a "needs editing" blog entry
i am having lunch today at the Country Hearth, the only restaurant in town. the important thing is, i have to try get a picture of the owner, as it would bring much mirth to this board. She is a cowgirl original. She is known in town as Grandma Cleavage, and is so hilarious that i couldn't have thought her up if she didn't exist. She is 78 years old, and even though it is 10 degrees outside, i saw her walk into her cafe this morning in her normal attire, which is a pair of extremely short white hotpants, and a tube top that is several sizes too small, such that she spills out of it amply. It is topped off with a beehive hairdo. And since she is into looking wonderful, she discovered Botox early, and has had so many injections of it that most of her facial muscles are numb. She could easily be a final table person on the World Series of Poker... her expression would never tip her hand. Of course, she likes to flirt with me, and i go for it bigtime, as flirting with her pays off big because she almost always slips me a freebie piece of pie in a styrofoam container when i leave... Hell, if i was 25 years older, who knows....LOL
She has buried a couple husbands, but the present one is true gem. He is about 90 years old, and stands in the back of the exposed kitchen portion, hunched over a butcher block, making hamburger by hand. He only drools sporadically, so there is still a small market for cheeseburgers in town if the timing is right and there happens to be a tourist passing through.
The waitresses, of which there is one that speaks English, have a unique system that involves never bringing a check to customer. As it is set up and decorately tastefully as a nice restaurant, complete with a pot belly stove roaring red hot in one corner, people sit and wait for a check to be brought. if you politely sit there and don't ask, you would be there for hours. Even if you ask, you still have to go see Grandma Cleavage to pay your bill. It is very perplexing to strangers in town, as in Cedarville, we follow our own format for many things.
She has parked in the same spot for many years, probably since she got her first car. Once, someone parked behind her (our town still practices diagonal arrow-type parking on main street) and she was so in tune to her own rhythm and rut (and several tumblers of chardonnay) that she came out, hopped in her jeep and backed up, as she always does, which doesn't involve looking first. Her jeep struck the pickup truck behind her, but she didn't feel the bump, and i guess she figured there was something like snow or a mechanical failure at fault, so she reached down, pulled the lever for 4WD, and punched it.
she pushed the pickup back about a hundred feet, tires smoking on her jeep. she then drove home, not even noticing anything was wrong. Well, the pickup was lodged on top of a fire hydrant, and just like in the movies, it was emitting copious amounts of water, and was sitting in its own little lake. The cow dogs in the pickup had decided they didn't like the proceedings, and began to howl. When the cowboy came outside to get into his pickup, he was majorly annoyed.
But an old work pickup without any new severe dents is not a big deal, and as people are a bit independent here, as long as he wasn't wronged personally, no harm no foul. people don't call the cops here, they work it out.
He got into his pickup, and tried to drive it away, but it was high-centered on the broken hydrant, so he was roaring his engine and rocking it back and forth, when of course, the local deputy happened to pass by. What happened after that is not clear, as there were two sides presented in court.
One school of thought is that he deputy, widely known to be an idiot, had the black eye coming, and another is that it is not good to relieve your temper on a cop.
Either way, when i see the cowboy's hat, which now hangs in her restaurant as part of some appeasement strategy, i have to grin at Grandma Cleavage, who grins back with a smile that could melt polyvinyl chloride. Such is smalltown life.
