I was in my old hometown again, yesterday, helping my mom move some furniture and boxes around between her home and her business. Out behind the business building, there’s a very old house that’s now used as a storage barn. I and my uncle moved some stuff into and out of the house, and we all took the opportunity to look around in the old place.

The house is somewhere between near 100 years old. It sits about two feet off the ground, on concrete block pillars, and has old style concrete steps leading up to the front porch. It’s in a very delapidated condition—it’s not a show model by any means. The front door lock takes an old skeleton key (which my mom has), but the only functional lock currently on it is a padlock on a new latch.

It’s small: a small front room, a small middle room, a small kitchen, a small bathroom, and a very small closet. The ceiling is maybe six and a half feet from the floor. Another room, notably bigger than the others, looks to have been added on after the house was built. Its ceiling is even lower, and what was a window on the side of the house was made into an embedded shelf in the now interior wall.

All the white paint, inside and outside, is flaked and peeled like bad dry skin. The walls and floors are just one board thick, and there are a few holes showing the ground beneath the house. There’s electricity run to the house for a couple of bare light bulbs with pull chains, but it’s obvious the line and sockets were added some time later in the house’s life.

The place is packed full of junk thrown in by various people: old tools and machines, old lawmowers, old furniture, old. . . junk that I couldn’t identify, etc. (“Old” in this paragraph means “2-10 years.”) My step-dad originally used the house to store things for the business, like extra tables and boxes of supplies, but over the years, some workers and some family tossed more stuff in. I don’t know why most of the old junk in the house now wasn’t taken to the dump instead of thrown in the house—it’s not a good place to store anything you’d ever want back in your living house. There’s a bed mattress in there—upon seeing it, my mom commented that she wouldn’t store a bed mattress in that old house overnight, much less for a year or more. It’s more of a junk yard than a storage house, now.

There’s also about a dozen wasp nests. My mom had exterminators come out a week or so back to kill all the wasps, so there’s bug corpses all over the place. And there were a couple wasps still moving, so we had to keep an eye out for them as we explored around.

There was one closed door in the house that made me curious to look in. I commented that behind the door was probably the old skeletons. While we had some stuff moved away from the door, I went to open it. My mom suggested I stand behind the door to open it, in case anything came out. My uncle made a spooky suggestion, and I’ll admit that my imagination started worrying me. What would be behind that door? Even if there wasn’t anything really spooky or scary in there, there might be an animal or some wasps.

I turned the old knob and pulled the door. It was a bit stuck, so it required a little tug to open. It was just the bathroom. An old sink, tub, some junk, but no toilet. But there was a really old washing machine—something from the 40s or 50s maybe. That was a neat little find; not that we did anything with it but look at it.

The house is an interesting thing to examine, especially when you realize that people actually lived in little homes like that, through hot summers and cold winters. You don’t often see this kind of historical living space. Most historical homes are the larger mansions of their day, not the more common small shacks of the average poor family. The big, old mansions get preserved and shown as examples of historical homes, but the small, old places wear down or get torn down and forgotten. It’s cool to see one of the last such old homes before it inevitably falls apart and is lost.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I stopped at the ATM in front of a Piggly Wiggly (a grocery store) in my hometown. I was amazed by the trash scattered around on the ground. Nearly all of the trash was just the paper receipts printed out by the ATM—a carpet of scattered white paper.

There’s a paper trash slot in the ATM for disposing of the receipts, plus, the machine directly asks the user if he or she wants a receipt to be printed. So the mess of discarded receipts is from pure laziness of the ATM users. Pathetic.

Out of curiosity, I picked up a couple of the receipts from the ATM counter and looked them over. I then grabbed up a handful more—there were about a dozen pieces on the counter, and probably another two dozen on the ground. Just pathetic.

But, the mess gives interesting information on the people who made it.

9/21/07 23:26 PM (11:26 at night)
Withdrawal: $40.00
Balance: $250.81

9/22/07 6:36 AM
Inquiry
Balance: $7.41

9/22/07 13:39 PM (1:39 in the afternoon)
Withdrawal: $60.00
Balance: $45.14- (that’s negative $45!)

9/22/07 14:47 PM (2:47 in the afternoon)
Withdrawal: $20:00
Looks like the receipt didn’t finish printing; no balance info

9/23/07 00:18 AM (12:18, after midnight)
Withdrawal: $120.00
Balance: $5.62

9/23/07 7:39 AM
Inquiry
Balance: $130.27

9/23/07 8:16 AM
Withdrawal: $500.00
Balance: $432.61

I find this kind of random information interesting. (Granted, I can find just about anything interesting.) Such data brings up all kinds of questions and fun imaginings.

How did the one person withdraw $45 more than he had in the account? I’d have loved to make that kind of withdrawal back when I was in college.

And what kind of night was the person withdrawing $500 hoping to have? And was it worth half his bank total?

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

While running an errand, for my mom, in my hometown, I stopped by a local restaurant for a carry out lunch. This restaurant is a town landmark, known by some throughout the state. It’s best known for barbeque, and in fact, claims to be recognized for its pork across the nation. I think the claim of wide recognition is a bit more sales pitch than true fact; I think the claim might be based on some truth of 20-30 years ago.

When I was a teenager, back in the early 80s, I worked as a waiter at the restaurant for about two years. A lot of former teenagers worked at that restaurant at one time or another. As a local icon, it was a first job, summer job, and/or after-school job for many hometown teens through the decades.

Since I left my hometown almost 20 years ago, I’ve only visited the place a couple of times. I ate lunch inside a few weeks ago, for the first time in some 15-18 years. It looks 90% exactly as it did when I worked there. I was pleasantly surprised to find my old boss still working there, now days at the register.

Back in the early 80s, while I worked there, the restaurant introduced a company mascot: Chitlin the Space Pig. I kid you not. A full costume pig with a cape and a space-style flight hood. A pig named after a food made of his own cooked intestines. That’s disturbing. This mascot showed up at the restaurant occasionally, sometimes visited the local minor league baseball park, and paraded around at local festivals and such.

I don’t know if Chitlin is still active in town or in the restaurant, but when I stopped in the other day to pick up a plate of barbeque, yams, string beans, and hushpuppies, I found his likeness patterned in tile on the floor of the carry out room. He’s arm-and-arm with “Wilbur” the symbolic barbeque cook of the restaurant (named after the actual former owner). Above their heads, are the words, “WE ‘PRECIATE YA TRADIN’ WID US!”

That slogan was created during my time at the restaurant. The owner, the aforementioned Wilbur, hired a marketing group to come up with the words, and their original version said, “WE ‘PRECIATE YA TRADIN’ WIF US!” The image of Chitlin the Space Pig and Wilbur the Cook, with the slogan, was posted up for all the employees to see and appreciate. (Or ‘preciate.) I, in my trademark pedantic way, pointed out that “wif” (for “with”) does not sound Southern. It sounds like we had a speech impediment. The proper Southern accent is “wid.”

“You wanna go wid us?” (You want to go with us?)
“Take this widja.” (Take this with you.)
“What would I do widdout my dictionary?” (I can’t find “wid” in this dagblame book!)

I figure my complaint (which I restated every time I saw the slogan) made it to the owner, and on to the marketing folks, because a few weeks later, the slogan was edited to say “WID.” So, if you’ve seen that slogan, know that I, then just 16 years old, had a hand in editing out the stupid speech impediment that could have been an embarrassment for all folks proud of their Southern accent.

Maybe that should be on my résumé.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I grew up, from six months old to 21 years old, in a town of less than 25,000 people. Twenty-five thousand doesn’t sound real small, but compared to my current home, with almost 100,000 thousand people, and around 1,000,000 people in the greater metropolitan area, it’s small. And then, comparing my current town to something like New York, with a population of over 8,000,000 people, I still live in a podunk.

The median household income in my hometown is around $26,000. The median household income in my current town is around $77,000. Interestingly, the median household income in New York is only around $43,000. (And the cost of living is lower in my Southland area!)

I currently live only two hours away from my hometown, so I’m able to visit fairly often. My family still lives there, so we have always tried to visit at least every couple months. Sometimes several months pass without a visit, and sometimes we go a couple times in one month. Recent circumstances have brought me to the hometown often over the past few weeks. (See my mid-August posts for the reason.)

Visits to the hometown are usually fun and interesting, and I find the days and events full of blogging potential. Heck, I could post a week about the just two and a half hours we spent at the county fair. I see so many interesting (to me) things to mention, explain, and talk about.

Daily life in my current town can be so routine and mundane. Many nights, I have to think really hard for something to post about from my day, because a normal, routine day can just flash by. Funnily, a non-normal day tends to be the most stressful. As the old Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” “Interesting” things happening in my otherwise normal day tend to be . . . difficult.

A weekend in my hometown, on the other hand, almost always has an interesting situation or occurrence. It’s the fact that time in my hometown is not my normal routine that makes almost every hour something interesting.

Because I’ve been spending more time in my hometown lately, and I find so many interesting things while there, I’ll be posting more observations from Smalltown, Southernstate. These observations won’t be all my posts, but they will be more common than they have been.

And in case some of my observations come across as negative, I want it known that I love my old hometown. But I do see a vast difference between where I’ve been since I grew up there, where I am now, and what the old, small, poor hometown was and is. It’s that contrast that strikes me as so interesting.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com