My last post was at the first of the month and here it is the last of the month. Where has the time gone?

I’ve been away waiting out hurricanes in airports waiting out electricians that were suppose to be through in order to start up some equipment and getting back home to find out that the state of Tennessee Child Support Division will grab the first name that matches what a welfare mother tells them to try to get the child support money she needs to get off of welfare.

I guess I need to explain this a little.

The day after labor day I had a flight out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to Tulsa, OK. Of course that was the day after Ivan had ripped through the Florida panhandle and it had fouled up Atlanta’s airspace pretty badly by Tuesday morning. I spent the entire day in the airport waiting on standby for one flight and then finally getting a flight out at a little after 6 P.M.

I spent the rest of the week in Tulsa and things went fairly well. There are still some issues that I need to go back and work out but overall the trip worked out well.

I came back home in time to head to Augusta where things weren’t going so well. My portion of the project went fine but the electricians were behind in getting the equipment wired up. So most of the following week I spent just standing on concrete waiting for the work to catch up so I could start up equipment.

On Friday I talked to my wife and she had found a business card from a local deputy sheriff in our door requesting that we contact him regarding a civil matter. He had left the office for the weekend before my wife got home so we were stuck all weekend wondering what this could be about.

I got home on Saturday.

On Monday morning I contacted this deputy sheriff and discovered that I was suppose to be in court that morning in Bledsoe County, Tennessee in regards to a paternity suite/child support case. The plaintiff was a woman I had never heard of and the child had been born in 1995. This was a shock.

In the first place I’ve never heard of this woman, in the second place I’ve been in a monogomous relationship with my wife since 1977 and in the third place after our second son was born in 1989 I had a vasectomy. They had just taken the name the woman had given as the father to the state when she applied for welfare and grabbed the first person with that name in the county the child was conceived and sent out a subpoena.

The name she gave them was Larry Burton and he lived in Hixson, TN. Okay, I lived in Hixson, TN from 1986 through 2002 but so did at least two other people named Larry Burton that I knew of. I use to get phone calls for one of them and I bought a piece of furniture from The Furniture Store in Dallas Bay from the other one.

After I finally got in touch with the Assistant District Attorney General handling this case I tried explaining how she had the wrong guy. I could tell she wasn’t buying my story when I acknowledged that I had lived at the addresses that she asked about. But then I told her that even though I had lived in Hixson during the time in question that I knew at least two other Larry Burtons lived there during the same time period, including one that I bought furniture from.

This caused her to change her tone. The woman had told her that the Larry Burton who was the father of her child had worked at a furniture store in Hixson. The matter has now been non-suited.

I’m lucky in that my wife trusts me and has a good sense of humor. However we both thought about a friend of her’s whose husband had an affair but they then reconciled. Had something like this occurred in her family I can see where the reconciliation might be over before the mess could be cleared up.

On a brighter note, my canoe that had been stolen had evidently been hid in the brush on the lake in my subdivision. A neighbor found it in his backyard after the lake went back into its bank. Half of it had been painted white with latex house paint and there were two trenching tools in the canoe that I can only imagine were being used as paddles.

It’s been an interesting three weeks. I’ll try to update more often now but I do have a little more traveling to do. I’ll try to get pictures next time.