Hick Goes Up on the Roof

Hick was up on the roof of the senior apartments Monday morning, looking for the source of a leak during our three inches of rain last week. It had caused a light to fall from the ceiling inside. He found it. The rubber coating on the roof had collapsed in one corner. It's not something Hick is qualified to fix, so he called a contractor.

 

There's a view across town at sunrise. Not very impressive. It's a small town that sprung up during the lead mining era. Hick's apartment building sits on Main Street. In the distance, you can see the store where I shop every Thursday. It will always be Country Mart to me, even though another chain has taken over. The brick building to the left of Hick's roof is the former Southwestern Bell Telephone building that my dad worked out of for many years. In the days before Bell was de-regulated into AT&T.

There's not much to see of Main Street from this view. That white building used to be a Western Auto store when I was a kid, but is now a Subway. The sandwich shop, not underground transit. The only thing underground in this town it the lead mine, now closed.

If you zoom in, you can see the back of the post office, the loading dock with all the vehicles parked. To the left of it, there's a brick building with two green awnings. That is now the city library, but it used to be the unemployment office, where I worked when Genius was born.

Getting back to the roof business... I asked Hick how much it would cost to replace the roof.

"It's like replacing a roof on a house. It will cost about $16,000."

"Does the association have enough money to do that?"

"Oh, yeah. Since I took over a year ago, it went from having a negative balance to over $60,000 in the bank."

"Will it be the same kind of roof? That tarpaper stuff? Or metal, like a house?"

"It's not tarpaper. It's EDPM. It will be the same kind of roof."

Good to know that Hick has filled the coffers of the association for the elderlies, what with getting all those apartments ready and rented. So they can afford to replace the roof. They're sure not wasting that money on Hick's salary!