Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll returns with VISITING MY PEOPLE Part Two: Relying on the Kindness of Strangers. She writes:

A road trip across this great and beautiful land produces some delightful surprises. Just outside Deming, NM, on farm or ranch land, I saw a large homemade sign, “Stand with Israel.” It gladdened my heart for many miles. God Bless You, whoever you are. In West Texas, I regret that I passed up the advertised opportunity to purchase TNT on a 2 for 1 sale. For the 94-year-old mother who has everything. And wants to downsize.

I love Texas, don’t get me wrong, and would probably live there if I didn’t live in Arizona. But you folks do hit the “Alamo” and “Lone Star” stuff about as hard as Georgians hit “Peachtree.”

Texas is big. (No, really, it is). And El Paso is like a microcosm of Texas itself: it takes about 40 minutes to get through it even with decent traffic. It starts with discount furniture places and tire sellers and Gentlemen’s Clubs, and goes on and on and on through hundreds of small businesses with Spanish names (and Alamo and Lone Star).

I love all those hard-working entrepreneurial people of every race and color who “didn’t build that,” according to President Useless Community Organizer. My family owned a drugstore in which my father worked about 100 hours a week. Claiming “he didn’t build that” – without even issuing a “trigger warning” – makes me so upset I may need a “safe room” with plush toys in order to recover. And money. I think I need money for that.

Any American President who can say something that stupid and offensive about small business should not get to retire on a massive government pension in a mega-mansion in Hawaii. Or get a $20 million-dollar advance for a post-Presidential book: Audaciously Bad Things: The Crusades, Israel, and Sand Traps (Bill Ayers, call your office…) as he waits to become the UN Secretary-General or Twelfth Caliph.

In honor of my own Dreams From My Father, I wish there were a way to compel Obama to run a family restaurant for a few years. See how he enjoys dealing with regulatory agencies, the IRS, OSHA, employees who call in sick on Saturday night, and customers who load their plates for the fourth time on the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet and then leave most of it uneaten. There goes your profit margin, but it’s OK, because profit is evil, anyway.

Speaking of restaurants, in Sweetwater, Texas, I went looking for what I had been promised by Glenn the Gun Guy, my shooting instructor, was the best food on planet earth. Glenn is not a small man. He knows guns and he knows food. I circled around in downtown Sweetwater for about 20 minutes looking for Miss Allen’s Family Style Restaurant until a lovely young woman gave me perfect directions with the admonition “You better be hungry.” Alas and alack, it was closed Mondays! Granola bars just didn’t cut it after such anticipation.

It goes without saying that there are jackasses everywhere. But, in general, small town America is kind, friendly, and helpful. In the 70s and 80s, many plots for Mannix and Cannon and like television dramas had the hero’s car breaking down in a small town, usually in the South, populated solely by knuckle-dragging cretins who were all related to the corrupt sheriff. Even when we were much less conservative, Mr. Ammo Grrrll and I mocked these shows and said, “I bet whoever wrote this drivel has never been in a town smaller than L.A. in his life.”

In Dudley’s Corner Cafe in Latimer, Iowa, a sweet couple walked in, looked around at the regulars and then straight at me in my Ruger shirt, and said, “You must be the one with the Arizona plates.” There then ensued a lively, cafe-wide discussion of Concealed Carry and Spring Training baseball. They were just back from Mesa themselves.

Earlier, in Missouri, I had noticed that my “low tire pressure” sign had come on. I am about as helpless with car things as I am with computer things. Which is one of the reasons we have men. (There are others.) I went into a travel plaza and asked a Mexican truck driver at the coffee machine if he had a tire gauge. He did not seem to understand the question and was preoccupied with getting coffee. Fair enough. In Spanish I either thanked him or possibly told him that my dog was sick and the sky was blue. It’s hard to tell with my Spanish.

I went outside and a nicely-dressed gentleman drove up and parked. He did have a tire gauge, checked all my tires for me in a cold stiff wind, and pronounced me good to go. Just then the Mexican guy came out and had BOUGHT a tire gauge! He wouldn’t even let me reimburse him. Guess he felt sorry for me with my sick dog.

Oh, those awful men and their “rape culture.” So now I own a tire gauge which is part-way to knowing how to use it to diagnose the problem and then solve it. Or I could just find more random nice men. Yeah, I think I’ll go with that.

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