hello and welcome to coffee with lyman
well you can see i'm out here in the wilds right so i thought i'd take a walk
go out to a little uh woodsy kind of area near where i live and have a little chat with you
now what i'd like to talk about today is kind of a funny story about my dad
now my dad and i we didn't have the best relationship
i was always under the impression he really didn't like me that much i'm not sure why but he didn't
so anyway uh there was a fair amount of verbal abuse very little if any physical so yeah
i i'd say uh yeah we just didn't hit it off but we did have our nice times together too
so this story is about where i lived as a kid i grew up in a mobile home park a lot of people
call them trailer parks or manufactured home parks whatever you want anything over 29 feet long is a
mobile home less than that it's a travel trailer or a trailer anyway we lived in a mobile home in
a big mobile home park on the east side of saint paul minnesota its name still is there landfall
village but at that time it was privately owned by the olsen family and in later years it became
a part of the county municipality so excuse me to get on with my story here
in our mobile home we had uh gas heat and the gas heat was piped in due to the courtesy
of the mobile home park so there was a little meter outside of our home and however much gas
we paid or we used it was monitored there well my mom she was like when it came to
to to pick up odors ascent she was like a bloodhound she i can't imagine anyone
having a better sense of smell than my mother so anyway she detected the smell of propane gas
and in our home so anyways she gets my dad go check that out well what my dad did was under
a mobile home all the way around from the bottom of the outside of the mobile home to the ground
there's a skirting so it makes it so the wind can't blow through animals can't get in under
your home it looks nicer keeps the place a little warmer in the winter that sort of thing well
that's where your gas line would run underground to hook up to the furnace somewhere in the home
well he gets the idea that he's going to remove a little door on her skirting he is going to take
a lighter and get on his hands and knees because that's all the room there is under
a mobile home and crawl inside that little door next to the gas meter and look for the gas
leak so i guess in his mind what he was thinking was if there's a gas leak and you have a match lit
that or a cigarette lighter is going to uh you know burn wherever that gas is it'll make a
little flame well what he didn't realize was that under our mobile home being that it was enclosed
there was a whole lot of contained loose free propane in the air there so when he got under
his hair he he got under far enough that his whole body was inside before he lit the match
my mother and i were standing outside just kind of standing there looking at the event
and when he let that match we saw all we saw was a big we heard this and saw this big burst of flames
shoot out from that hole and quickly followed by my dad's butt coming out backwards as fast
as he could crawl his eyes were were about as big as saucers and he took his cap off and he
was beating himself he thought he was on fire and what he did was he singed off his eyebrows
well as soon as the went and he started backing out i started laughing it just struck me like i
was watching a laurel and hardy show and it never even occurred to me he might be hurt
and my mom was standing there and she's looking at me and she's saying don't laugh don't laugh
trying to be quiet about it so my dad wouldn't get mad well anyways he gets out and he's beating
on himself and all that and my mom while his back is towards us because he's on his knees
she takes me around the corner of the hole and said stop laughing stop laughing if you can't
stop laughing go away you'll make him mad so i was like hysterically laughing i thought was so funny
so i went away and that was just one of the things it was like it was really mean of me
to laugh and i don't know why that struck me as so funny i think it's because he was kind of a jerk
that something like that happened another time the poor guy in the middle of winter
he decides to crawl up on an addition we had built to our mobile home it was 10 by 20 feet and there
was an eve built out over the exterior wall right so rain wouldn't run straight down and run off
on a house well anyway on the eve uh ice had built up and my parents were afraid that that was going
to cause the roof to start leaking so his idea was he'd go outside put a ladder up under the
eve climb up the ladder and bang bang bang knock down that ice break it off let it fall down and
everything from the roof could drain okay well what he did was and i don't know why but again i
was just standing there watching him i was like 12 years old when all this was going on and he was uh
he took his ladder he set it on the ground beneath the eave far enough away from the wall so he could
you know get up over to eve pound a little bit but he said it on ice there was a just a
shiny big glare patch of ice all along that wall outside because of you know it would
get a little warm drip down freeze get a little warm drip down freeze so instead of like you
know taking something and knocking a hole some notches into the ice or just clearing the ice away
he just sets his the legs of the ladder on the ice climbs up the ladder starts messing around with
the ice and surprise surprise the ladder goes like this and he falls down hits the ground on his back
and uh i didn't laugh out loud i i you know went up to him and uh helped him get up and
i thought maybe really was her at that time so but this yeah goofy things like that
well i just wanted to take a few minutes to say hello to you again
share a little coffee with you
and tell you a short story
so thank you for watching i look forward to seeing you again the next time goodbye for now
you