Bubba McCoy told me when I called Christmas Eve that something had happened to him. He said he was becoming thoughtful in his old age.
He said it concerned him.
I used my Google-search doctor's certificate to explain that, due to natural testosterone loss, most old men are really just oversized and horribly unattractive women, usually too feeble to do much good with their gender improvement.
Whatever, Bubba replied. All he knew was that he was suddenly a better giver of a Christmas gift, at least for Mrs. Bubba. And he told the story.
"What we've always done is she gives me a dozen or 15 packages for Christmas and I give her the one thing she picked out and told me to get at a certain store or from a catalog she handed me with the page dog-eared and the item circled.
"But this year it just rushed through my brain one day that I'd heard her once say that the only thing she might like at least one year would be for me to pick out something for her myself--just one thing--that would show I'd put some thought in it.
"And then it hit me. I'd heard her say that this satellite radio thing she keeps in the kitchen and listens to the oldies music and old mysteries on ... that it'd nice if she had one in her bathroom because it was too much bother to gather up the one she has, which ain't small, and haul it and the cord and antenna back and forth across the house all the time."
Bubba got on the computer and managed to find the satellite radio website, and, after three or four failed fat-fingered attempts, to create an account.
He succeeded in selecting a new radio. It got delivered in a couple of days as instructed to his car-lot office. It came in two boxes containing all manner of wires and devices, including two remote controllers and two things he knew from the setup in the kitchen to be antennas. He figured he'd bought two radios accidentally except there was only one thing that appeared to be an actual radio. But there were no speakers.
He cursed. He hurled across the trailer office one piece of gear in one of those boxes. He muttered that this was what he got for trying to be thoughtful.
Then he saw a reference in some of the over-busy setup instructional material to a "speaker dock." Then he ventured clumsily back online, changed his password for his new account because he'd forgotten it from a few days before, and ordered a "speaker dock" just like the one Mrs. Bubba had in the kitchen and onto which, it appeared clearly to him, he could attach this little supposed radio thingie.
The speaker dock arrived at the car lot. Mrs. Bubba was out shopping. So Bubba took the dock and the radio equipment home and went into her bathroom to make sure the contraption would play in there.
He attached the little radio thingie to the dock. He put the antenna on the window sill pointed south as instructed. He hit "on." He followed the instructions appearing on the screen. And he heard nary a peep.
He cursed. He threw another piece of gear. He said again that that's what a man gets for trying to be nice.
Then, close to surrender, he went back online in one desperate informational search and saw an invitation to "chat" with a live person, which he soon found to mean not in spoken words, but right there with texting.
Here's what he typed in the little box: "First thing you need to know is that if I have to use all this crap in these boxes and read these damned instructions, I'll cancel this account and send every bit of this back to you. I've got it set up but it won't play. The ID number on the radio is ..." and he carefully typed a long series of letters and numbers.
Soon the chat person sent him a refresh link. He said he didn't need to refresh, dangit, but to get the thing to play in the first place. The chat person replied, yes, sir, I've already sent the activation signal; this is merely for refreshing.
"You mean it's working?" Bubba typed.
"Wait three to five minutes," the chat person replied.
He waited six, to be safe. He punched "on." The damned thing blared. He had the volume maxed out somehow.
He punched around on scores of channels, stopping for a while on "Amarillo by Morning" by George Strait. He soared with happiness of accomplishment.
His plan for Christmas morning, he said, was to get up before Mrs. Bubba's usual 7 a.m. awakening, set up the radio in her bathroom, tape a red bow on it, and keep it on the station with her favored '50s Christmas crooners--Sinatra and Como and such, just like downstairs--and turn it up loud enough to wake her.
"I can't wait," he said.
I told Bubba he'd become not a feeble old woman but a wide-eyed child.
Whatever, he 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.