J77 Diary
Note: The following is a transcription of an interview with J77 reporting on activities on April 5, 2022. It is lightly edited for clarity.
Okay. Well, we have seven o’clock meetings that I attend on Tuesdays at High Street Methodist church. We call this group Renovare and we meet at seven till eight o’clock. It’s a Christian men’s group, various Christian men from different churches, and we all get together. And what we do is read a book and share a little bit about what the book is and, share prayer concerns or anything like that, and, just fellowship. And after that meeting, we usually go out for breakfast. Right now, we’re going over to Riverside cafe and we have breakfast there. So it’s a good chance for men to get together in fellowship and just share a little bit with each other and it’s a good group. And so we went to that and went to breakfast and had a good start of our morning with that.
So then I came back and I started trying to find some tools I needed to try to do some work over at our church Kirby Avenue Church of God. We’re having some problems with electrical wire there at the church. So I was trying to round up some of the tools and the equipment I needed to try to look at the electrical wire there at the church. So, I did that and went over to the church. Well, no, what I did after that, I went to Lowe’s to pick up some supplies that I needed. So I went to Lowe’s to get some wires and all of that. And while I was at Lowe’s there, getting the wire and some junction boxes and just equipment, I needed to try to do some of that work over at the church to correct some of the wire problems, M called me saying she wanted me to pick up this young man from Northside High School.
So it’s a middle school, I guess, Northside Middle School. So, we hurried up and tried to go by Northside since it was on the way home. So we were able to pick the young man up and take him over to our home so he could help M. We continued to work on some of the stuff that we had as far as the church electrical wiring. After I got home, I had a friend there waiting on me to ask me if I could help him. He doesn’t have a truck, but he is doing some home improvement work on his home. So he wanted, asking me to help him to go—and since I have a truck—to go and haul some material for him, he’s doing his flooring and so he needed someone to help him to get this flooring back to his home.
So I told him I would be glad to do that. We go back to Menards first to have him to help get some flooring materials. He needed to work on his house. And he found out that some contractor had just about bought everything out that he had far as the flooring. So he would go to ask about, if I could take him by Lowe’s and see what they had for flooring because he was saying it was three months wait to get materials for his flooring, if he had to just try to order it and wait on it, but he don’t want to do that. So I told him I would take him by Lowe’s and he could see what they had far as flooring. And so he was able to find something close enough match that he went ahead and purchased several boxes of that laminate flooring that he could put in to do his housing project.
So after that, I headed back to the church and I had a man—and after looking at all that work—I saw a guy out at Lowe’s when I was there, he was a contractor and I told him to come by and give me an estimate on it. So, I didn’t really want to do that work anyway. So I went back to the church to meet him, to get him to give a look at what we had far as problems with the wire and see if he could give me a price on estimating. How much he would be willing to do the wire for?
And so after talking to him, I went back to the Ball State class. We have a Ball State immersive learning class. It’s geography and GIS. We call it a mapping class and they’re trying to document the history of our neighborhood and a lot of the older business, the streets, the churches, lot of things that we want to try to preserve our history. And this is one way we could use this class and give them experience to work with the community to get inputs and find out, you know, about the streets and everything.
So after the mapping class, we finally come back home and we to try to eat something. And that was pretty much our day.
Interviewed By: Prof. James Connolly
Transcribed By: Muhammad Hafeez ur Rehman