Wednesday December 14, 2021, I called up Rolando, my neighborhood scrap metal guy. “Rolando, meet me at my place in the morning- I have a pick-up”.
I’m a waste not want not kind of gal. I keep things longer than I probably should ~just in case~, I find things in alleys, craning my neck at stacked shadows down side streets when driving through neighborhoods, shopping at ‘the big store’ as Collette puts it, very succinctly.
I knew the demo was going to happen, and I knew that the metal from the doors on the garage could turn into another person’s treasure with some planning, and I am a planner.
So, Rolando met me at 9am, as promised. He took a look at the overhead garage door, and made a call to a friend for some back-up. Between the 3 of us, we could figure out how to make this door available for Rolando to take away.
As he and I were putting the ladder into place, garage door open, I hear “I can get that out for you in about 5 minutes”. I look over, imagining that this was Rolando’s friend that he had just called. “Great”, I say. “I think we can undo these bolts, with no tension on the spring and…..”
“I’m Myles”, the person standing in the doorway says, in a thick Irish brogue.
It was Myles, from Illinois Excavation, scheduled for a soft time of 1:30pm.
Wow- okay, ya, great. That would be fabulous. and away he walks.
The soon to be tell tale sound of heavy machinery is heard at the end of the alley, I drop the garage door, and we all step back.
In a matter of minutes, without so much as disturbing a splinter of the wood frame on the garage itself, Myles had not only extracted the garage door with surgical precision. but had folded it like a cocktail napkin turned origami crane. He had folded it to a size that was to fit perfectly into Rolando’s scrap truck, and he gingerly grabbed it with his digger, and placed it in the back of the truck.
WOW. That was impressive. What he did to the garage in a matter of about 12 minutes was equally impressive. No muss, no fuss. the garage was down, and the scraps were swept up like it was 3 am after a house party. Not a crumb left.
The following days found Myles and his crew deftly managing the excavation, footings and foundation, like bosses. Myles, for those playing at home, is also the lead singer of the Honky Tonk band The Hoyle Brothers, a band that I have been VERY familiar with in past years. They have had a few lead singers, and I had only seen Myles perform a couple of times. When he’s singing a Hank Williams song, he’s all business with a solid southern twang. I had no idea that his lyrical Irish accent was being his country AND western facade.
That Friday I headed over to the Empty Bottle for Honky Tonk Happy Hour, and danced for only the second time since the plague took us all out of commission in March of 2020, and I couldn’t have been happier. A couple of bottles of beer, dusted off cowboy boots, some 2-step, and the start of something big.
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