My Little Town 20120502: Mr. Reid

(8 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

The bulk of the story is concerned with the little town of Gull Lake, Alberta, Canada.  There is some background first, so please bear with me.  First of all, this is a rare post in this series that contains a considerable amount of profanity.  There was no way to tell the story properly without it.

Second, I did not know this man.  I saw him only once at a restaurant in Gull Lake.  He certainly made an impression, though!

My family were into hardcore traveling vacations.  We started this in 1969 when we drove from Hackett to Roundup, MT for my father’s 30th year high school reunion.  They bought a travel trailer after that trip because of ridiculously high motel prices.  The rate at Motel 6 was $6 per night!

This particular trip was in 1971 or 1972, because I had a learner’s permit to drive, and I drove quite a bit.  One time in Iowa a bus was passing a car in the oncoming lane, and it was sort of scarey for a 14 or 15 year old kid to have to pull a car and travel trailer onto the shoulder fast, but I did it and we were all fine.

In any event, we stopped at some restaurant in Gull Lake to get dinner.  Our party consisted of my grandmother, my parents, and me.  We took a table and a man about my grandmum’s age, drinking from a six pack of beer came over to our table.  We all liked meeting people in places where we traveled, so we welcomed him and introduced ourselves.  He introduced himself, and I do not remember his first name, but he spelled out his last name, trilling his “R”.  I suspect he was originally from Scotland, but it might have been that in such a rural area the old pronunciations were retained.

I think that he fancied Ma, because he kept looking at her.  Dad was quite the conversationalist, and Mr. Reid was not shy.  Somehow they began talking about horses and my father asked him if horses were expensive there.  The thing is, my father used the Hackett term, “Are horses high here?”  Mr. Reid replied, “Oh, Chrrreest!  Mine is fourteen and a half hands high and he’s not grrrown yet”!

We all got a laugh out of that except for Ma.  In the first place, she did not approve of drinking, being of the old school of Methodists.  Most folks do not know that the Methodist doctrine was for a very long time one of teetotaling although that has been less emphasized in recent decades.  In the second place, she did not like to hear anyone take the Lord’s name in vain.  She made some kind of sound that indicated her disapproval.

As Mr. Reid continued to drink more beers, his language got progressively coarser and Ma became increasingly uncomfortable.  His last outburst had Ma doing a Tommy Smothers “OK!  That’s enough!” moment.

Somehow he got on the topic of an argument that he had with a woman and it was getting pretty graphic.  Ma just had had “a can full” as they used to say in Hackett when Mr. Reid, how with a very loud voice said, “An’ I tol’ ‘er, woman you’rrre so full of bullshit it’s blowin’ out of both earrrs and your ass to boot!”

That did it!  Ma bolted up from the table with a “Oh, Lord!”  and went to look at the postcards.  Dad and I were laughing ourselves to death, and my mum was amused but kept her decorum.  We were about done with dinner anyway so we said our good-byes and paid for our dinner.

We got to the car because we had a few more miles to go for a place to park the trailer for the night.  Ma was still livid, muttering about, “That ol’ buzzard an’ hiz ole eight pack!”  Dad and I laughed for a couple of days about the incident, and years later at family dinners we would still get a laugh out of it.  “Blowin’ out of both earrrs” became a family term to describe some telling a tall tale.

I know that this is a short piece tonight, but it was one of the funnier incidents that we had on vacation.  If you have any stories to share, whether about a little town or a large city, please feel free to add them in the comments.  Both other readers and I get a kick out of other folks’ experiences.

Warmest regards,

Doc, aka Dr. David W. Smith

Crossposted at

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