Two requests poured in that I venture just east of the White River for a visit with Bubba McCoy--that self-styled Landers of the Delta, the rotund rascal who calls his business "Bubba's Auto Emporum" and refuses to listen when I tell him the word is "emporium."
"It's my car lot and I reckon I can call it what the hell I want to," he likes to say.
I describe Bubba as "rurale," in the way people living in the city with sophisticated tastes are called "urbane."
Smart in a commonly expressed and unlettered way typical of persons hailing from, and living in, small, isolated bucolic cultures--that's how I define "rurale."
My question was as follows: What was Bubba making of all that business over the past week on gays being able to get married, and Obamacare surviving perhaps permanently, and the Rebel flag getting all that bad publicity?
"I'll tell you what I think," he began, as if I hadn't just asked him to do that very thing.
That's the way Bubba starts his profundities.
"I think it's a mess," he said. "I think there's something gone wrong when two people of the same sex can be married and adopt kids and all that.
"And I think there's something gone wrong when the government is buying health insurance for somebody making $90,000 a year. And some idiot shoots nine people and we want to blame guns and piece of cloth, not the idiot."
I tried to interrupt but he told me to shut up because he wasn't finished.
"But it doesn't bother me much. Maybe it's because I'm 68 and fat and could be gone before I finish answering your question.
"But maybe it's because what I call a mess is just the way of the world. Maybe my mess is somebody else's progress.
"What is it that that Scripture says--that there's a season for everything? Well, maybe this is the season for the world to change and for old Bubba to begin to phase on out to that extended-cab pickup in the sky."
I was impressed by the generosity of his analysis and saddened by his emerging fatalism in what someone once fraudulently called the golden years. But first I had to offer the usual correction and context.
A family of five living in San Francisco plays heck getting by on $90,000 a year. That family would need help for insurance premiums--help that would not be nearly as essential to someone making $90,000 along the White River bottoms.
And those people aren't getting their premiums paid. They're getting a subsidy by which the government is their partner in covering the expense.
"My advice in that case," Bubba said, "would be to get the hell out of San Francisco."
I wondered about Bubba's sense of generational responsibility. It might make sense not to worry so much for himself about the long-term implications of cultural trends and public policy. But what about those two beloved grandkids, both now in college?
"I'll tell you the truth," Bubba said, though I thought he'd been doing that all along. "That dentist son-in-law of mine has got into whitening and cosmetics and stuff and is making so much that I find it hard to worry about any of that bunch. I've spent my life trying not to go the dentist. Today people go two or three times a day."
He said his daughter Yvonne, married to the dentist, "has got her teeth so white it hurts my eyes to look at her. I say, 'Hon, just hug me. But whatever you do--don't smile at me.'
"The doctor told my wife she needs to buy a bright light to use indoors to keep from being depressed and getting all morose all the time. I told her it would be cheaper just to drive over to Memphis and tell her daughter the dentist's wife to smile at her. So she hauled off and went.
"I haven't seen her in two weeks. She sounds happy on the phone. I don't know if she needed the bright teeth or away from me."
I wondered in closing: Did the gays getting married really bother Bubba that much? Isn't he, at heart, a live-and-let-live kind of guy?
"It'd bother me if I thought about it. So I don't think about it.
"But, you know, there were these two old gals who came in here several months ago looking for a pickup truck. I took 'em for lesbians, but it didn't bother me.
"So they picked out what they liked--a silver Toyota Tacoma--and negotiated me down a little bit, though not as much as they could've. Then they left and came back in a few minutes with a cashier's check.
"I don't get a lot of cash in this business. I float notes and keep repo men in business.
"So at that point I'd have baked them a wedding cake or arranged their flowers. I'd have been best man for either or both."
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/05/2015