Just Blame It On…

Uh-oh. Blue lights. Think fast.

(Which, admittedly, ain’t one of my strong suits.) So we’ll simply do what everybody else does…

First thing is to glance down—heart in throat—at the pickup’s speedometer: YIKES!!!

That’s what you get for cruising—and I DO mean cruising—these lonely county-maintained roads.

Secondly, try to figure out how long it’s been since you drank the last beer. Hmmm, 30 years; good to go there.

Finally—while the big old boy is disentangling himself from his car seat and straightening his hat—come up with a tale that would make Perry Mason proud.

And it’s going to have to be a shore-nuff barnburner, because he’s already got that little pad in his hand…

“License.”

How’s that for an introduction?

I hand it over, and he goes back to the car to do whatever happens there over the course of five rather nauseating minutes—as in checking to see if the statute of limitations has run out on those ax murders I committed as a teen—before sauntering back.

“Any idea how fast you were going, Mr. Gay, and is there a reason why your truck is still trying to catch its breath?”

He was ready to write; in ink; I could just tell. And I was afraid there was going to be a long list of zeroes attached when he got through. Better make it good; be calm (yeah, right!); deep breath; whatever you do, forget the radio voice and go Far South Georgia Twang; if possible, act even dumber than you feel right now…

“Sorry about interrupting your shift, officer. You see, I just ain’t percolatin’ too good. Throat’s kindly swole up and my joints is aching. Sunday evening, my fifth cousin on my mommer’s side come over and brought me half a hog, and now he’s in the hospital with that there clover stuff. I’m a’hopin he ain’t brung it over and dumped it in my lap. Along with the hog.”

Did you ever see a squirrel roaming around like an idiot, digging for non-existent nuts, then suddenly going on lockdown as the corner of his eye catches your .22 being raised? That’s kinda what the guy with the hat looked like.

“Clover?”

“Yes-sir; seems to be a bunch of that stuff from what I hear. It’s all over the place. We’uns has been wondering who planted it in the first place.”

“Clover,” he mused, then suddenly dropped his little pad with a clatter. “COVID? Are you trying to say covid???”

“Oh yes-sir, my bad. THAT’S what he called it.”

“Slow down and have a nice night,” he fairly bellered as my license came sailing back through the window. And re-entering the vehicle didn’t require nearly as much effort as extrication!

As the car peeled off, all I could think about was Gomer Pyle and “Citizen’s arrest, citizen’s arrest…”

Along with the fact that if everybody else in the world could blame clover for any and everything on the planet that’s not going their way, then so could I! Throughout world history, there’s never been a more popular excuse.

Lemme give you one example: ammo. In 1943, this nation produced 63 million rounds of small arms ammunition… PER DAY! Sure, it was a war year; but has our technology regressed to the point that I’m missing Georgia doves with shotgun shells made in Spain and Italy—and scrounged half the state to find them?

Ain’t nobody planting clover and keeping workers out of the ammo factories across the water? Oh yeah; dumb on down and blame clover…

Any time mental gears get to grinding to the point that my blood pressure could power a cotton mill whistle—you probably don’t remember that, either—I turn things over to the brains of the family: son Myles.

OK, so he assured me that this thing is real. And not to be messed around with. Debilitating and deadly, even.

“Get the shots,” he says.

Wait. What? Shots? As in needles?

“Yep. You’re going bear hunting in the Okefenokee in a few days, and you’ll come back scratched, scraped and punctured in 2-dozen places. What’s a little shot?”

Right. That’s the type of argument he knows is apt to puncture… my resistance. 

But we ain’t just diving right into this vaccine thing without a little research—which is pretty much what I do on a daily basis.

And with that finally accomplished, I set up the pricking process. However,  upon arrival…

“Which vaccine do you want?” the nice nurse asks?

Uh, nobody said nothing about multiple choice. So I take the pamphlets she’s offering.

Which may as well have been printed in Mongolian. All I can reasonably come away with are the sites of the manufacturing plants: one in Kentucky, the other in Mainz, Germany.

Now, I’ve only read about a thousand factual, historical books on WWII; it’s a lifelong passion. And I seem to remember a couple things about Mainz: it was pretty much flattened from the air, as well as being rather rudely rumbled over by George Smith Patton Jr. and his Third Army shortly after those fine lads crossed the Rhine River.

It ain’t likely, all these years later, that somebody’s still holding a grudge, but then you never know…

I go with Kentucky.

Gotta wait a couple weeks for the next shot, but so far nothing has turned blue or fallen off. It can’t be as bad as the bears.