Catching up on the latest

One of the biggest adjustments a big city boy like me had to make when I moved to this quaint rustic setting, was the inevitable meeting of neighbors while traveling in vehicles in opposite directions on the same roadway, when catching up on the latest news takes precedence over the unrestrained flow of vehicular traffic. I also noticed that this is a practice indulged in almost exclusively by males. Only rarely have I witnessed women stop their vehicles and chat through the driver’s side windows.
In our nation’s urban areas, believe it or not, most folks don’t stop in the middle of the street to pass the time of day while remaining seated in their respective modes of transportation. As a matter of fact, in most urban areas with which I am familiar, to do so would amount to an open invitation to be on the receiving end of an uncouth digital gesture. And that’s the least severe of the possible repercussions. In some neighborhoods of my home town of Memphis, stoping your car in the middle of the street to talk to somebody is a first step toward getting shot.
I’ll admit it took me a while to become accustomed to the phenomenon. At length, it dawned on me that folks on this part of the earth’s surface usually aren’t in as big a hurry to get someplace as their city cousins are. Seems that people in the country have figured out that one place is pretty much the same as another so there really isn’t a lot of sense in getting in a hurry to change one’s location.
Once I had arrived at this realization, it still took me a while to get comfortable enough with the practice to actually do it myself. When I do it, I tend to spend the entire conversation looking in my rearview mirror. I used to think this was so I’d be ready to move quickly in case some other vehicle pulled up behind me, with a driver wanting to get on with his or her life. I now know that the fixed stare into the mirror is merely a holdover from my years in the city, when that vehicle pulling up behind me very well might be driven by someone to whom my life was utterly meaningless. I get a similar feeling when I am playing cards while sitting in a chair that doesn’t allow me to keep by back to a wall. This is called the “aces and eights syndrome” named for the poker hand James Butler Hickok, a.k.a. Wild Bill, allegedly was holding when he was shot in the back in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1876.
But I’m not paranoid. Really, I’m not. People really are out to get me.