Son,

The past few days have caused me to reflect on pride. My pride. My pride of being an independent person. The ‘never surrender’ attitude served me very well in sports – at other times my pride has caused some real pain. When I bought this house a few years ago I had some help moving in. That was OK. But there were a few thing that I felt I could handle myself.

I have an old safe. I bought it years ago at an auction. It has a really cool brass combination lock and a brass door knob. The safe is about two feet tall, about 18 inches wide, and about two feet deep. I think it weighs about 300 pounds. The door weights about eighty pounds. It rolls reasonable well on the metal casters. I think the safe is about a hundred years old. I just use it as a fire safe, protecting important papers.

So the safe was at my old house. I loaded my dolly (two wheel cart) into my truck and headed out to get the safe. I backed my truck up to the back porch and the tail gate opened exactly level with the porch. I went inside and muscled the safe onto my dolly. Then I tied the safe to the dolly with about a hundred feet of rope. That safe was virtually a part of the dolly – it would not fall off. I was sure of that. I easily rolled the safe onto my waiting truck.

When I arrived at my new house I faced different problems. I had to park in the drive and could not back up to the house. So I used some ropes with a haphazard pulley system to lower the dolly and safe on to the ground. Getting in the house was a bigger problem. There are about four step up to my back porch. There was no way I could haul that safe up those stairs. So I went to the garage and scavenged some old boards. I laid the boards up the stairs to the porch, fashioning something of a ramp. Then positioned the dolly bound safe about twenty feet out the sidewalk and took a run at the ramps up to the porch.

It almost went pretty well. I hit the ramp at a dead run and the safe went up. When the dolly was about to the top of the ramp one of the wheels slipped off the ramp. The safe and the dolly were so securely bound together that the contraption acted as one. The energy generated by 300 pounds in motion was more than I could handle when it went awry.

The whole contraption spun around and the handle of the dolly caught me squarely on the chin. I was down for an eight count. I don’t think it knocked me out – but I did have a visit with an imaginary tweety bird and some stars. When I picked myself up from the patio I realized there was blood coming out of my beard – and my jaw was throbbing.

When I gained my senses I looked around there there was the safe, sitting on the porch – it had landed where it was supposed to be.

Another victory for false pride.

Dad