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 | | From: | Bill Orr | | Subject: | Wake For Old Charlie | | Date: | Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:39:40 GMT |
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 | Wake For Old Charlie
There ain't a lot of fancy talk for people like old Charlie.
He been here niegh on forty years some folks say,
puttin down his feet in one place then t'nuther
doin this and that to fill his hungry belly.
First I knowed of him was when he first came here,
he went out and bought thirty acres east o'town.
He put in a pasture and got some goats .
Now, what could a fella do with goats, everbody says,
like a goat ain't got no usefulness,
that is, like a horse or mule. You can ride a horse
and that is useful. And a mule could maybe pull a plow,
but there ain't much mule-plowin' goin' on nowdays.
But a goat don't do nuthin cept stand around
and eat a ton of grass and anything else it can find
is what they said when they rode past his place.
Course, I saw a goat pulling a cart once, had two
kids in it laughing and carrying on, having fun,
but that's different, not like doing something serious.
Charlie had a business, sort of, that let him make
some money to live on. He fixed stuff,
he fixed things that didn't work right,
didn't make no difference what it was,
might be a well pump or kitchen drain.
Well, when it happened, the breaking, that is
they'd say "Call Charlie. He can fix it."
And he really could. There weren't nothing like it.
He'd come and look at what was broke or not working,
then he'd go out and get something from his truck,
probably a part he had been saving for this very thing,
then he'd come back in and pretty soon he'd say,
"That's it", and you could pay him for his time and parts
and he'd get in his truck and go on his way.
Well, Charlie ain't around no more. He's gone,
died a week ago last Thursday. His heart quit on him.
There ain't much to say about him.
A lot of people went to his funeral and service in the church.
They just sat around saying nothing and looking sad.
What can you say about a man that spent his life
fixing stuff for other people that they
either couldn't fix or didn't want to fix themselves,
and had a lot of goats in his pasture?
Bill Orr
2005
--
http://home.earthlink.net/~billbernice1/
Includes "Poems of the Sea"
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