"What? No Bubba over the holidays?"
Those are the kinds of messages I get. It's as if people prefer visits with the used-car-dealing sage of the Delta to my own direct commentary.
I'd talked with the rascal the day after Thanksgiving. I'd found him irritated that he'd been served macaroni and cheese and brussels sprouts rather than mashed potatoes and cornbread dressing for the traditional meal.
But, by "holidays," the reader presumably meant Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year's Day.
So, on the Monday between Christmas Day and the dawn of 2020, I drove over after calling Bubba to confirm that he always shuts down Bubba's Auto Emporium this week. No one is buying a truck or SUV or faux muscle car this time of year.
"It won't get going for me again until people start getting some tax-refund checks for down payments," he said.
Bubba was hanging out at the house watching college football bowl games he didn't care about and named for sponsors he couldn't identify. "Somebody with a 6-6 record just beat somebody with a 7-5 record in the Somethin-Somethin-Somethin Bowl and there were more people on the field than in the stands," he said.
He said daughter Yvonne and her dentist husband had given him a soundbar for his television for Christmas and that he'd hooked it up but couldn't tell any difference. He said he'd plugged it in and connected "the computer thingy."
I asked if he'd activated the remote and chosen the TV sync function, or otherwise looked at the instructions. He said he never looked at instructions and didn't need this new remote because the regular TV remote worked fine.
It took me a few minutes, but I got everything synced and, for fun, tied Bubba's sleek new soundbar with the Bluetooth to my phone and punched up some AC/DC--"Highway to Hell," it was--at high volume.
"Turn that **** down," Bubba screamed, as Mrs. Bubba raced in from the kitchen with her hands over her ears and Sam the old black Lab with the failing hip howled.
I turned down the volume as I guffawed, conspicuous in the McCoy household in my amusement.
I told Bubba I only wanted to make sure he could tell the difference.
Mrs. Bubba said she had been intending to offer me a piece of raisin pie until I pulled that stunt. But she went ahead and brought me a slice, over Bubba's objection, and the crust beat anything I'd ever tasted.
I told Bubba he was lucky to live with such a culinary master.
"Don't bother talking to me. I can't hear nothin'," he said.
As the resonant tones of low-grade college football came from the new soundbar, Bubba regained his hearing and bearings, and said, "Tell me something: Why would a woman impeach Trump and then not send it to the Senate like she's supposed to? Duddn't that prove that it was all just a game?"
I told Bubba that what mattered was that he thought that. I didn't come to argue with him. I came to assess the rural common-sense thinking he had well-represented for decades.
"Yeah, but am I wrong?" he asked.
It's complicated.
"Are you saying I'm too stupid to get complicated?"
I said I was too fatigued to go into it and that how things played mattered more for this purpose than the full context of those things. But I said the short version was that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was acting both on sound reasoning--since Mitch McConnell had pre-emptively and inappropriately declared Trump's acquittal--and game-playing to the extent that she was seeking to drive a wedge between Donald Trump, who wants a chaotic trial, and McConnell, who wouldn't mind not having one at all.
"So, she's just bein' political," Bubba said.
Yes, of course, but for the purpose of weakening and/or exposing a president who is bad for the country.
"What's bad about the economy and the stock market?"
Let's not, I said.
Let's do, Bubba said.
I said either Bubba disapproved of Trump's transparently unfit behavior and believed it intolerable in the American presidency, or he didn't. I said that was the great American question in one sentence.
"I quit looking for good Christian behavior in a president about the time Jimmy Carter ran inflation to 18 percent," Bubba said. "I got used to overlooking bad behavior in presidents when Bill Clinton was managing to do a pretty good job while Monica was ..."
There is no need to quote that crude phrasing, or to argue.
How about changing the subject? Did Bubba have any resolutions or predictions for the new year?
"My resolution is to take this ol' Lab Sam with me wherever I go, even if I have to carry him at great risk to my low back, because his days are numbered, and he has been the best friend I ever had. He and I could bring home some ducks back in the day. Now neither one of us is exactly spry. My prediction is that we will survive Trump, whether one or two terms or something in between."
He asked if I had any resolutions or predictions.
I told him I was resolved only to keep coming to see him and was predicting only that readers would make sure I kept that resolution.
I asked him about a hug.
"Nope," he said, "not after that racket you played out of your phone."
Mrs. Bubba gave me a hug and slipped me a foil-wrapped piece of raisin pie for the road.
I reached down to give Sam a farewell pat and told him not to bother trying to get up.
Then I turned and pointed my phone toward the soundbar, as Bubba screamed, "No."
Just kidding. Happy New Year to y'all.
"Be careful goin' back," Bubba said.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Web only on 01/01/2020