The rube sits and smiles

After having unloaded all my farm equipment from the railcar that had brought it from my late father’s farm back East and knowing that I had come to the right part of the world when Dude and Shorty, who had helped me unload it looked at the wheels on my hay wagon  and pronounced them “high-speed” because they actually had ball bearings instead of old-fashioned babbitt bearings, I felt accepted by my new neighbors. A person with less class than Shorty and Dude might have rightly said, “What a bunch of wore-out junk.”

It told me I had landed squarely among people I could understand. In Trout Creek in the 1970s you seldom saw a new pickup, and when you did you knew who it belonged to. If you saw a baby blue 1954 Chevy pickup or the same color 1954 Chevy sedan you knew that Bob Eaton was near at hand. The state had damn near priced Bob out of the driving class when the Legislature settled on a new and simple method of taxing vehicles and suddenly Bob’s daily rides were “antique autos” of great value and taxed accordingly. It took the Legislature two years to replace that mistake with different one, teaching me a lesson that has stood the test of time, “nothing is simple”.

When Bob’s eyesight got the better of him he was reduced to driving the short way to town on his lawn mower — but tax free.