Stories:Dumb Shit I Got Vygis To Help Me With:The Fence

Author:C3PO. Over the years, Vygis and I had done so many favors for each other that there was no conceivable way we could have kept count. Neither of us knew who owed the other more, so our friendship was the one that if either of us needed help to do something that couldn't have been asked from anybody else we could always call each other. The best part about this is that the weirder or stupider your need was, the more it would be understood. Of all the dumb shit I got Vygis to help me with, I can't recall a time where the question was "why would you do that?" He had his reasons for doing the things he needed help with, and I had mine. It was just a matter of when could we get together and get it done. 
Here are some photos of one of those times, working on the fence at my parents' house. My parents had a strange tendency to just not do home maintenance, and things often got so bad that I would just do things myself when I could, even after I had moved out. When they'd moved into our house in the early 1970's, they'd had a fence put up around our yard. It was a pretty cheap fence; as an example of how little Long Fence Company expected us to keep it going was that the wooden fence posts were just set right into the ground. By the 1990's most of the posts had rotted off at the base, and the fence was simply starting to fall down. A normal adult would have taken the fence down, or paid money to have a new one put up. My parents weren't going to do anything about it though, and to me it was easy to see that all that was needed to be done was extract the old bottoms of the fence posts from the ground and put in new ones, as well as repaint of course. Multiplied by the number of posts plus the challenge of designing a way of pulling half-rotted 4x4's from the ground, well there was only one person I could call to help with this job. 
Here he is, working with me and Cora. He just showed up; the simple fact that he could get together with us for some reason was enough. Of course, it was a hard job, and as other sections of the fence experienced a similar problem over the years I had to call him a few times more. It eventually became routine. Sometimes it was even a game; he'd be at our house for some reason and I'd get out the chain set that we used to pull posts out and he'd know what was up, like a cat that's just seen you get out the cat carrier. Another thing that was funny was that although we had used a technique to extract the posts that simply lifted them up without any digging, during one of these work sessions we had somehow managed to sever a neighbor's phone line which must have laid right up against the fence post underground. Fortunately we didn't have to pay money for that repair somehow. We finally got rid of that fence after about 40 years when my Dad died and we had to sell the house. Sadly, Vygis never got to gloat because his funeral was just a month after my Dad's.
Category:Stories
Category:Things:Cars:1987 Hyundai
Category:Author:Charles Dickson
Category:People:Cora Dickson
Category:People:Charles Dickson
Category:Places:Elvis Lane, Lanham Md.
Category:Year:1992