Burley Athan built custom cabinets in his shop and installed them in upscale homes.

Upsize your home.

He had a helper, a nephew, or a cousin.

His helper quit to take a higher paying job.

Burley asked me to be his helper. I quit my construction job and went to work for Burley.

His helper quit and asked for his old job back. He was kin. Burley gave it to him, and let me go.

I called this The Old Rollback, and it was to happen to me again.

Be careful when you upsize your job. Especially if it's contingent on someone else upsizing his. If his doesn't take, yours might not either. Shit doesn't run uphill.

I liked working for Burley.

We'd go measure a house for cabinets. Order the wood.

That meant driving to Winston. We'd have a cup of coffee with Nancy and Maria, in Homecrafts.

We'd build the cabinets in Courtney.

Then we'd drive to Winston and install them in the home we built them for.

One day we built a dining room table for me and Brenda out of pecan veneer tabletops and table legs that had defects. Burley bought them as culls from a furniture factory.

This was the table I typed the books I had been writing in my head at, on an office manual typewriter Brenda bought me at a garage sale.

I had more time to spend with Owen and Brenda.

Owen and I would make beer together.

I talked to him as if he were an adult.

I would explain what I was doing to him, as we went along.

"Now I am pitching the wort."

"Now I am testing the specific gravity with my hydrometer."

"Now I am cyphering off the dregs."

I called my beer OG-37. For original gravity.

Also goat beer, after Einbecker bier. A dark, almost a bock beer.

Einbecker bier had a picture of a mountain goat on the label.

Brenda and I could go shopping together now, and to the public library, in Yadkinville. Brenda could go to garage sales.

She bought a table model FM radio.

I put up a Radio Shack dipole antenna on the roof and could get the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays. I'd listen to the opera as I made my beer and wine.

I'd bought all the equipment at Homecrafts, when I worked there, and now just bought supplies from them.

I don't think you can make a really good lager beer, at home, but you can make good ales and stouts.

You can make good country wines, out of fruits and vegetables. You can even make a dry red and a dry white wine.

It ain't going to be a grand cru wine, or even a California pinot, like Spit-Bucket sought, in Sideways. But it can be dry, and subtle.

We didn't have a TV. We didn't go to the movies. The only music Brenda could get on the radio was country music, and Brenda didn't like country music.

My folks gave us an old black-and-white TV, and now Brenda could keep up on current events. Trends. Fads.

What was happening.

As Louis Armstrong said, on a State Department tour of Africa, when he got off the plane, "What's happening, Gates?"

Watching television was like getting off a plane in Africa.

What's happening? Is it me who's crazy? Everybody's black.

I get culture shock watching television.

Also, if you haven't watched it for awhile, and you watch it, it's gotten worse. It's worse then you remembered.

But when you watch it, regularly, it becomes real.

It becomes normal.

You become it.

You are what you watch on television.

And they control what that is. Whoever they are.