💔 Sometimes, life doesn't give you what you deserve, but don't let the pain steal the beautiful person you are becoming. ❤️🙏
....Yours Truly Nollywood Actor Joe 🎭
I used to have a nigga that we were like SpongeBob and Patrick but damn that nigga turned Mr krabs...
Oh well good for him, I mean it's all bout that money ain't it?
When I matched with a guy whose profile said he “doesn’t do small talk,” then got mad when I tried to have a normal conversation on the first date.
His profile had that line right at the top, plus “looking for something real.” We met for a drink. I asked what he did for work. He leaned back and said, “Why does that matter?” I asked if he lived in the area. He said he doesn’t like giving out personal information on the first date. I tried asking what he does for fun. He told me he doesn’t perform for people
Mom gave my 2 sisters and me a seed packet each before she passed. Theirs grew beans.
Each spring, I’d plant only a few seeds, saving the rest because they were Mom’s last gift. But for 3 springs, I haven’t touched mine.
This year, I examined the packet. The back was in Hungarian, but we’re not Hungarian.
Then I noticed the flap was resealed.
My grandfather was a volunteer firefighter who washed the ladder truck every Sunday, and he scrubbed every rung but one near the top, which he never touched. When I reached for it once with the sponge, he took the sponge out of my hand and said, "Not that one."
I was nine, standing on a milk crate behind the firehouse with a bucket of gray soapy water. The truck was a 1962 open-cab pumper with a wooden aerial ladder that had been replaced in the seventies by an aluminum one, and he washed it the way other men wash a car they love. Bumper, wheels, hose bed, every rung from the bottom up. Then, about two thirds of the way up, his sponge skipped one. It was dull and a little gray, and the rungs on either side of it shone. He did it every Sunday for as long as I knew him.
I asked him again when I was sixteen. He said, "Some things you leave be," and went to put the hose away.
He died in January, and the department asked me to speak at the service. Going through the station's equipment binder to get the dates right, I found a page for the old aerial, with thirty-eight years of Sunday inspections signed in his hand. On every line he had written the same note in the margin: Rung 14. Intact.
I decided I knew what it was. A man who tracks one rung for four decades and won't let anyone touch it is covering up a defect. I figured the rung was cracked or the ladder had failed a load test once, and that he had been quietly keeping a dangerous piece of equipment in service because the department could not afford to replace it. I volunteer with the same company, and I also work as an inspector for an insurance carrier, so I know exactly how that kind of thing ends. I went to the firehouse on a Tuesday night with a flashlight and a tape measure, and I told the chief I was only doing a safety check. I said it like someone who had already decided what I would find...