GAMBLING PAID OFF

We had a house for sale on a road called Beaver Bend. It was a very nice house and our contractors had been in, and had gotten a lot of work done. We had a sign out front that we wanted to sell it. A woman and her boyfriend showed up. “Wow, we like this house, I want to buy it. If we are approved to buy this house, we want to move in, this weekend,” they said.

I agreed that we could do just that. Now I hurried the contractors along … I quickly checked her credit report … I made some phone calls to confirm her employment. She said that she had won at gambling over at Lake Charles, Louisiana. She showed me a photos of one of those mock checks three feet tall and four feet wide. She had one photo with the manager of the gambling casino. Well, that was her down payment. What a way to buy a house … use your gambling gain as a down payment. Smart idea.

Now, on my end, everything was done except the tub surround in one of the bathrooms. I always like putting in tile tub surround with ceramic tiles. The guy that normally did that for us was not available to do it that week. I got on the phone and I called and called. Nobody had time or it was way too expensive. One man bid three times the price I normally paid to get that done. That just seemed like blackmail. So I kept calling. I even went over to Home Depot to see if I could find someone who did tile work to keep me on schedule. Getting very weary of talking to people I called up my 19-year-old son and said: “Ulrick, we are going to do some tile work.” I could still do that because Ulrick still lived at my house. I went to Home Depot and this time I purchased a videotape on how to install bathroom tile and bought all the necessary equipment and of course the tile. I told Ulrick he could bring his radio or CD player to that house. We played the music of his choice, country western, which would not be my choice. I hadn’t thought about what to listen to … my goal was simply to get the tile up so our buyer could move in. She had even agreed that she wouldn’t use that shower stall and bathtub combination for 24 hours, because everything needed to set up and dry. We went to work and as you might guess, because there were two of us doing it, it went very, very fast. But the other thing I hadn’t planned on was the camaraderie with my son … the bonding. Now it wasn’t that I didn’t love him and I wasn’t bonded with him anyway