Who are your friends?

Your friends accept you for what you are, who you are, how you are, where you are, when you are whatever you are. Friends can and will be honest with you. Friends return the favor. Friends understand how to disagree with you. Friends forgive you. Friends stick with you. As the old saying goes the proof is in the pudding.

Hillbillies make good friends. With some strong hillbilly genes, and jeans, Kadizzle feels he can speak for the mountain people. When you meet a person from the hills they size you up.  Don't show up in a shiny suit. The people in the hills may seem backward, but one thing they learned is to beware of strangers. Now for the good news.  If you treat a mountain man right, and he sees your soul, and finds it good, you are in. If they give you something, it is a token of friendship. It might be some potatoes, some plants, a sack of apples or a knife, but it means you have been accepted. You have made a friend for life. There is one rule, don't ever cross him. Don't steal his pig, always invite him in to the table, and help him when you can. 

Kadizzle once was a professional safety trainer.  He did his work in West Virginia, north and south, Ohio, and North Dakota. In the course of his career he taught first aid, and many other things to coal miners. Over the years it was thousands of classes. Kadizzle can tell you one thing for sure the most grateful people were the coal miners deep in the mountains of West Virginia.  The memory is still there of ending a class of safety for coal miners deep in Appalachia. A miner was designated to give Kadizzle a nice new pocket knife. It was a token of their appreciation for the fact that someone cared about them.  At another rundown remote mine Kadizzle showed up an had no lunch. The old coal miners noticed and offered to share their lunch.  That was way back when Kadizzle was about 23.  Since then after hundreds and hundreds of coal miners Kadizzle has never met any kinder than the ones in the toughest coal fields in the country.  If you crossed these people they would shoot you, but if you respected them they would die for you.