There I was, a long way from home, Louisiana boy trying to do some antique business with a dealer from Kansas. A plastic milk crate filled with many objects and I say, “How much for all?” and now we begin the dance that only happens when somebody says “all”.
He gives me a number. I point at another crate, then another and another, all filled with a clutter of objects. He throws me a number, per item.
Once upon a time, when I was new to this, I would grind out another cycle, to save a little money, but I’ve come to despise haggling because I realized that if it isn’t win-win, then it’s both-lose. I want this guy to make a profit, and I want him to remember me as being fair, so that we can do amiable business together for years. So I say, “Count ‘em out.”
Here is an area I just love about the antique business: we trust each other, even as strangers! While I’m gone to get my truck he’s going to be 1-2-3’ing into the high 100’s. When I return he’ll tell me the count and I will trust the number.
When I return he says, “I counted it fair,” which in Midwestern means he rounded in my favor, what we in Louisiana would call lagniappe, and elsewhere the good ole American baker’s dozen. Not once, in all these years, have I been burned.
Things were going Mayberry wholesome, until he asked me if I was a Republican. I once wasn’t, then was, and now I don’t know where I fit anymore. He’s wanting a Trump vs Clinton, which I liken to lower back pain or shingles, so I say what we all say, “I can’t believe these are our choices,” and he and I both shake our heads and call that plenty said.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Hours Later In The Dark Of Night
On road trips I do iced tea and sunflower seeds. The iced tea feels caffeine in moderation, and the motion of loading seeds, cracking them open, then flicking the shells out the window does wonders for keeping me alert.
It’s late, dark, I need sunflower seeds, stop at this convenience store. “Hi you!” I hi-you back. Paying up, I asked her how big the graduating class. “Maybe 30.” What’s a big name in the phone book? She looks out at some teenage boys standing around a lifted pickup. “Boulware.”
As I walked out she says, “Have a nice night,” which isn’t much for dialogue, but it’s included here so I can applaud her accent. The way she said “night” just went on and on, and even seemed to have an “a” in there somewhere.
Now reloaded with sunflower seeds, happy for the stretch-my-leg-ness, I remounted my big Dodge.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Speaking Of All Alone On A Dark Highway
You get yourself on some two lane state highway, between some little town that graduates 30 and the next little town that graduates 25, no houses, just timber land left and right, static on the radio, a moonless dark, road to myself for so long that it surprised me to see taillights up ahead of me.
The car is pulled over, a young woman standing by the driver door, and now she’s walking forward, which brings my attention to a young man who is twenty yards away from the car, walking…
I kept going, but I kept thinking. Did they have a flat? Car broke down? Didn’t I just hear a sermon on The Good Samaritan a few Sundays back? I turn around.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
If What Happens Next Don’t Tell You
About The State Of America
I see the young man walking but I don’t see the car. I pull over on the shoulder ahead of the man and watch him in my side mirror. You watch enough TV crime shows, it just about ruins you for doing stuff like this. And of course he’s out there not knowing who I am, maybe thinking the same thing.
I lower my passenger window and he comes to it. “Appreciate you pulling over,” he says. He’s got that graduating-class-of-thirty accent too. “My wife got all alchey’d up and I just had to step away.”
He opens the passenger door, which turns on the overhead cab light, and says, “It’s a crazy world out there and you never know,” and then he lifts his shirt up to expose his waist and turns in a circle to show me he’s not carrying a weapon.
So, this is our America now…
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
I Was Raised On Sheriff Taylor And Deputy Fife
It ain’t like I do this kind of thing all the time. Fact is, it may have been decades since I picked up a hitchhiker. But I’m not giving up on the America that I grew up with, and if I err, it’s going to be on the assumption that people are decent. I nod him on into the truck.
“My wife got all alchey’d up ‘n I just didn’t want no more of it.”
“Where’d she go?” I ask.
“I got out and she started following me, cussing me. She ended up just driving off.” I limit my relationship advice to thinking there-but-by-grace-go-I and keep my lips zipped.
There’s no doubt he was prepared to walk home, but as we get going and keep going I realize that I’m saving him some foot blisters. He’s a pleasant young man. It’s yes sir, yes sir, those country manners that I grew up with. Never pushing the line, “Just drop me here,” trying to save me inconvenience, which would have still left him an hour’s walk, but I insisted and he was grateful and his marital spat was soon forgot.
“I’m a welder,” he tells me. “I got broke in at Port Arthur.” I like that: broke in, which I take to mean where he took his first real job.
Wouldn’t you know, his house was at the end of a dead end road. When I was a kid watching grownup men do this sort of thing, the guy getting helped might not have two nickels to rub together, but he’d offer to pay, but that was only formality, as the whole point was to not cheapen the deed; the person in my role would refuse, and say something like, “I know you’d have done the same for me.” It was the Pay It Forward before Pay It Forward.
He said thanks, and meant it. Knowing there was a wife out there that drove off and left her husband on the side of the road… I said good luck, and meant it. Away I went.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
…where we may find the reader still wondering why the writer titled the story All Those Stars…(little knowing that the story almost was Celebrating A Decent Deed With A Powerful Pee…)
Me again, on that dark, quiet two lane. Popped a few sunflower seeds, flicked some hulls out the window. Maybe it was that cool night air, or the iced tea in me, but suddenly I had a powerful urge to, as we used to say in the country, see a man about a horse.
When I say lonely highway, I mean just-me-and-the-stars-above-kind of lonely. I aimed at the white stripe, and then took a glance upwards. Oh, the stars!
So many, so beautiful! I grew up in the country, without all the lights, but since then I’d become too city, and city had cost me views like this. I felt little-boy-finding-what-he’d-lost.
Stars have perspective power. In the cab of my truck I am the owner of the truck, the hand upon the wheel, the foot upon the gas, the decider of music and volume, but now outside the truck, looking up at so-much-more-than-me, I am, appropriately, the master of nothing. For someone needing a break from being an adult it was a nice feeling.
One of the reasons I was on this road trip was because my problems, like America’s problems, seemed bigly uuuge. That big black sky, decorated for Christmas, Whoever Made It All and me, and this nice thought, that on this planet, crowded with so many of us, He knew of me, and considered me family.
Bladder lighter, spirit lighter, I drove on home.
This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, which hopes one of these paragraphs made you twinkle twinkle instead of tinkle tinkle.
Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories can be found on the Eighty-one Facebook page. He can be reached at 81creativity@gmail.com.
Comments are closed.