Atop Casa La Brea

Local forecasters predicted that Wednesday’s temperature here in Jacksonville, Florida, would top 100 degrees. So where did I spend that sunny morning? Crawling around on my hands and knees atop my son’s house helping him tar a roof leak.

Tuesday I’d worried about what my next writing project should be. But Wednesday when I called Donald just to ask about a computer problem (he’s a computer network administrator) he told me about his leaky roof and I volunteered to help him spread tar. I’m sure that’s how Stephen King spends his time between writing one book and another.

The scorching heat on the housetop made our tools almost too hot to touch! And tar gets sticky; there’s a reason they tarred and feathered criminals back in the good old days.

But Donald and I enjoyed many a laugh up there doing our repair job.

For instance, when Donald asked me why I pressed an oak leaf into the hot tar, I told him that I was creating a future fossil for Casa La Brea. If we had a mastodon handy, we could have imbedded him in the roof too. But, since Donald and Helen only have ten or twelve cats, I offered to create a unique fossil on their housetop. He wouldn’t let me have even one spare kitty.

Even though we wore kneepads, the rough grains of asphalt shingles scraped and stung us as we joked about the words of Jesus in Luke 17—you know the place, “When the Son of man is revealed, in that day, he which shall be upon the housetop…one shall be taken, and the other left”.

When the Lord comes again, both Donald and I will be left on the rooftop—because we’ll be stuck up there in tar!

Hey, it sounded funny while we were up there troweling tar into cracks between shingles.

Finishing the messy job, we sat in the shade sipping ice tea and talking about Donald’s inclination to become a minister; he plans to enter seminary later this month.

He also said that he and Helen have tentative plans so that if Ginny and I (or Helen’s parents) get too old and feeble to take care of ourselves, the kids plan to partition the back of their home to make an apartment for us decrepit old folks

Lovely thought but it will be a cold day… er, on the roof, before I’d want to live with any of our children. Love ‘em, yes. Live with ‘em, It’ll be a cold day!

Besides, their daughter Maggie enters college toward the end of the month and it looks as though she’ll live at home and commute for a while yet instead of moving to the dorm. She and her boyfriend had checked out our activities on the roof before they took off to an exercise class. Wow! She is gorgeous! I mean fashion model beautiful.

Donald drove me home to pick up some theology books I’d saved for him, and we went for a swim to cool off.

As Donald left my house for his, he said it was his turn to cook for a supper at his church; he planed to make meatballs in a special sauce. To make the meatballs, I suppose you take meat and squish it into balls; but for his special sauce, Donald heats barbeque sauce and melts in grape jelly to give the sauce sweetness, zest and tang.

His meatballs are a favorite at church suppers.

Incidentally, just yesterday Donald and Helen opened a brand new website called Cowart Cooking Wiki. It’s at http://www.whenwilltheburningstop.com/index.php?title=Main_Page . Please check it out, sign on, and add your own favorite receipts.

But before Donald left, I proudly showed him a copy of William Short’s 1854 Diary—the book that I just published yesterday—See my online book catalog at www.bluefishbooks.info.

As my son compared my transcript with the original autograph of the 155-year-old diary, his sharp eyes spotted two things that had escaped my notice:

First, Donald spotted some numbers faintly written inside the cover. I’d seen them there but discounted them as unimportant. “Dad, he was trying to solve an algebraic equation here,” Donald said, “And he was going about it wrong”. Donald was a physics major in college and solves (or is the right word proves?) equations with ease.

I knew that in 1854 William Short was a professor of language and mathematics, but I had not recognized the numbers he’d written inside the cover of his diary were an equation.

Then, on examining the original diary’s back cover, Donald noticed that the layers of leather in the binding had separated sometime in the distant past, probably due to the diary getting wet in Short’s pocket. By tilting the little book to catch the light at just the right angle, Donald saw a distinct impression where Short had hidden several coins inside the cover slot created by that separation. The coins had been there so long they embossed their imprint on the leather.

But alas, somebody somewhere sometime in the distant past had removed those ancient coins.

I’ll bet they were gold coins Short had tucked away in this secret compartment…

Long gone before I ever got hold of the diary.

Nothing left but a faint impression of the coins.

Story of my life…