Jerry O'Myer

Jerry worked as a production manager at the John Deere plant before he retired a couple of years ago. He took an early-retirement package as the company did some restructuring because he thought it might be nice to enjoy a hobby or two before he got really old. It had been a series of disappointments instead. First he could not decide which hobby he might like, then all the hobbies were boring or too costly, and now he couldn't do anything but think about finding a new job. But he was much too old to be scouting for work, especially in this small town they moved to, where there were no jobs except at the community center. Those were not jobs at all, but volunteer engagements - that's what he called them, because they sounded like something you'd be signing up for life to do.

Jerry took long walks on the county roads around his house. He wore a reflective jacket, much like something a highway construction worker might wear. The jacket was not something he would have purchased himself, as he was not afraid of the occasional car, van, or truck zooming by fifty or sixty miles per hour faster than he was moving. But Melinda was afraid, or rather quite terrified. She had bought him the jacket thinking it might keep him from the dangerous walks, but he shrugged and wore it, even when it was ninety degrees in the summer.

Jerry was the kind of man who fixed things, things he didn't know how to fix, things that did not yet need fixing; if it was broken or perhaps about to be broken, Jerry was there fixing it. Sometimes there were things he could not fix the first time around, things that kept breaking. He would occasionally deem those things unfixable. But Melinda, Jerry's wife, could count the number of times he had stopped trying to fix a thing easily, if she could remember those times; they were so few that they sort of just slipped out of her mind.

He was currently battling one such thing: their mailbox. It leaked, and had done so for twenty-odd years, off and on. Every so often the rain was blow just right on the wind and find a way into the mailbox, where a few letters or a magazine would soak up the water. Jerry could not leave the problem for the next sideways rain that might happen in six or seven months.

"Other people must have wet mailboxes," he proclaimed over a plate of biscuits and gravy. "There for someone has found a way to fix them and I will too."