Mater Fight- With all the movies like Animal House staging food fights, this was a near fight caused by food. The names are changed to protect the guilty and rarely has anything more stupid taken place. Turning left at the store and heading toward Union Church, there used to be a house trailer in the first curve. One summer the residents planted a small garden and there beside the road were some find tomato plants before long. Around said curve headed toward the store in his blue truck pulling a small work trailer, comes a nice fellow, Mr. Coppertop. About 50 yards past, the safety chain on the trailer snapped and the load shifts causing the thing to fall backwards and spin into the tomatoes destroying many. Mr. Coppertop (his name would rhyme with the famous battery) removed his offending cart and came on to the store. Nothing much happened until the next day when the offender came back and the sitters around the front all started to talk and joke him. One guy, Mr. My Way, was not laughing. He blurted out,” Hell, it would not have happened if you had the safety chain hooked! I drove a damn million miles working for the state and never lost a trailer.” Mr. Coppertop tried to say that he had the chain in place it just broke. No matter how he tried to say it, Mr. My Way (cause that was his personality) told him he did not know what he was talking about or that he was stupid. Mr. Coppertop finally said sarcastically, “Yeah, Copper, I guess you know. You were there.” With that My Way stood up and started to curse, “My damn, mumble, mumble, when I get this knife out, mumble, dig, dig in pockets, I will cut you GD head off.” We all just sat or stood there while Mr. Way dug in those tight pants pockets. I noticed Mr. Coppertop had eased his hand down into a box by the milk cooler and grabbed a hickory ax handle. A fight over nothing was about to take place. Reaching into the desk I pulled out an empty .32 revolver that had belonged to my Big Pop and pointed to the roof like I was going to fire. I told them all to stop it or I would call the sheriff. The old gun had not been fired in over a decade but the bluff worked as first Mr. Copper and then Mr. Way left with his knife finally drawn. The blade was old rusty and would not cut cardboard with its one inch blade- ooh. Later that evening, Mr. Coppertop came back and thanked me for stopping it. He said he would have hated to whip an older man, but no one was going to cut him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a .22 revolver. I told him it was not worth killing or being killed over tomatoes. I did not think it would happen again and if it did there let us handle it. He said he would try. As they use to say on Dragnet, in a moment the results of the trial. It seemed the whole thing was set into motion by the fact that the Mr. Way was one of those guys that never spent anything and had accumulated 100,000s and 100,000 in a Savings and Loan institution, where when interest rates where sky high he raked it in. That place was in bed with the Keating group that invested rather riskily in everything from art to golden spittoons and umbrella stands. They had gone under and taken the S & L with them. All of Mr. Way’s monies were frozen. He would get some back from the Fed but not all. That was on his mind when he heard Mr. Top tell his tale of trailer. He did loose mucho money. Later at a church over politics, he nearly got that deadly knife out again over a tie. Yes money stress can cause many problems. I could have had enormous sums of cash, but I like to help when I can, trade cars now and then (maybe too much), and take a trip every now and then to see something new. What good is it if you do not use it? You cannot take it with you and he did not. You leave it for someone else to fight over. You may need to be saving, but you can become a slave to money until you can become miserable and make other that way. The whole thing shows how silly humans can be. It was truly much ado about nothing.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:00:17 +0000
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