IT STARTS WITH THE LITTLE THINGS

I look in the mirror and don’t know who is staring back at me.

I’ve lived most of my life being this poor, unemployed person, who lived in a car. And now… now I think I may be turning into a snot. I can’t be sure, but I had a troubling incident the other day that points in that direction.

The guy who installed the sprinklers in our yard came by to collect payment.

Now before we go any further, you may be thinking that I feel like a snot because I can now start a story with the line “the guy who installed sprinklers in our yard.” You would be right. But that’s not even what this story is about. So don’t fixate on the sprinkler guy. It will just distract you.

So the sprinkler guy is over and I give him his money and offer him something to drink. It’s an average summer day in Texarkana, so it’s about 172 degrees outside. I get him a bottle of root beer out of the fridge. It’s a “Hank’s” root beer, made in Philadelphia. Quite tasty.

After taking a few sips, the Sprinkler Guy says, “This is really good. Where do you get this?”

“You can’t get it here. You have to go to this store in Dallas.”

He looks at me like you might expect a person to look at a unicorn, or perhaps a space alien.

“Can’t get it here?”

“No. There’s no place that sells it in Texarkana. But there’s a place in Dallas, and I think there’s a place in Shreveport that will have it soon. That will save a lot of driving.”

He keeps staring at me, and all of the sudden it hits me: I’m now the kind of person who will drive 200 miles each way to buy “the right kind of root beer.” How did this happen?

Living in Los Angeles for 8 years certainly didn’t help. You just get used to having access to “things” that are “good” and that you “like.” Getting married also was a factor. Having a wife with a real job that pays in actual money allowed me to refine my sensibility.

Now when I say “refine my sensibility,” I’m not saying I’ve gone highbrow. Instead, access to money has allowed me to take my lowbrow tastes (grilled cheese sandwiches, root beer, movies) and make them more expensive ($10 grilled cheese, imported root beer, movies with European people whining), and therefore more worthy.

Then there’s the move to Texarkana.

They have microwave pork rinds here. I’m not kidding. It’s right next to the microwave popcorn at Albertsons. When I saw that for the first time, I blacked out for a moment, but I’m OK now. My point is, it’s very different here. Or, more accurately, I’m very different here.

I’m always asking people to spell words here, because I just can’t understand what they’re saying. Did he say “veal” or “veil”? Was that “lion” or “line”? Does that kid want to rent “The Cruddy Kid” or “The Karate Kid”?

It’s hard to say. In the south, a lot of words get pronounced the same. By my estimation, the people here have decided there are just too many words, so they’ve decided to consolidate a few. Within 50 years, southerners may have gotten things down to a single word (“cho”) and will express meaning only through tone.

So at this point, I really don’t know if I’m a snot, or if very single man, woman, and child in the south is strange. Both are equally likely at this point, but I really don’t have time to contemplate that now. I need to make some calls to ensure my cheesecake has been properly airlifted from Rochester. You can’t get any good cheesecake here.