The Neighbors

Denny Ray is one of the saints around here. Perhaps it was the mid 80s he was a member here and was the equipment maintenance manager. It is a bit hard to describe how much of a headache this job is. We have a huge campus, with all kinds of dishwashers and compressors and refrigerators and generators and food processing equipment and gas and electric systems. And because Denny is so good with all of these he has saved the community a fortune. Not just because he does not charge us half the time and when he does charge us he bills half what he should. Not just because he basically forced us to shift gas companies which saved us over $10K in the first year.

No you can’t just be handy or thrifty to get saint status in community land, it is a high road. And one of the ways Denny does it is by watching the neighborhood. By doing the networking and community relations work which Twin Oaks ought to make labor creditable, but largely does not. Sometimes this appears in the form of a go cart or rocking horse. Most recently it has shown up as pears.

Our courtyard has a beautiful pear tree that Hildegard has organized with a bucket for fallen or eaten pears and two different length bamboo grabber sticks. These sticks are so simple, yet very effective at grabbing high pears with minimal impact on the area the pear was in before grabbing. You need to let them ripen a bit after falling, but they are pretty tasty pears.

Denny saw the sister trees to our on land right off W. Old Mountain Road which is our back door to the conference site. They were full of pears and Denny knew that the woman who owned the house had died. So Denny started walking down the street trying to find out who the caretaker for that house was and ultimately discovered that it was Tommy Mullins.

Tommy i perhaps sixty, small stature, bad teeth and a charming personality. Denny escorts us in to his compact home which is bursting with his hospitality. And this is in part clear because he has felt great generosity from the community over the years. Last year i knew that Keenan took surplus watermelons and gave them to our neighbors. Tommy got a couple. That was a big hit.

But an even bigger hit was apparently at some point, some enterprising member gave and installed a hammock for Tommy. We beat out god for the top spot in Tommy’s favorite things list.  So Tommy is all about giving Twin Oaks the pears from these handful of pear trees.