Bubba McCoy told me the other day that I ought to reward myself during this Christmas season by driving over to join him in the duck blind away from the perils of virus and politics.
He said there weren't many ducks yet, that they'll fly by in meaningful numbers in early January, but that it didn't matter because we wouldn't hunt but simply "commute with nature."
I started to correct him, but then I thought that maybe "commute" was the right word for my driving over and our venturing into the cold wet.
I told Bubba I understood the meditative healthiness of such an experience, especially at this stressful time, but that I could achieve that kind of transcendence in urban warmth by the indoor fire as I gazed on a lighted Christmas tree.
He asked, "Were you born a wuss or did something happen along the way?"
I told him I simply did not know.
"Well, you oughta come anyway," he said, "just to get some of her fudge."
"Her" is how he refers to his vastly superior better half, who produces each Christmas season industrial quantities of planked perfection in buttery, sugary, melt-in-mouth fudge made from an old recipe on a box of Hershey's cocoa.
I have driven down for this delicacy in years past and had none left by the time I arrived in pain back in Little Rock.
I told Bubba, "I'm comin' down tomorrow. I'm going to commute with some chocolate."
"I'll tell her," he said, not getting my quip. "She'll load up a tin can and put a pretty bow on it for the city boy."
Where, I wondered, was Bubba on the matter raging across rural Arkansas of Donald Trump's supposedly being cheated out of a second term?
"I've never really trusted our elections," he said. "I figure Kennedy stole it from Nixon, but, hey, it all worked out in the Cuban missile crisis.
"It used to be you could buy votes over here with a bottle of whisky. I know a certain Democrat--and you know who I'm talking about--who got his margins in the Delta by passing out contributions to preachers who'd carry all the church members to the polls."
So, was Bubba agreeing that Trump had the election stolen from him?
"No more than usual--that's what I'm sayin'.
"I don't trust every vote Biden got, but I believe, in the end, more people than not wanted him to be president, or for Trump not to be president anymore.
"Trump did this to himself. He's his own worst enemy. The woman I live with who's gonna wrap you some fudge--I think she voted for McCain and Romney, and I know she voted for Asa. And she just couldn't take Hillary last time.
"But she ended up running and screaming from the TV whenever Trump came on it. She said he was a horrible person.
"That's what beat him. He lost enough votes of people who drove themselves to the polls that he couldn't overcome the ones who rode in a van.
"It's like Arkansas down at Auburn. They may have cheated the Hogs on that backward spike by the Auburn quarterback. But it only mattered because we couldn't stop their running game. You see what I mean?"
I said the difference was that a backward spike is a fumble, but group trips to the polls to help poor people limited in transportation independence ... that's not stealing an election.
"It don't matter," Bubba said. "Who's gonna be president next year?"
Biden.
"Right," Bubba said. "And people are going to get tired after a year or two of saying he cheated, and he'll get judged on the job he does. Although I gotta say that you never seemed to get tired of writing ... what was it? How did it go?"
The preposterous second-place and Russia-endorsed president.
"Yeah. So, you were claiming Trump cheated."
No, I never believed he was smart enough to understand how or why the Republicans were helping him.
I was saying his being president was preposterous, which it was, and that he was second-place, which he was.
Bubba asked what time I'd be at the house for the fudge. I said I'd like to get there in time to ruin my lunch.
The next day, he met me at the door and I told him to put on a mask because I was coming in.
He handed me his keys and told me that, if I wanted him to wear a mask in his own danged house, I could go to the carport and retrieve the one hanging from the rear-view mirror of the Suburban.
Then he said, "Wait a minute. Never mind. I hear her saying she's got one for me."
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.