A good morning or afternoon or evening, depending on where it is this may find you. Actually, if it finds you, wouldn’t that technically mean you are lost? I hope you aren’t lost. It’s no fun being lost. It is funny being lost sometimes, though not fun. Well, I suppose it can be fun.
I remember one day in my “ute” — meaning youth — getting lost whilst riding around on South Mississippi country roads with my friend Buffalo Bob. We left the Seabee base in Gulfport early one afternoon and stopped off to pick up a cold six-pack of something or other. I’m not trying to be cute. I mean, it was beer, hell yeah, it was! I just can’t remember what we were drinking back then, maybe it was Miller High Life. Interestingly enough I had a cold can of Miller in my fridge that I used to cook some chicken last night. Coincidence? I think so.
It seems we drove and drove and drove some more that beautiful day discussing all the major matters of the world as we knew it. Sometimes I wish I could have recorded some of those conversations although, on the other hand, maybe not. We eventually came to a crossroads where lo and behold there sat a VFW hall. Now neither Bob nor I were members though we were in the Navy. Bob was a veteran of a foreign war, one of the most foreign at the time, a place called Vietnam. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things though.
We walked in that VFW hall as if Bob was Sgt. Alvin York and I was Audie Murphy. Up to the bar we lumbered and asked for a cold beer. Since no one else was in the bar but the tender, whether or not to serve us because we weren’t members didn’t seem like a major decision to the beer tender. Actually, I think we still had beer in the car. We had stopped to ask for directions because it seemed as if we had been driving all afternoon. We had been, actually.
“So how do you get to Gulfport from here?” I asked the noble bartender.
He gave us instructions that didn’t require copying down, thankfully, because I doubt there was a writing pen closer than 40 miles from us.
“Where you boys from?” the barkeep asked as we paid up and headed toward the door.
“Oh, we’re from Gulfport,” said Buffalo Bob.
In reality, we were both from Texas but sometimes one has to use a little poetic license, which would be helpful if this was a poem, but it isn’t.
Off into the sunset we rode. Actually, it was in the opposite direction of the sunset. But that’s neither here nor there. I always thought that exchange we had in the VFW hall was kind of funny.Maybe you had to be there. And maybe you didn’t.