Finding common ground over a laugh in line

So there was that time I offered to fight an 88-year old man at the local Walmart, but he started it, and I only half-meant it.

That was Wednesday, and I was at the Webb City, Mo., Walmart, which serves as a shopping mecca and social center, as the store does in so many small towns. I was standing in line with my suitcase of Dr Pepper because my aunt planned a gettogether for the cousins and I couldn’t arrive empty-handed.

In front of me was an old man who looked like he’d been left out in the field too long. He had a couple of items, and the cashier, who was waiting on another customer, told us there was a self-service check-out, if we didn’t want to wait. The old man looked at me, and I shrugged, and told him I was too lazy to walk any farther with the soda pop.

You have to understand that out here, you can’t go to town or the library or the Walmart without getting into a conversation. It’s just being friendly. The man told me he was mostly here just to get cash back — $20, which he was going to spend on a haircut. I nodded — he looked a little shaggy — and then he said haircuts once were four bits (50 cents) and if the damn Democrats have their way, his haircut would cost $40 by the end of the year. He laughed, I laughed, and as I was loading my soda pop onto the belt, I said, “Would you hate me if I told you I was a Democrat?” The cashier’s head jerked up and the old man asked me to repeat it. I did and he gave a long, drawn-out “Noooooo” as if I’d greatly disappointed him.

Jasper County is about as red as you can get. In 2016, nearly 73 percent of voters here went for Trump. In 2020, just over 72 percent turned around and did the same thing all over again.

Yes sir, I told the old man. I am like Harry Truman, a name you invoke in Missouri when you want to win an argument.

It didn’t work. Why, them Democrats, he said, they are all about gay marriage, and that’s all you see on television these days, and I told him the gays haven’t hurt him, and he can always just switch the channel. I said all this with a grin. I like arguing. I like old men. Combining the two makes me happy and I have looked forward to this trip until four days before I got on the plane. About that time, CNN started talking about Springfield, Mo., (the city I flew in to!) as a hotbed of the Delta variant because people won’t get vaccinated out here because Jesus and freedom. Or maybe it’s freedom and Jesus. In one week, the positivity rate in Missouri rose to 8.2 percent. The intensive care beds are full, deaths are rising, and the counties in my corner of the state have been leading the nation in daily new cases per capita. Of the people who died of COVID recently in one Springfield hospital, none had been vaccinated, so the departed now have the freedom to say hello to Jesus, I guess.

It’s the same thing all over the country. The variants are hitting the young and unvaccinated.

This is what happens when you refuse to listen to science. A virus doesn’t just go away. It must be starved to death, by people who refuse to serve as its host. Vaccinations have slowed nationwide, but they are barely creeping along in the Show-Me State, whose natives tend to lean toward the skeptical, conservative side.

But yes, I flew out here, and here was this old man mouthing off.

I have spent years on social media mouthing off, myself. It gets you nowhere. I asked the man his name — Dale Hart, and he was quick to say he is 88, but if the Democrats stay in office … He wants to die? I finished his sentence for him. Does his family know of his plans? Won’t they miss their grumpy old man?

He started grinning. I told him I could still be his friend, but if he preferred, I’d fight him but only if he would tie one arm behind his back because I have a bum arm from tendinitis and we were absolutely going to fight fair. Now he was giggling, and it was a sweet giggle.

He told me he still fishes and hunts and that he’d caught 10 catfish out of Grand Lake just the day before. As he talked, he held his hands apart to show me how big the fish were, and I started laughing because everyone lies about the size of their fish, and he laughed, too. I told him I don’t eat catfish because they’re bottom feeders, just like his political party, and he laughed at that, because honestly? Dale and I aren’t ever going to agree, but we’re not going to fight, and as we shook hands, he gave me his address and told me he’d take me fishing. If I didn’t have such a big family I wanted to see, I’d have gone. You bet I would. This is America, after all. If you can’t sink a line with a guy you meet at Walmart, what’s the point?