I had not spoken with Bubba McCoy, out-of-retirement used-car dealer east of here, since the Republicans took over everything in sight.
He said he was about ready for a nap. He'd gotten up at 4 a.m. for duck hunting, which he pronounced not as much fun as it used to be, and then sold a Ford pickup by noon, which he pronounced every bit as much fun as it ever was.
He said he'd gotten at age 68 to the point at which could collapse into a nap on a second's notice. He said he always woke up thinking he'd been asleep for a day when it turned out he'd been asleep for 10 minutes.
Bubba said the missus was fine and still on his case about his diet.
He said Yvonne was back with the dentist over in south Memphis and that the grandkids were teenagers and not as endearing as they once were. He said he hadn't heard from the troubled Junior in a couple of years and didn't expect to hear from him this season.
As far as he knows, Bubba said, Junior is doing odd jobs and living with a bar waitress in Colorado, where the new drug law is fortuitous.
"It looks to me anymore that if you're doing something illegal, you may as well just keep doing it because it'll turn legal soon enough," Bubba said.
He said he and the missus would spend Christmas with Yvonne and the dentist and the now-unappealing grandkids.
He lamented that Mrs. Bubba was into that dreaded annual state of last-minute fretting about whether she had enough gifts for everyone and whether everyone was getting approximately the same number of packages.
He said the Ford pickup sale might help offset some of her last-minute equalization purchases at the mall over in Memphis.
"I told her, 'Don't worry. Anybody coming out short can have the tie you're gonna give me that I'm never gonna wear.'"
Bubba said he and the dentist were planning to deep-fry a turkey for Christmas dinner and would try not to set the flowerbed on fire this time.
As for the election, he said, "I only lost one vote."
Yes, the governor's race.
"Oh, no. I voted for Asa Hutchinson."
How come?
"Well, it looks to me like state government could stand some shaking up. I know Beebe's all right. But every day I open up the paper and some state agency is paying a million dollars for a contract that didn't get performed right. That's like me going over to the car auction in Tennessee and paying for vehicles that never get delivered. I wouldn't be covering much Christmas shopping charges that way."
So which vote did Bubba lose? Something local?
"Nope. The big one, Senate."
Bubba didn't vote for Tom Cotton?
"I couldn't. He just weirds me out. Anyway, I've always liked the Pryors and I never could figure out why everyone around here was so mad at Mark. He's a good boy. I was glad to see he's going to get married again. He's gonna find out that gettin' beat was the best thing ever happened to him, sort of like losing the farm was the best thing that ever happened to me."
Bubba said Obamacare must be horrible because everyone, especially his dentist son-in-law, says so.
"But Obamacare ain't hurtin' me any. My Medicare costs the same and seems to covering everything it always did. The supplemental premiums and the drug premiums haven't gone up, and I just keep paying 'em with money I've still got in my health savings account."
Bubba said the young man to whom he'd sold the pickup earlier in the day had mentioned he didn't have any other monthly expenses, at which point Bubba asked him about health insurance.
"He said he didn't have any and didn't need any. I didn't tell him that what he was overpaying me for the truck had enough markup to cover health insurance for nigh unto a year.
"But I don't feel bad about that. He wanted that truck and he has the right to be stupid. I certainly exercised my rights in that regard when I was a young man.
"And if he gets sick or goes and buys some subsidized Obamacare insurance, I'm gonna have to pay for it. I may as well get about $1,700 above a fair price on a truck I'll probably end up repossessing in a few months anyway."
I thanked Bubba for the economics lesson and wished him a happy holiday.
"Same to you and the dogs and that good-lookin' woman you're over-married to," he said.
"It's nap time around here," I heard him say as I walked away.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/28/2014