Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 20, 1993                   TAG: 9310200018
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IS IT JUST ME, OR IS LIFE ODD?

Could mine?

Tell me, am I wrong to marvel at these?

Johnny was let out of prison in early August. From the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, he traveled to Roanoke because, to the extent he has any home at all, this is it.

Johnny served 19 years of a 30-year prison term for armed robbery.

He's still angry about the sentence.

OK, so he pointed a gun at a guy and took his money.

But the other incident was overblown, says Johnny. He sprang on a fellow in Highland Park and "knocked him on his noggin" with a hammer.

Was the victim killed?

Heck no, says Johnny, still mystified as to why the judge got so angry.

"It was just one of them little ball-peen hammers," he says.

Not two weeks ago, Donald was driving his small Plymouth up the dirt road that winds up Buffalo Mountain in Floyd County.

A rocky, rutted trail, it's usually the domain of four-wheel-drive trucks - not compact cars.

The Plymouth didn't make it. Donald says his front wheel hit a rock. He also admits he was drunk - so drunk he was uninjured when the car rolled six times on its way down the side of a mountain.

To hear Donald tell it, and he recounts this story with the excitement you might use to describe your surprise party, the car sheared foot-thick trees along its 150-foot downhill tumble.

Two friends were also uninjured.

Only one of the three men - not Donald - wore a seat belt.

They took the license plates off and left the car there. They bummed rides back into Roanoke.

Donald still owes $4,000 on the car.

A few of the rainy days last week got pretty raw, and the nights were downright blood chillers.

The weather prompted three people to call me to complain about Virginia's Fuel Assistance Program, which pays to help keep needy households warm during cold weather.

The application period started only last week and will run through mid-November. Heating oil, gas, electric, coal and firewood vendors will be told in December who qualified. Benefits will be paid in January.

"I could freeze to death by then!" complained one aggravated applicant.

And whose fault would that be?

It's an assistance program, not a surrogate womb.

The average payment for the season last year was $194 per household, hardly enough to keep a family's tootsies toasty from October through March.

Traditionally, the application period opened much earlier in the season, but nobody applied. Who thinks of heating the house when it's 85 degrees outside? Ninety percent of the applications came - surprise - at the last minute, after the season's first cold snap.

That would be late October or early November.