"The one I think is the sickest--that's the one I'm gonna vote for. I'm looking for the best chance to get to the running mate."
Yes, I ventured east again, to the Delta and the auto emporium, where business is said to be decent.
Bubba McCoy, who just turned the old 7-0, provided that aforementioned pearl of brutal rural wisdom in reference to the presidential choice that looms so distressingly.
Bubba declared his joints sore and his short-term memory increasingly failed. "Every danged time I manage to get up out of this chair to go do something, I forget by the time I get up what I got up for."
But he said his long-term memory was strong, and thus his recent attitude highly positive. It happens that he has been stirred to relive the great Arkansas glory days of 1964.
Bubba was a freshman in Fayetteville that year, majoring in hearts, spades and dominoes and pretty much flunking the rest.
Most fatefully, he was inexplicably charming the young woman who would become Mrs. Bubba and whose aging parents owned the East Arkansas farm he would lose in the 1980s, because of drought and inflation, if you must know.
Bubba wasn't cut out for farming. He was cut out to sink deep in that ragged leather chair in an iced-down trailer office on a hot September afternoon and explain the world yet again to that city boy from the newspaper, and to sell a pickup to the next rascal happening by.
Bubba remembers looking up on campus that year to Ronnie Caveness and Loyd Phillips and Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson and Fred Marshall and Ken Hatfield and Bobby Crockett and other snortingly tough upper-class football players.
He also remembers ogling that sophisticated upper-class woman from El Dorado, Donna Axum, who stopped by campus a couple of times that year.
He called her a "co-ed," but I explained that we don't use that word anymore in reference to a female college matriculant.
Bubba replied that "co-ed" sounded a danged sight better than female college matriculant.
Lately Bubba has been freshly reminded that those Razorbacks of '64 beat Texas, beat Nebraska and shut out their last five regular-season opponents on the way to the true version of the national championship. And he also has been reminded that, in that same year, the aforementioned Miss Axum reigned as Miss America.
He recalls the pageant when she sang opera and then switched comically to a pop song, and then told emcee Bert Parks that the way he said El Dorado was the "Yankee pronunciation."
Legendarily successful Arkansas football and a Miss America from the state--attesting that the toughest boys and the prettiest girls are from Arkansas ... those were the days, my friend, and, just lately, they seem to have provided a glimpse of coming back again.
It was not merely that the Razorbacks rallied dramatically on the road the other night to defeat highly ranked TCU. It was that they seemed to do so with a confidence and powerful will to win that took Bubba back to the storied ways of Hog lore.
And he really likes Bret Bielema--"because he's about my size. He looks to me like Junior Samples and Tony Soprano might have had a baby."
And now for another female matriculant at Fayetteville to become Miss America--as did Savvy Shields last weekend ... well, as far as Bubba is concerned, Donald Trump can bloviate all he wants about making America great again, but it's happened in Arkansas already, and quite on its own.
And that brings us to Trump versus Hillary Clinton and back to Bubba's formulation that he can hardly abide either and will favor the one he deems least healthy and thus offering the greater apparent prospect for vacating the office.
"The vice presidents--King and Penn [he meant Kaine and Pence, but I didn't bother correcting]--run circles around the top ones," Bubba said.
"Right now I'm leaning toward voting for Hillary because that mess Sunday was wild," he said. "I've had pneumonia, but I ain't never had to have the Secret Service catch me facedown inches from the concrete."
Bubba notes that Trump is his age, 70, and seems to be advancing steadily toward his weight.
"So right now I'm thinking his big problem is remembering what he stood up to do," Bubba said. "And considering some of the stuff that seems to run through that head of his, I'm thinking that might be a blessing.
"He might stand up aiming to nuke somebody--not Russia, though--and then forget what it was he went to do."
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/18/2016