As a fellow who grew up in laissez-faire southeast Louisiana where even Southern Baptists dance and drink, I should have been the last person expected to oppose the Benton County “wet” choice ballot or Springdale’s Sunday liquor sales initiative last November. Little that it matters now, I was in opposition.

I never read an estimated monetary benefit for Springdale Sabbath suds sales, but liquor sales proponents estimated $20 million to $30 million dollars in annual stimulus for Benton County. At the risk of seeming smug in our prosperous corner of Arkansas, will we really need this boost? Is the multimillion dollar fi gure gross or net gain? Does that estimated benefit take into consideration, for one, the blight factor of liquor stores, such as billboards on a scenic parkway?

When the ink is dry on full-scale liquor store permits, I don’t think we can assume every outlet will appear slick and upbeat like a Macadoodles or a West Coast Bevmo. I think we are guaranteed most will be small and mundane. You see, in 2011 our austere capital city politicians essentially shut down chain liquor store retailing. Therefore a Macadoodles will not become a Walmart of libations, at least not in Arkansas.

I wondered if convenience was literally a “driving” force in the vote among some locals.

Do we really need liquor stores around every corner? If I still lived in the suburbs of Texas’ largest city, I would be driving 15 minutes just to get out of the subdivision to meet Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker. Many Northwest Arkansas “come-heres” like me arriving from sprawling metros might agree: A liquor errand to the Missouri line can be pleasant compared to what we knew elsewhere.

I am thankful this inconvenience once existed. The barrier was a very personal benefit in my family. My daughter, mother of two gorgeous granddaughters and a recovered alcoholic, recently received her two-year AA sobriety chip. I couldn’t have been prouder to attend that meeting with her than if she’d been hooded at a Ph.d. ceremony. She has specifically confessed in her darkest hours in her alcohol-free Bentonville home she often thought of driving to “the line.” But the asphalt to Missouri helped pave the way to her sobriety. This is but one family’s experience and certainly no reason for an otherwise sober populace to have voted down retail liquor. Yet to me my daughter’s situation spoke to the wider definition of a community and to a wholesome quality of life it provides and projects - a portion of quaintness and innocence soon gone from these parts but for Norman Rockwell images hanging in a Bentonville hollow.

I also wondered if there was an unspoken desire to present a more sophisticated, liquored up Benton County to the world. I hope not.

We are not Waco, Texas, decades ago, slipping its Bible-thumping image behind the choir loft and approving package stores to attract northern companies’ manufacturing plants. If Walmart and J.B.

Hunt global trade, Crystal Bridges’ art and fine dining along Interstate 540 aren’t enough sophistication, then I don’t know what is.

If readily available screwcap bottles of Mogen David 20/20 were a true signal of metropolitan elan, then West Siloam Springs would have an opera house and nonstops to Sao Paulo.

Recently I embraced the change and ventured out for my very first Benton County wine purchase. It was odd to be in Walmart Store 100 and to blithely place a bottle of Mad Housewife into the cart, a feeling similar to my first Michelob purchase the very day I turned 21.

Another similarity spanned the decades: In neither case did anyone check my ID.

As I self-scanned my bottle at Walmart, I reckoned the old, dry Benton County was plenty wet enough for me with liquor-by-the-drink and barstools aplenty. Time will tell if retail liquor will really change this corner of the state or if this just becomes more community wallpaper, like the fried chicken aroma wafting from the Tyson plant in Rogers.

I am reminded of the Scottie Ferguson character in Hitchcock’s classic movie “Vertigo,” set in San Francisco. Worried about Scottie’s acrophobia, an old college chum asked if the affliction hindered life in a steeply hilled city of tall buildings. Scottie replied nonchalantly: “Oh, I can’t go to the bar at the Top of the Mark, but there are plenty of street-level bars in this town.”

Same here, Scottie.

There are plenty of street-level bars in Benton County, including one across the street from my church.

TED TALLEY LIVES IN BENTONVILLE.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 03/25/2013