Let me tell you about an old friend of mine named Nimrod who grew up “in the hills” as he says.  He has lived in the north for a lot of decades now, but still has vibrant memories of his growing-up years down in the time and the land where stock car racing was born of the moonshiners outrunning the law and where betting on cock fights was as common a pastime as playing marbles “for keeps” was where and when I grew up.

Nimrod tells great stories of his young life in Boone County.  Like me, he never stretches the truth or makes up any facts, so we get along just great as we swap stories.

Knowing people like Nimrod makes life a lot more enjoyable.  You just never know what to expect.  Just the other day he sent me a photo of a wonderful watercolor he painted---all these years and I never knew he is an artist.

One time years ago, he handed me a tiny old photograph, about an inch-and-a-half square.  He told me to keep it, and I did.  I used to look at it often, but I have misplaced it.  As I remember, it shows a woman with her hair up in a bun, holding a baby in her arms, standing in front of a rough-hewn log cabin sitting up off the ground on short concrete pilings.  I can see woods in the background.  I think I recall Nimrod telling me that the woman in the photo is his grandmother or maybe even his mother, standing in front of her house.

I love that photo and hope I can find it again, because it reminds me that people come from different places and different times.  Nimrod and I can sit in a coffee shop having a great old time swapping yarns, but we may as well have come from different planets as to where and how we grew up.

One time I hired Nimrod and another guy to put a new roof on my house.  “We’ll get ‘er done by April 1,” said the other guy, and they did, but more than one April 1 flew by between the time he said that and the time it got done.

They showed up on December 22, on a warmish day to start the job.  They stripped the old roofing off and laid down new felt and started putting new shingles on before they ran out of daylight.  The next day the weather turned.  They were back on the roof, in the cold, being careful not to break the now-brittle shingles.

My wife and I were taking the kids on a trip to see grandparents out-of-state.  Late in the afternoon, we piled in the car.  Since this was only a  day after the shortest day of the year, it was getting dark, and, worse, it was starting to lightly rain and was only 20 degrees outside.

Nimrod and his buddy were on our roof, putting the last of the shingles on the peak.  They were at opposite ends, each astraddle the ridge, working toward the middle, banging away.

“Isn’t it getting icy up there?” I shouted before getting in the car and driving south.

“Y’all don’t worry ‘bout us!” hollered Nimrod.

When I returned a week later, I had to pry the story out of him about how, in the pitch dark, he, being the smaller of the two, had to pound roofing nails in my brand new roof to use as “grippers” to keep him from falling off the ice-covered roof as he made his way down to the eaves and the ladder. 

Then, Nimrod had to get another ladder from the truck and slide it up the roof to the other guy, and hold it there, while he worked his way down, pulling Nimrod’s nails and calking the holes by feel.

“That took a lot of guts!” I remember saying at the end of the story.

“It woulda took a lot more guts t’spend the night on the roof, if I ain’t badly mistaken,” he said, and I guess he was right about that.
  

                                      © by Jim Whitehouse

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