[Public-List] Here's a good one...

[Mike Meinhold]

He could be the Farley Mowatt of the 21st century!!

On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 15:50 Winslow Ayer via Public-List <
public-list at lists.alberg30.org> wrote:

> Gordon, after having read many, if not all, of your stories, it seems to
> me that you should write a book about all of your (mis)adventures. You
> write very well and it’s always entertaining. Even if not always for you,
> except perhaps in retrospect.
>
> Winslow
> Tinlkers Damn #283
>
> > On May 18, 2023, at 3:33 PM, Gordon Laco via Public-List <
> public-list at lists.alberg30.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Jonathan,
> >
> > Needless to say I didn’t know about the oversized, wrong profiled hole
> until the other day.    I used butyl resin from a tube because it’s thick,
> and LifeCaulk’s ‘Life Seal’ to butter up the flange inside and out.
> >
> > Next winter I’m going to close the hole with cloth and epoxy… sand it
> smooth then start again with the correctly sized hole.
> >
> > I’m thinking unkind thoughts about my friend who did the installation.
> He was a fellow who had crewed for me when I ran the historic schooner
> gunboat at the local historic site and become a friend… a very nice guy
> whose life seemed to suddenly fall apart on him.   He was out of work and
> literally on the street so I hired him to do some fitting out jobs on
> SURPRISE.   That’s when I had a shock.   When I asked him if he’d take the
> list on as a paid job, he looked skyward, spread his arms palms upward and
> shouted ’THANK YOU JESUS!’.  (What?)
> >
> > It transpired he’d fallen into the grips of an evangelical entrepreneur
> who’d advised him he needed to change his life.  This involved leaving his
> wife, handing over all his money to the congregation and quitting his job.
> These acts of abasement would effectively lay him out flat, for Jesus to
> pick up.   The idea was that he needed to wipe his slate clean in order to
> be remolded and have his life rebuilt, confirming his faith.
> >
> > My comment at the time was ‘Gee Doug, it’s not The Lord who’s hiring you
> to install my new head and knot meter, it’s your buddy Gord who wants to
> help you'.   Well to him that was the Lord’s work through me.  So be it,
> thought I.
> >
> > So away he went working and got the job done.  We fed him meals during
> the project, during which he’d tell my wife and I we were going to hell
> along with our two sons because we didn’t go to his evangelical
> congregation with him.   I have to say his descriptions of people in
> raptures and sweating shouting matches 'speaking in tongues' didn’t much
> appeal to us.   One time my wife said to him ‘does it not occur to you that
> you’re throwing God’s gift of intelligence back in his face’.  He didn’t
> see it that way, but told her that God made women to be a tool for the
> devil…
> >
> > On days he wasn’t there his wife would come by and weep while telling us
> how she’d tried to help him but failed.
> >
> > That was a long time ago and we’re not in touch anymore.  We fell out of
> communication when he told us about a year later he’d met a new girlfriend
> at the church he belonged to and wanted to marry her.  We congratulated
> him.  Then he told us his pastor told him before he remarried, he needed to
> go back to his ex-wife and make an attempt to make up with her and re-marry
> HER.   Hmmm, said I, do you really want to do that?  He said he didn’t,
> absolutely not, but because he’d been told he had to by the evangelist, he
> was going to.   Needless to say his ex-wife told him to #&%$-off and he
> happily married the new one.
> >
> > So what’s the point of all this retrospective?  I’m tempted to look him
> up and ask him if he knew the poem read to professional engineers when
> they’re graduated and given their iron rings. It’s called ’The Sons of
> Martha’ by Rudyard Kipling. It’s about responsibility when one is being
> relied upon to do a good job….   Part of it goes:
> >
> > “They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the
> nuts work loose.
> > They do not teach that His pity allows them to leave their job when they
> damn-well choose.”
> >
> > So Doug, that through hull installation was a slow booby-trap you left
> me.  If that thing had let go while making a passage somewhere, like we do
> every year, you might have killed me and my wife and my sons.  Perhaps God
> might have delivered us somehow with a miracle to keep the boat afloat…
> perhaps somehow a divine force induced me to change that transducer the
> other day while I was in my slip at the club and there was a full service
> marina just next door that was still open for business…. was it a test of
> my faith?   I don’t think so, not yet Doug, wherever you are.   But I think
> I’d like to talk to you about it.
> >
> >
> > Gord
> > 426 Surprise
> > 705-527-9612
> >
> >
> >
> >> On May 18, 2023, at 2:55 PM, Jonathan Bresler via Public-List <
> public-list at lists.alberg30.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >
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