This story began with a gentleman that was having his fiftieth birthday in the year 1999. He had many family and friends at his house to celebrate this time in which a new year was approaching his life. When the cake was presented to him, he noticed that instead of having one candle that read 50, it was four candles that read 25 and 25. He had requested that this be done so that he could look at it as he was turning 25 twice instead of view it as turning half-century-old. When the guests were gone, he began to look at everything that surrounded him and it started to bring back many memories of his younger years.
He began to think about a one of his homes in which he referred to as a “Hobbit-like-house”. He liked this house because he was able to enjoy his Shetland pony and the creek that crawdads to play with. There were four children all together with him being the oldest. There was little food to go around for the whole family to eat, but work was scarce with little pay. His father worked as much as possible, but because most of the work was seasonal, it caused them to have to travel quite often to find new work. There came a time when they could not afford the car payments, so this caused two gentlemen to repose the car. This made him sad to see that with all of the hard work that his father had put forth that they could just come and take the car away from them. But his grandpa convinced him that there will be times that come along that will be hard, but you have to move on and keep trying.
With little clothing on their back and little food, it made it hard for him to succeed in school. He seemed to be constantly moving from school to school to accommodate his father’s work, which also made it harder for him to succeed. He was finally told that he would have to repeat second grade. .
At one point they had to travel a great distance to find work. This meant that there was very little room to sleep and there was very little food.
