themselves.

Then once I was pulling up on a wire with my trusty pliers and the pliers slipped off the wire and popped me in the mouth.  That was while installing fence along the roof of one of the utility rooms at the Cotton Bowl at Fair Park. I went into a temper tirade for about 15 seconds, throwing tools, buckets, spools of wire everywhere.  When I played out, I looked around at the other two workers who were staring at me like I'd lost my mind.
Good times.

I'll be seeing the friend who helped me land that job this Thanksgiving.  We'll drive up to see him and his family along with some other friends and we'll probably share other stories that we HAVEN'T heard a hundred times - like these stories - because we've both lived long enough to have experienced just a few more golden moments.

But no story or experience will be about a time where I was so darkly tanned, scratched up from barbed wire, or had fingers (or lips) so bruised up from pliers, pinching brackets, or red hot bolts.

"Good fences make good neighbors"?  Maybe, Mr. Frost.  but they also make great friendships and even better memories.