Dog crazy

A black Mercedes S-class sedan with Ontario plates was parked in front of the entrance to the kennel and spa when I arrived this morning to pick up Bonnie and Billy Ray, our elderly dachshunds who had been boarded overnight.

Standing in front of the check-in desk, cradling a fluffy white dog with a pink bow atop its head, was the owner of this magnificent feat of German engineering, a woman who looked remarkably like Sarah Palin, down to the rimless glasses. She – the woman, not the dog – was wearing a tennis outfit, diamond earrings in a cross-cross pattern and, on her left hand, a solitaire roughly the size of a robin’s egg. A Nordstrom's shopping bag was atop the check-in counter.

“Here’s her water dish,” she said, reaching into the bag and handing the dish to the clerk, a frizzy-haired woman about my age. The bowl was engraved with the dog’s name. Evelyn.

“And here’s her water,” she said, removing a bottle of Nestle Pure Life. “Please make sure your people don’t give her tap water by mistake. This is all she drinks and she needs to stay hydrated, especially now that we’re back in Florida.”

“Okay,” the attendant said, nodding her head.

“And here’s her food dish and food,” Evelyn’s mother announced, pulling from the bag a tiny ceramic bowl and two plastic containers. “She gets the chicken for lunch – she eats around noon, just before she goes down for her nap – and the turkey snack around 4:30. You’ll need to keep it refrigerated, of course.”

“Of course,” the attendant replied.

“Do you have a microwave?”

“Yes, in the break room,” the attendant said.

“Well, she won’t eat cold food so you’ll need to nuke it, but just for three or four seconds. It needs to be at room temperature or even a tiny bit warmer, but not hot. Please, please make sure the bowl isn’t hot to the touch before you give it to her.”

“All right,” the attendant said.

“And she gets one of these vitamins with her lunch,” the woman said, handing the attendant a bottle. “You’ll have to open the capsule and mix it in with her food.”

“One vitamin at lunch, break open capsule and mix with food,” the attendant repeated, typing into her computer.

“She was just groomed yesterday,” the woman said. “I tried to remove the bow but it’s clipped on so tight with a rubber band, and I’m afraid she’ll lose it. It’s adorable, don’t you think?”

“If she loses it, we’ll put another one on her,” the attendant said, ignoring the question. “We’re a full service grooming salon.”

“If you have to do that, make sure it’s pink. Evie likes pink, don’t you?” she asked the dog. I half expected Evelyn to reply. 

“Oh my God!” the woman shrieked, as if she had been goosed. “I forgot her bed! How could I have done that? I'll run out to the car and get it.” She turned and, clutching Evelyn like a running back clutches a football, exited.

She returned a moment later with a tiny doggy bed in a leopard skin print. “Here you go,” she said, handing it to the attendant. “What time is nap time?”

“From noon to two,” the attendant told her. “That’s perfect – exactly her schedule, isn’t it Evie?” the woman asked Evelyn, who yawned.

Is there anything else?” the attendant asked solicitously.

“I can’t think of it but if I remember something I’ll call you,” the woman replied, kissing Evelyn repeatedly, as if she were going off to war, and handing her over the counter into the attendant’s arms.

The attendant rang a bell and spoke into a loudspeaker. “We have a check-in.”

A sullen-looking tattooed girl with a nose ring appeared from the back room and took the dog from the clerk.

“Isn’t she the sweetest thing you ever saw?” the woman asked, watching Evelyn disappear into the back room from which, when the door opened, the already shrill sound of dogs barking became almost deafening, but she wasn’t addressing the attendant or me. She was talking to herself, as if she were watching Jesus walk on water.

“What time are you picking her up?” the attendant asked.

“I’m going to try to be here by five-thirty but it may be closer to six if there’s traffic.”

“OK, we’ll see you then.”

The woman turned, went out the door, and got into her Mercedes.

“You're here for Bonnie and Billy Ray, right?" the attendant asked me.

"Yes," I said. "And I hope you’ll remember in the future that they prefer Fiji Water, not plain old Nestle. That was absolutely amazing."

“I could write a book about these people,” the clerk replied with a weary smile.

“I bet you could,” I told her, as Bonnie and Billy led the tattooed girl out of the back room, straining their leashes to get out of that place so they could return to their lives and try to forget that, for 24 hours, someone may have actually considered them to be – horrors – animals.

“What took you so long?” my wife said when I returned with the dogs who, having no idea whether they had been boarded for one day or one year, started yelping with joy when they saw her, just like the dogs in those youtube videos when their soldier masters return from overseas. 

“I thought nobody could possibly be crazier about their dogs than we are," I told her between yelps. “But I was wrong."

WTF happened to Hillary? 12 reasons she lost.

As a political agnostic, I’m not wed to any candidate, party or ideology. My beliefs are based on what my gut tells me is right. I generally agree with the Democrats on social issues. I tend to prefer Republican economic policy.

Like many Americans, I detested the candidates both political parties put up this year.  Unlike most, who held their noses and voted for the one they disliked the least, I voted for a third party candidate to send a message to both parties not to nominate candidates like Hillary or Trump in the future. I’m not proud of that, by the way.

That said, I’m fascinated by how many Clinton supporters – especially those in the media but many of my friends as well – claim they genuinely can’t understand why Trump won because I can and it should be obvious to anyone who followed the election closely. In no particular order, here are a dozen reasons why.

1. The smugness of social media users:  Conservative Facebook and Twitter users posted countless memes and stories attacking Hillary. Bad enough. But liberal users sunk even lower, posting memes and stories attacking Trump supporters, questioning their intelligence. Despicable. You can disagree with someone’s choices but never, ever, call that person stupid. In a democracy, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion and vote. Earlier this year, I was still considering both Trump and Hillary. The vile posts of Hillary supporters implying the stupidity of those who supported Trump would have, if there hadn’t been a third-party choice, helped drive me to Trump. I happen to think those kind of messages drove hundreds of thousands of voters away from Hillary.

2. She ignored something her husband got right: During Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, James Carville, his campaign manager, posted a sign, “It’s the economy, stupid!” to remind him, every day, of the one thing most important to voters. Hillary essentially ignored that message – political suicide in a country where the average wage has remained flat for a decade. Many Americans, particularly millennials, can’t get economic traction and are understandably upset about it. Clinton’s convoluted economic plan promised basically more of the SOS that has given us an economy that isn’t growing. Trump’s economic plan was understandable – cut taxes and end the trade deals that took away jobs and sent them to other countries.

3. She over-relied on women: Hillary understandably wanted to make history by becoming the first woman president – I felt sorry for her during her concession speech when she was talking about the glass ceiling some other woman will someday break – and, by God, she almost made it, but she assumed women would vote for her for that reason alone. Bad decision. If any other well-qualified Democratic woman, and there are many, had run against a candidate as flawed as Trump, we’d almost surely have our first female president-elect. Americans have twice elected an African-American president, they wouldn’t have thought twice about voting for any woman other than Hillary. But she came loaded with too much baggage and a long record of questionable decisions that would have hurt any male, female or transgender candidate.

4. Americans are tired of Clintons and Bushes: For 28 of the last 35 years, a Bush or Clinton has either occupied the Oval Office or the office right down the hall. George H.W. Bush was VP from 1981 to 1989, and president from then until 1993. Bill Clinton was president from 1993 until 2001, followed by Bush II until 2009. In 1776, America declared itself free of its royal masters. Nobody is entitled to the presidency or to any office because they are related to political royalty. If Hillary would have won two terms, a person born in 1981 would have lived under a Bush or Clinton presidency or vice-presidency for 36 of his or her 44 years by the time she left office. Enough already. Note to George Bush III and Chelsea: Don’t even think about it.

5. Wikileaks made a splash: Though the mainstream media did a good job of burying them, leaked emails proving that Hillary’s campaign schemed to marginalize Bernie Sanders and, especially, recent emails revealing how CNN commentator and current DNC Chair Donna Brazile forwarded debate questions to Hillary, cost her votes. Did Hillary get those messages from Brazile? She never denied it, one more nail in the coffin of a candidate who was already distrusted.  

6. The public saw through manufactured mass hysteria about Trump: I saw a Facebook comment under an online news story today declaring Trump a “lying, fascist, racist, xeonophonic (sic) sexual predator.” Over the last few months I’ve seen hundreds – thousands – of similar comments. Many of them, it turns out, were written by trolls paid by a Super Pac to discredit anything Trump-related. The sheer volume of these clearly orchestrated, hysterical-sounding comments became annoying after a while. Let’s examine these claims one by one.

Lying: Yes, Trump is a liar. So is Hillary. All politicians lie and Americans know it. Fascist: A fascist is an authoritarian who imposes a right wing agenda. Trump has promised to do just that. Does anyone honestly believe that if Hillary had won and had a cooperative Congress, that she wouldn’t have been authoritarian in imposing her left wing agenda, as Obama was during the first two years of his first term? Mussolini was a fascist. A president who starts acting like one, thanks to our system of checks and balances, will be shut down fast. Racist: Yeah, Trump seems to be one. No way around it. Xeonophobic: A xenophobe is scared of people from other countries but let’s put it in context. Most Americans, even those who don’t want to admit it, are scared of people from fundamental Islamic countries, specifically young men from fundamental Islamic countries who overstay their visas and fly first class. If you aren’t, you are naïve. As for his opinion of Mexicans, see what I said about his racism. Sexual predator: All the hilaria about “pussy grabbing” was something to distract Americans from Bill Clinton's sexual escapades Trump was emphasizing at the time. There isn’t a straight man in America who hasn’t said something akin to what Trump told Billy Bush, and everyone knows it. While Trump made remarks about women’s appearances, he owned beauty pageants that are about … women’s appearances. And yes, he said vile things about Rosie O’Donnell but lots of people don’t fault him for that because she is every bit as objectionable to many people as he is. As for his raping a 13-year-old twenty-some years ago, that charge was dropped. It stretches credibility to believe a narcissistic billionaire obsessed with his public persona would rape a child. It may sound good when you’re a PAC-funded think tank looking for ways to stir up anti-Trump hysteria but the charge wasn’t believable to most.

7. Questions about the Clinton Foundation: Last year, before it lost all credibility (see point 13, below), The New York Times revealed how the Clinton Foundation, in return for a large contribution, facilitated the sale of a large percentage of our country’s uranium to Kazakhstan, an Islamic country. Some right wing news sites have claimed TCF collected millions for Haitian earthquake victims but didn’t fully distribute it, which didn’t help the foundation’s claims it is totally above board. Wikileaks earlier this week revealed an email from Bill Clinton’s former BFF Doug Band implying that Chelsea’s wedding and extravagant lifestyle were funded in part by the foundation. Etc. Etc.

The Clintons have become enormously rich – wealthier than might be expected from their hefty book royalties and speaking fees. If you are a politician who says you believe government’s job is to take care of the disadvantaged, what do you need with your own foundation then, if not to enrich and/or promote yourself? While the foundation clearly did and does some good, that was a question in many people’s minds and Trump ran commercials to keep it top-of-mind.

8. The private server controversy: As Bernie Sanders said during a primary debate, let's give that a rest. Everyone has an opinion and nobody knows for sure, other than Hillary and her closest aides (some of whom took the fifth, which didn’t help) whether or not she intentionally violated the law for nefarious purposes. The FBI’s bizarre investigation, including the announcement a few weeks ago that it was back on, certainly cost her votes and may well have done her in once and for all.

9. The Democratic party no longer serves its primary constituency: Democrats, traditionally, have been been known as the party that takes care of working people. They haven’t done a good job lately. Yes, President Obama hasn’t had a cooperative Congress to pass his budget proposals but the party has focused, instead, on issues like transgender bathrooms. If you work on an assembly line and are worried about your job moving to Mexico as a result of NAFTA, a trade deal Hillary’s husband created, you don’t give a damn about picayune stuff like that. The fact that Hillary showcased at her convention mothers of African-Americans shot by cops – some of whom, it has been proven, fired in self-defense – apparently didn’t get her the African-American votes she had counted on and wound up pissing off lots of people, including white cops and their families who voted for her opponent. I could go on and on but, as Hillary herself once said, what difference would it make?

10. Hillary's hypocrisy: Trump said offensive and inappropriate things about women. Saying she knew voters didn’t want their children exposed to messages like that, Hillary spent big time on commercials bringing them into living rooms where millions of impressionable children were watching. Claiming she was against women being considered sex objects and that she wanted girls to know they didn't need to compromise their principles to be successful, Hillary hung with Beyonce, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez prancing half-naked across stages, urging their fans to vote for her. Trump invited some of the women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexually abusing them to sit together at a debate, effectively exposing her claim that she was an advocate for abused women. Asserting repeatedly that she was in the corner of the poor and middle class, Clinton refused to release transcripts of her remarks to Goldman Sachs for which she received $250,000, an incomprehensible sum to voters trying to scrape by, who couldn't help but wonder exactly what she told Wall Street fat cats. If the Goldman folks hadn't thought she was on their side, why would they have invited her in the first place?

11. She embraced Obamacare: My wife and I this year paid $25,800 for a silver Blue Cross/Blue Shield health care plan that came with a deductible of $13,500. Had we needed to, we would have had to lay out $39,300 before insurance paid a penny of our health costs. At 64, our rates are among the very highest in the nation, but millions of other Americans of all ages are getting socked with health costs they can’t afford as a result of the badly-named and ill-conceived Affordable Care Act. Trump was very clear that he plans to repeal it and replace it with something better (though he has been vague about specifics). Hillary said she would keep it and implied he was threatening to leave Americans without health care they can’t afford anyway, so they voted for the candidate who promised to fix it. 

12. She preached inclusion but practiced exclusion: In every debate and every appearance, Hillary promised that she would be a president for women, LGBTs, African-Americans, and Latinos. But there’s one significant constituency she excluded: White men. I am so, so embarrassed to admit this but I am one. I didn't ask to be born this way, I honest-to-God didn't, and I blame my father for that. He was one, too. So are all four of my descendants. (OK, two of them are in diapers but they’ll be men someday.) The fact of the matter is, there are millions of hard-working, dedicated, white male Americans who have never spray-painted hate graffiti or intentionally oppressed anybody. If you’re not one of us, try, if you can, to put yourself in our place. You’re listening to a politician who specifically promises to represent everybody … but you. Would you be happy to vote for that politician knowing how she feels about you and your ilk? Not very likely. How hard would it have been to add, “And to you men out there in the audience, I’m pulling for you, too. Everyone’s going to have equal opportunities to succeed when I’m president.” But she pointedly didn’t. And who does she have to blame for that? Herself.

These are a dozen of the reasons Hillary lost the election. And here is a bonus, one more reason that, in my considered opinion, is the most important of all.

13. God-awful journalism: Virtually every newspaper, network, magazine and web site went out of its way to make Trump look bad as their way of making Hillary look good. Amazingly, they thought nobody would pick up on it because, of course, they would never report it themselves. For instance, the Hillary-shilling New York Times wouldn’t run a story about anti-Trump bias at, say, CNN or the Washington Post. Would it? No, and it pissed Americans off big-time so they voted against the media’s anointed candidate. Voters didn’t need to read Breitbart or Drudge to see how the deck was stacked – the reporting was that bad. Americans love an underdog and the media was so biased in Hillary’s favor that they actually created votes for her opponent.

If, after reading this far, you still can’t understand why anyone voted for Trump, try to remember that you and the media will have four years to hold his feet to the fire, to insist that he consider your point of view, and, especially, to demand that he live up to the standards we Americans expect from our presidents.

I’m not holding my breath and you shouldn’t either but we should all hope for the best. 

Home again

Sunset over the Pacific in Mazatlan.

My wife and I arrived home at 2 a.m. this morning (thanks American Airlines!) from Mazatlan, Mexico, where we spent the last week pre-celebrating joint milestone birthdays.

Of course you can ask. We’re going to be fifty – me next week and she in mid-December. 

We had a swell time. We always do whenever we travel and we’ve visited something like forty countries. Mazatlan is – make that was – the third destination we’ve visited in Mexico, which ranks in the top three of all the countries we’ve visited. 

What, you ask, did we do in Mexico? Visit ruins? Go deep-sea fishing? Check out the museums? Take Spanish lessons? None of the above. We hung out around the largest of the three massive swimming pools of our resort. Granted, we have a pool in our own backyard but … it doesn’t have a swim-up bar, we can't summon a waiter named Jesus to bring us shrimp cocktails or club sandwiches whenever we’re hungry, and there are no attendants handing out fluffy towels, adjusting our pool umbrella or asking if we’d like to sign up for massages in the spa. (Yes, thank you. Swedish for her, deep-tissue for me.)

OK, you caught me. We’ll be fifty-five. Yes, both of us – our birthdays are twenty-nine days apart. It’s kind of nice being married to someone who is almost exactly my age because we remember the same songs, the same TV shows, the same events. For example, we had both just completed second grade the summer Neil Armstrong took his one giant step for mankind.

I brought three books but finished them all by the end of the third day. Stupidly, I left my Kindle at home so I couldn’t download any. I suppose I could have downloaded a book to my cell phone but my 55-year-old eyes can’t read type that small. Besides, I’m embarrassed to take out my phone in public. It’s an iPhone 3 which identifies me as a dinosaur. It’s five years old, refuses to die and, by God, I’m not going to get a new one until it does. It was fascinating and disturbing to see young couples by the pool or in restaurants who were so busy interacting with their cell phones they didn't even look at each other. 

The gift shop was out of books in English except for “The Martian” which I read on my last trip to Mexico. Luckily there was a wicker basket atop the counter of one of the swim-up bars where guests can leave paperbacks they don't want to carry home for other guests to read. The day we arrived, I saw a Larry McMurtry cowboy novel.

I’m not generally fond of novels  – I’m a non-fiction kind of guy – but, sometimes, they’re ok, especially on vacation. But the McMurtry book, when I went to retrieve it, was gone. The basket contained nothing but some novel (I assume it was a novel) in a language that, for all I knew, was Bulgarian, along with half a dozen Harlequin and Silhouette romance novels which, I learned because I read two of them in four hours, taking care to fold the covers over so nobody could see what I was reading, are written for women with the IQs of deer ticks. Both the romances I read were about women in powerful jobs, one a world-famous designer, the other a country music superstar. Both, it turned out, secretly hated their glamorous jobs and yearned for nothing more than the simple, honest men they had left behind when they struck out for fame and fortune.  Once reunited with the turgid members -- a term used in both books that made me laugh out loud -- of the men they had been yearning for all along, they ditched their careers and settled into domesticity. Every woman’s dream.

By the time I finished those books, someone had deposited a Tom Clancy novel in the basket but, unfortunately, he didn’t write it. It was based on an idea he had and he licensed the writing to someone who, apparently, didn’t work with an editor. For example, a character in Africa calls someone in California. The Californian announces that it’s 7 p.m. and he is just about to leave the office. The African caller says it’s 10 a.m. where he is. What’s wrong with that picture? 

All right, dammit. We’re going to be sixty. Are you happy now?

More entertaining than the books was the time we spent observing our fellow guests – almost all of them American. It is amazing how badly people behave when they are on vacation, how much they drink and what they wear. Trump proposed a wall to keep Mexicans out. If I were the president of Mexico, I’d put up a wall to keep over-served Americans wearing tank tops out of my beautiful country.

The only other thing of note I did was to eat good food and lots of it. The scales informed me this morning I gained five pounds in one week. I’m surprised that’s all. Our resort offered an all-inclusive package, all the food and drink we could consume for a mere $120 per person per day. I had no intention of buying the all-inclusive package but, as our arrival date approached, the hotel started sending emails and calling every other day and the price kept dropping. By the time it fell to $61 per person (the senior rate, same as the child’s rate), I decided it was too good a deal to pass up.

I should have.  Not only did I feel compelled to eat and drink everything in sight because it was “free,” I could have done so for a lot less than $61 because the dollar is at all-time high against the peso. An enormous buffet breakfast including a chef making made-to-order omelets is $15. A club sandwich, fries and Pacifco beer brought to your lounge chair by a uniformed waiter is $12. A steak with a salad, dessert and a couple of glasses of wine is $25.

Whatever, we’re back home now. My wife is still in bed. I’m sitting by the pool drinking coffee I had to -- horrors -- make myself. In a few minutes the kennel will open so I can go pick up Bonnie and Billy Ray, our elderly dachshunds who, together, are almost half our age. 

Look, asshole, it’s none of your f-----g business, OK? Do I go around asking your personal information? No, I don’t. I have better manners than that. I’d think you would too.

Home again and tonight we’ll have a new president-elect half the country will despise.

I wanna go back to Mexico. Maybe for the next four years.

Small town

The entire third grade class of the Auxvasse School, 1959-60.
That's yours truly, third from left in the middle row

People who don’t know better think John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town” is an accurate portrayal of life in a rural town. While it is accurate to some extent, it all depends on how one defines "small" because, when it comes to little towns, "small" is a relative term.

When Mellencamp was born in Seymour, Ind., in October 1951, his small town had a population of 9,629 according to the 1950 census. When, a month later, I made my grand entrance, my hometown, Auxvasse, Mo., had a population of 507, one-nineteenth the size of his. I wasn’t even born in my small town; it didn’t have a hospital.

Just how small is a town of 507? Perhaps the easiest way to put things into context for those who can’t begin to imagine a town that small is to start with the school. And no, I don't mean the schools. I mean the one and only school.

Last weekend while staying at my sister’s, I ran across the Auxvasse School yearbook from 1959-60, the year she graduated from high school and I was in the third grade.

The yearbook covered grades 1-12, which were housed in the same building. There were 20 high school graduates that year. The entire student body – I counted – consisted of 292 students. Most didn’t live in town; they lived on the farms that surrounded it.

The Auxvasse School had 13 teachers – seven for students in grades seven through 12. Going through the yearbook, I was amazed at how many teaching hats they wore.

Doyle Wood taught American problems, world history, as well as English and PE to seventh and eighth graders. Elizabeth Novinger taught journalism, speech, and English 1,2 and 3. (There was no English 4.) Don Foster taught citizenship, American history, physiology, health, high school PE and coached the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. Agnes Ferguson taught algebra, geometry, general math, seventh grade math, and eighth grade math. Bessie Gottschalk taught seventh and eighth grade science, biology, home ec 1, and home ec 2. Virginia Carter taught typing, bookkeeping, seventh and eighth grade chorus, high school boys’ and girls’ chorus, high school band and elementary band. James Breen taught seventh and eighth grade social studies, general shop, advanced woodworking, mechanical drawing and driver’s education.

There were six elementary teachers, one for each grade. According to the yearbook, five graduated from Northeast Missouri State Teachers College in Kirksville and one from the University of Missouri.  

The year before, Auxvasse School had undergone a growth spurt in terms of enrollment. Up until then, African-American elementary pupils attended a one-room school on the west side of the GM&O tracks that separated the black part of town from the white. Black high school students were bussed 35 miles to Jefferson City to a school run by Lincoln University, a teacher’s college for African-Americans. The year I started second grade, the schools were integrated. Of the 20 pupils in my third grade class, five were African-American. 

The 1959-60 yearbook was made possible by local businesses whose ads appeared on the final pages. Most were purchased by businesses in nearby Mexico and Fulton, the county seat. The only ads from Auxvasse merchants were placed by the Security Bank (“Capital & Surplus of $75,000 and Undivided Profits of $450,000”), Divers Food Store & Elevator, the Chalet (“Your Favorite Eating Spot”), Dryden’s General Merchandise, Hunt & Moser Chrysler-Plymouth, LaCrosse Lumber Co., Maupin Funeral Home, Welch’s Tavern, Wilbur Foster Trucking & Ice, the Kingdom Telephone Co., Hape’s Locker (“Custom Slaughtering & Meat Processing”), Baumgartner’s Furniture & Appliances, the Auxvasse Review, Andy Briggs Real Estate, Bill’s Garage and Dr. A.H. Domann. There were a handful of other businesses – three gas stations, a café, hardware store, drug store, grocery store and a lawyer that, for some reason – probably economic – didn’t buy ads.

Auxvasse was so small it didn’t even have a conventional traffic signal. There was a blinking red light suspended above the intersection of U.S. 54 and the farm-to-market road, to keep travelers from speeding through the mile-long town in under a minute.

The Auxvasse I grew up in had no movie theater – it still doesn’t – though my brother and sister remember one that lasted a short time in the late 1940s. There was no bowling alley, community pool or skating rink either. Kids’ activities consisted of Girl and Boy Scout troops and two 4-H clubs, the Advancers and Crusaders. Most of the churches had youth groups. My church was so small that its youth fellowship group had to join up with two other Methodist churches from neighboring communities even smaller than Auxvasse.

Athletics were a big – make that huge – part of life in our small town. There was Little League in summer (I was relegated to right field and missed both pop flies that came my way during my short career), high school basketball in winter, and baseball and track in spring, even through the school didn’t have a track. Heck, the school didn’t even have a gymnasium until 1954. Before then, basketball games were played outside and there were no physical education classes.

There were no police in Auxvasse, but there was a night watchman who rode through town in his own vehicle, keeping an eye out for crime, but there rarely was any to be found.

Nor was there a fire department but there was a fire truck, a vintage model from the late twenties or early thirties that had been purchased third-hand from another small town. It had wooden-spoke wheels. Whenever there was fire in or around town, the siren went off and all the able-bodied men within earshot were expected to show up at the firehouse and follow the truck to the fire to fight it. One day when the alarm sounded, the men of Auxvasse rushed to the firehouse and found that someone had stolen the battery from the truck. Needless to say, the house they had hoped to save burned to the ground and the thief was never caught by the police because there weren’t any police.

The unequivocal highlight of my childhood was the day the Presbyterian Church at the end of our street burned down despite the best efforts of amateur firefighters from Auxvasse and the professionals from Mexico and Fulton. There were no fire hydrants, so the firemen quickly used up the water they had brought to the scene on their trucks.

Sometime around 1960, Tippy Cowan, the wife of the local hardware store owner, decided Auxvasse needed some culture and started a town library in a 10’ x 10’ room in the concrete block structure where the fire truck was garaged. My mother and Mrs. Cowan donated most of the books, the majority of which were from the Reader’s Digest Condensed series. The library was open one afternoon a week and I rarely encountered anyone other than Mrs. Cowan when I went to check out one of mom’s condensed books. Every two weeks the bookmobile from the Daniel Boone Library in Columbia came to town for an hour or so, but few people took advantage of it.

Auxvasse had five churches – the aforementioned Methodist, one Disciples of Christ, one Presbyterian and two Baptist, one for whites, one for blacks. The ladies of the African-American Second Baptist Church served a fund-raising lunch one Saturday every month and my father always bought plates of fried chicken, vinegary greens and slices of meringue-topped pies and brought them back to his store. The Disciples of Christ ladies were famous for the chicken potpie they served with raspberry Jell-O salad every Halloween.

The morning after Halloween, Auxvasse residents invariably woke up to find half a dozen or so outhouses – not everyone had indoor plumbing even in the 1960s – pranksters had hoisted onto pick-up flatbeds, brought to Main Street and set afire.

The highlight of Auxvasse’s social calendar year was the Lion’s Club Fair held in July. A carnival set up five or six rusty rides in the town park which wasn’t really a park – it was nothing more than a couple of acres of vacant land next to a smelly feed lot. Members of Callaway County’s many 4-H clubs brought cows, horses and hogs (which were always referred to as “swine”) to the fair for judging. Those deemed “best of show” were sold to the local slaughterhouse and the kids who raised them posed proudly for pictures that would appear in the Auxvasse Review just before the animal was led away to its doom. Woodworking, home canning and baking projects completed by 4-H members were displayed on the bleachers of the gym for all to admire and for judges to award ribbons of merit. The window box I made during my brief stint as a Crusader -- I’ll come clean here, my dad built it in about five minutes and he, if possible, was even worse at carpentry than I am today -- won a white ribbon, the lowest possible award.

The fair culminated on Saturday night with a dance at which some folks drank too much, wound up dancing with people who weren’t their significant others and/or got into fistfights, providing gossip fodder for months afterward.

My sister and I drove through Auxvasse last weekend. The only businesses remaining on the town’s block and a half business district are the bank, tavern and phone company. The rest of Main Street’s buildings are empty. Even though it was a Saturday afternoon which, when I was a kid, was the day farmers and their families came to town to stock up on provisions for the coming week, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. As we were looking into the window of what was once our father’s store, a car stopped at the stop light and the driver waved but we didn’t know him and he didn't he know us. That’s just the way folks are in small towns.

Wal-Mart pretty much destroyed businesses in Auxvasse and other small towns throughout rural America. There are Wal-Marts in both Fulton and Mexico, which, like Auxvasse, once had thriving commercial districts, businesses run by local merchants that provided good jobs for residents. Those businesses have shuttered their doors in large part due to the chain founded by Sam Walton who grew up in Shelbina, another small town about sixty miles north of Auxvasse. Most small town Missourians are proud one of their own founded Wal-Mart. I am not among them because Wal-Mart, more than anything, is the reason so many small towns in the Midwest and south have fallen on hard times. 

I spent 30 years in Wilton, Conn., a leafy, affluent, stuffy suburb of 17,000 an hour northeast of Manhattan. Its residents like to claim in letters to the editor of the local paper that they live in a small town, something this guy from an honest-to-God small town always found hilarious. Wilton has some of the highest-rated public schools in the United States and almost every student not only goes on to college but to graduate school. Whereas the bank in my small town had capital of $75,000, the town my kids grew up in was home of AIG Financial Products whose greed-induced downfall  – the US government had to put up $180 billion to enable the company to unwind its positions -- contributed mightily to the 2008 global financial crash.

Real small towns don’t have companies like that, nor do their residents work for hedge funds or investment banks as many folks in Wilton do. Real small towners don’t sip coffee at Starbucks, dine in Japanese restaurants, or hang out at wine bars eating tapas. Real small towners don’t have to visit a town-owned “farm” to see pigs and cows that are brought in for kids to pet once a year; they raise their own. Real small town high schools don't have ski teams or lacrosse teams nor will you ever sit next to anyone famous at your kid's school concert, sporting event or theater production.

Wilton is by no stretch of the imagination a small town – at least not to me. But, I suppose, to someone who grew up in Brooklyn or Long Island, as many of its residents did, it might be.

Like I said, small is a relative term when it comes to towns.

Adventures of Chicken Man

When: Last night between 7 and 7:30 pm.

Where: Three fast food restaurants along I-70 in Kansas City.

Who: Myself and counter employees of KFC, Popeye’s and Church’s Chicken respectively.

7:02 pm, KFC

Employee: What would you like?

TD: I want a two piece meal with potatoes and gravy and I’d like one of the pieces to be a breast – I’ll pay extra if I have to.

Employee: We're out of chicken.

TD:  What do you mean?

Employee: We ran out.

TD:  Let me get this straight, you’re out of chicken?  Isn’t this a Kentucky Fried Chicken?

Employee: No, this a KFC. And we're also a Taco Bell.  How about a chicken taco or burrito?

TD: No, I'm craving fried chicken.

7:14 pm, Popeye’s

Employee: Can I take your order?

TD:  I want a two piece meal with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy and I’d like one of the pieces to be a breast. I’ll pay extra if I have to.

Employee: We’re out of chicken parts, we only have tenders.

TD: You're kidding, right?

Employee: They’re really good. No bones. I just ate one on my break.

TD: I can't believe this. No thanks. 

7:30 pm, Church’s

Employee: Can I help you?

TD: I want a two piece meal with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy and I’d like one of those pieces to be a breast. 

Employee: Do you want original or spicy?

TD: Original.

Employee: Do you want our two-piece deal? It comes with a biscuit and a medium drink.

TD: YESSSS!

Employee: OK, that’ll be $6.89. 

(Two minutes later I am handed my order on a tray. I fill my soft drink cup from the dispenser, sit down at a table in the dining area where I am the only customer, and realize I need a fork. I get up and go to the counter where the condiments, napkins and plastic utensils are kept. The bins are empty except for knives.)

TD (to employee): There aren't any forks on the counter. Could you get me one?

Employee: We’re out of forks.

TD: Okay then, a spoon.

Employee: We’re out of those too.

TD: How do you expect me to eat my mashed potatoes?

Employee: Would you like fries instead?

TD: No.

Employee: We have mac and cheese.

TD: How would I eat that? With a knife?

Employee: I’m sorry.

TD: How long have you been out of forks and spoons?

Employee: Ever since my shift started at 5. Well, now that I think about it we were out of them yesterday too.

TD: Hasn’t anyone else complained but me?

Employee: No, you’re the first. Every else goes through the drive-through.

Watson for President

I woke up planning to write something funny about last night’s presidential debate but the more I think about it, there was nothing funny about it.

In one corner we had a megalomaniacal hypocrite who has amassed a fortune by gaming the system, making undeliverable promises and spewing meaningless rhetoric to appeal to uneducated voters.

In the other we had Donald Trump.

If Clinton or Trump were running for dogcatcher, I wouldn’t vote for either of them. 

Before last night’s debate, 60 Minutes featured a story about IBM’s Watson, the super computer originally created for Jeopardy, that has amassed knowledge from millions of data sources and has the ability to come to conclusions based on that data. Among other applications, Watson’s power is being harnessed to help doctors prescribe life-extending treatments for terminal patients for whom they have run out of ideas.

Maybe we should dispense with elections altogether and, starting in 2020, install Watson as president. Watson has never talked to Access Hollywood about grabbing someone’s genitals. He doesn’t go around making speeches and collecting massive fees, telling Wall Street fat cats one thing and his supporters something different. He has never denigrated anyone because of their ethnicity nor claimed to be an advocate for victims of assault except for those assaulted by his spouse. Watson has never established a foundation that accepts contributions from George Stephanaopoulos or countries that oppress women. Watson doesn't mock the handicapped, has never defamed the families of our fallen soldiers, or set up a private server to hide his political activities. Watson is articulate. Watson inspires. Watson represents the best of what we Americans can do.

The United States has become so complicated to govern that, frankly, it may no longer be governable by mere mortals. In an age in which all of us have unlimited access to information but aren’t able to process it because we tend to get it from web sites that reflect our own prejudices – and we, like the presidential candidates, all have them –  Watson can take data from any and all sources and create policies that benefit the common good.

Watson could make decisions about social issues, free of political influence. By interpreting data from doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, Watson, better than anyone, could set up a health care system that works. Watson could devise the best possible economic policies, save us billions by eliminating duplication, and devise a tax code that moves us forward and creates jobs. Watson could analyze every battle and conflict that has ever taken place and make projections to determine the best foreign and military policy, and could recommend Supreme Court justices by analyzing their decisions as lower court judges, based on their adherence to a nuanced Constitution that takes into account how America has evolved since the original was written.

I’d certainly vote for Watson, along with a Congress comprised of Apple-based computers running on software that represents the needs of their particular districts.

Wouldn’t you?

Whatever your answer, future generations probably will.

Clarification from the Trump campaign

  

To: The Media

From: Trump Campaign Press Room

There has been a great deal of negative coverage as the result of a 2005 tape released by the Washington Post yesterday in which Donald J. Trump was recorded having a private, off-the-record conversation with Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush (who got his job only because he's related to those turncoat scum-sucking Bushes who spawned low-energy Jeb).

In yet another attempt to discredit Mr. Trump whom, we freely admit, is not always as articulate as we wish he would be, the media has taken one particular quote out of context. What Mr. Trump was actually telling Mr. Bush is that when he sees a woman holding a young cat in her arms who is about to step out in front of an oncoming car, he grabs the cat to get her attention and thus save her life.

“I never said I was a perfect person,” Mr. Trump said last night. “I’m ready to put this behind me and am looking forward to my debate Sunday night with that lying twat Hillary Clinton.”

Go with the blow

As I write this at 11 a.m., Hurricane Matthew, a category 4 storm, is predicted to hit around dinnertime tonight. Forecasters say Matthew will either hit Florida’s east coast directly, somewhere around Palm Beach, or will hover just off it. It will then blow up the coast toward the Carolinas, packing winds in excess of 100 mph and leaving up to eight inches of rain in its wake. Though we live a mere 100 miles away, on Florida’s west coast, forecasters are calling for us to get less than an inch of rain and we have only have a 30 percent chance of experiencing hurricane force winds that last a minute or longer.

All that can change in a heartbeat of course.  

As a peninsula that extends nearly 400 miles into tropical waters, Florida is a sitting duck for storms like Matthew that typically begin off the coast of Africa, slowly churn their way west, picking up in intensity, and occasionally, by the time they arrive in the Caribbean, emerge as full fledged hurricanes rated anywhere from a “1” (sustained winds between 74 and 95 mph) to a “5” (winds in excess of 157 mph that will blow anything in your yard to Japan).

When we bought our first Southwest Florida house in 2005, the realtor proudly told us this part of the state hadn’t been in the path of a hurricane since 1960.  We were in the path of not one but four that year, including Wilma, which caused $100,000 in damage to the house we had just finished renovating. All but $5,000 of that was covered by insurance but it took six months to find workers and materials to make the repairs since there were hundreds of thousands of other homeowners in the same boat. When, at the height of the storm, Wilma blew the vents and the chimney off the roof, palm rats scurried up the side of the house and took up residence in the attic to avoid the wind and rain. By the time they were removed six months later some were the size of small raccoons.

Once the repairs were made, we sold that house and bought another, which we kept for nine hurricane-free years.

Two and a half years ago we bought our current house, which, unlike our previous homes, has storm shutters that cover the windows. Most are operated electrically. Others require a hand crank to lower and secure them. Four consist of huge, heavy pieces of corrugated plexi that screw into tracks above and below the window frames. Installation requires several people and a ladder.

Installing the plexi shutters would be a problem for me at this particular juncture because I broke my ankle last week. When people ask, I tell them I broke it helicopter skiing in the Andes but the truth is I mis-stepped on my own sidewalk. Dumb. As a result I am wearing a heavy boot to keep my ankle in place. I could hobble outside to crank the non-electric shutters but there’s no way I could get up on a ladder to install the plastic ones.

More worrisome, our yard – the main reason we bought this house – is dotted with towering palms, pines and oaks that could come crashing down onto the roof.

So, as many of my fellow Floridians are doing, I’m checking www.nhc.noaa.gov/, the website of the National Hurricane Center, every hour or so, to see if Matthew is still on his predicted track, and am crossing my fingers it won’t be necessary to install the shutters because, of all the times for a hurricane to hit, I’m kinda powerless here to do anything but go with the blow.

I feel for the millions of folks on the other coast and in the center of the state who, forecasters say, may experience the full effects of Matthew’s wrath but that’s a risk we all took when we moved to Florida and, I suppose, the price we pay for living in paradise.

An interview with Gary Johnson

As part of our ongoing series of interviews with presidential candidates, tomdryden.com today sat down with former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who is running as a Libertarian.

TD: Governor, you’ve been savaged in the press lately for appearing to be somewhat out-of-it. You said you weren't familiar with Aleppo, the Syrian city where U.S.-backed forces are battling ISIS, and a few days ago when Chris Matthews asked you to name a foreign leader you admired, you couldn’t think of one. So let’s start off easy. Who do you admire most? Doesn’t have to be a world leader. It can be anyone.

GJ: Cheech and … oh, God, what is that guy's name? It's right on the tip of my tongue. You know, Cheech’s partner. I had all their albums in college. They made that movie, Up in Smoke. I must've seen it fifty times. Cheech and … Cheech and … damn, I can’t think of his name!

TD: Chong?

GJ: Yes, Cheech and Chong. I admire them.

TD: OK. Moving on, congratulations on being endorsed today by the Chicago Tribune.

GJ: Who did you say endorsed me?

TD: The Chicago Tribune.

GJ: What’s that?

TD: A newspaper.

GJ: No, the word before that.

TD: Chicago?

GJ: Yeah, that. What is it?

TD: A city in Illinois. The Tribune’s editorial board called you a "principled alternative to Trump and Clinton."

GJ: An alternative to what?

TD: Trump and Clinton.

GJ: Never heard of them.

TD: They’re running for … never mind. Have you ever stopped to consider that, if you win in November, you’ll become the third Johnson president?

GJ: I thought every president had a Johnson.

TD: You’d be the third president with the last name of Johnson.

GJ: Is that so? Who were the other two?

TD: Andrew and Lyndon.

GJ: Third, huh? Must be a common name or something.

TD: If you’re elected, what’s the first thing you’d do?

GJ: I’d issue an executive order legalizing marijuana. There’s nothing more important to America’s future.

TD: Thank you Governor and, I can’t believe I’m saying this but, having considered your opponents, you have my vote. 

GJ: Thanks, Tim!

TD: It's Tom.