Where Was I?

originally published March 28, 2007

Well, I was eating scrambled eggs and hot sauce with Doc Eldridge over there in Greene County at the Yesterday Café in Greensboro right down the street from where I used to eat sardines and soda crackers with my Daddy in our old store after hours when Mamma and my sisters had gone off to Atlanta to do some shopping at Rich's, a long time before it became Macy's, which used to be Davison's and before that Davison-Paxon when there wasn't any Lenox Square or any other malls, and you went to downtown Atlanta to do your shopping, and for that matter you could go on the train, just go down to the station and hop right on a passenger train in the morning and come back in the evening, but of course we didn't call it commuter rail back then, we just called it the train, and we got on it and went to Atlanta and came back, which was just as well, because there weren't any interstate highways back then, either, so it was a long and tedious drive to Atlanta, unless I was driving the Cadillac ambulance, which is what we called it when we weren't using it as a hearse, which was back when I was working at the store and at the funeral home which belonged to the store, and when I was driving the ambulance, we went fast, and when I was driving the hearse, we went slow: you just had to know which was which, and I was telling Doc that I was glad we could still eat breakfast even though he had decided not to run for Congress, even though Greene County would have been in his district if he had and for that matter, he still might, so I asked him where he stood on bike paths and he said he's all for them, which I assured him would get him the Cobbham vote in Athens, especially after our progressive Mayor and Commission three-lane Prince Avenue, with the center lane for buses and the two outside lanes for bicycles, but I don't think Doc will support limiting the number of people who can live in a house in a residential neighborhood to one-unrelated, non-smoking, even though the one-person limit would be so good for the bar and restaurant business, since people would have to get together at sidewalk cafés to eat their family meals, because if the police caught them eating together at home, they might assume that the whole family lived in that one house and arrest them, and of course the one-unrelated law will be fabulous for the real-estate market and is the solution for all this over-building of apartments and condos all over Athens as it will mean that a lot of people are scrambling to find lodging just for themselves, and, you know, I tried to get Doc to run as a Democrat, because that's all he has ever run as, but he holds himself out to be a Republican now, though why anybody would want to be a Republican in Athens-Clarke County, I don't understand, especially since the new progressive Mayor and Commission are sure to throw out those silly non-partisan local elections that Doc got passed, and you'd think Republicans would be proud of their party and want to identify with it at election time, instead of hiding behind "non-partisan" elections as if it didn't make any difference whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, but my Daddy was a Democrat and proud of it, because he knew Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved this country and especially the South which was lying prostrate from the boll weevil until FDR introduced kudzu as a lesson in how government can take over your life, unless the Republicans are in charge of the government, and then it can't take over anything, not New Orleans, not Baghdad, not the Veteran's Administration: all they can use the government for is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and God help the middle class, which is one reason Doc doesn't have much room to run for Congress, because the rich folks will vote for the right-wing Republican and the poor folks will vote for the liberal Democrat, and there's not enough middle-class left to vote for a moderate, except that when our progressive Mayor and Commission solve the problem of poverty in Athens by redistributing the wealth here, then I guess there won't be any more Republicans anyway, but at the end of the day, we've all got to move forward, because it's already Apr. 1, and you know what that means.

Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher

editor@flagpole.com