A bat in the belfry

We were all getting ready on Monday morning to go over to my grandmothers house to read the history on the bottom of the table (more on this to come), when we heard a weird noise. I thought it was Julian batting his legs on the bed in my parents bedroom. We discovered that it was something stuck in the chimney. My mother called my father who called in the local "animal control" aka: my brother Jeremy. He came over and took a look up the chimney and discovered there were two flickers (which is a bird by the way). We fashioned a tarp around the chimney and he put on his gas mask and goggles and fished them out of there. One of them he got right away but the other one flew around for a bit all covered with soot and made it's mark all over the nice white ceiling. Good thing they weren't showing the house today. The only thing we could figure out how two birds got stuck in the chimney is that they were having a little rendevous. There was one male and one female and they must have been "playing" and got stuck. We are happy to report that they are both free and unharmed. So...the history on the bottom of the table...my grandmother has a beautiful old wooden table and we write family history on the bottom of it. It is really neat. We have all the births and deaths. Who visited on certain holidays. Who was graduating and who was suspended from school. Other milestones like marriages and sometimes divorces, military history, how much things cost at certain times like the table cost $5.00 to build sometime in the late fifties or early sixties. The wood was cut from a tree on my grandparents property and the local woodshop kids from the high school built the table. The table has a hand rubbed turpentine and linseed oil finish. Each time someone went over to visit they would sit around and rub the table (probably while drinking beer and whiskey and playing cards and maybe some smoking cigarettes) and eventually it was nice and smooth. So that is the history lesson on the Barlow clan.