There was one situation that always caught me off guard. There were very few times that I can remember that I ever saw Jody alone. There were always a least a handful of people around. Most of the time there were enough folks around to populate a small town or a least enough to start a small army. During the time he was building the boat these solitary times were even rarer. He was living next door to the clinic on Saturn Dr. when the following incident took place. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
    On one of these rare evenings Jody and I decided that we would watch one of the Beatles animated movies. I believe that it was the Magical Mystery Tour or maybe it was Yellow Submarine. We made this decision because it was the only thing on the tube. This was in the days before VCRs and it is also one of the few times that I remember seeing Jody watch television.
    Just to get in the right frame of mind we decided that several bottles of wine would have to be sacrificed to the great god Sobriety. This was a nice start but we needed something with just a little more kick that would get us where we wanted to go; out there somewhere. Well, it dawned on us that there's a whole canister on nitrous oxide (laughing gas) just down the hall in the clinic. Jody's living quarter's and clinic were side by side so this was only a few footsteps away. Needless to say we made several trips to get "gassed" (yes I know it is a bad pun but I have a weakness for bad puns). 
   Somewhere in the second hour of the show there is a scene where the Beatles are running up and down a hallway of doors. They randomly open a door and are greeted by something totally nexpected. There may be an ocean liner trying to exit through the door, marching bands, streets of traffic and all kinds of other strangeness. Every time they open one of these doors and see what is coming they rapidly slam the door and run down the hallway to another door. At the next commercial Jody and I both jumped up to RUN to the bathrooms to unload wine. There was one bathroom for the living quarters and one for the clinic. These two doors were side by side. Sometimes Jody would have to keep large dogs overnight. If he did not have any room in his small kennel, he would put the large dog in the clinic bathroom. Jody beat me to the bathroom in the living quarters so I proceeded on to the clinic bathroom. I yanked the door open, a great Dane leaped straight up, I SLAMMED the door and ran back the other way in a state of gassed confusion. My trip to the bathroom had now become an extension of the last scene of the movie! Jody hears the door slam and sees me run by and hollers to find out what is happening. At the same time it dawns on both of us what is happening and we collapse onto the floor in state of hysterical giggles and laugh until we are crying. For the next hour we could not even look at each other without completely cracking up and laughing until we were crying.
     I'm sure it's one of those things where "you had to be there" to fully appreciate the humor. One thing is for sure though; Jody never missed an opportunity to have a good laugh and we laughed about this incident for years.     

~ Marshall~