Spring in the country

Well, gentle readers, the primary election season is over, except for a run-off or two, and school is about to let out for the summer. Thank heavens. The last three weeks have provided about all the last second, double time activity I need.
As I mentioned recently in this space, it is the spring that turns a small town newspaper man’s fancy to thoughts of running down the middle of the highway, screaming at the top of his lungs.
I shouldn’t complain, I know. Political years and their attendant political advertising are about the only things that allow small town newspapers like this one to keep their heads above water, financially speaking. And all the end-of-year stuff at the schools, although it usually keeps me right on the brink of pulling my hair out (what there is left of it) is a very important part of small community life.
I’d say “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” but somebody might take that statement too literally. Actually, I would have no objection to being able to take my wife out to dinner on a week night now and then. But let’s not get too radical.
As I have said before, in a number of different venues, before I moved to a small community, I never thought there was that much going on that was newsworthy. Just shows you how much a person can still have to learn. The goings and comings and various doings in Hazen, DeValls Bluff, Carlisle and Des Arc may, indeed, not mean a whole lot to the rest of the world, but by cracky that stuff is pretty doggone important to the folks who buy this newspaper.
Seems like the only time the ol’ boys at the newspaper and broadcast media stations over in Little Rock look in this direction is when they hear of something they can report in such a way as to make all us small town yokels look, at best, ridiculous or at worst, stupid and dangerous. You’d think Walter Hussman’s scandal mongers at the Demo-zette, or the self-promoting talking heads at the television stations would have plenty to do just keeping up with all the ridiculous, stupid and dangerous stuff going on in Pulaski County. But no! Let somebody over here drop the ball, and the media boys in the State Capitol are on it like a hungry dog on a pork chop bone.
The plain, unvarnished truth of the matter is that large urban area media outlet owners like Hussman know they are doing business in a pest hole. These guys consciously try to make their bailiwick look better by trying to make your community look worse. They’ll jump on any band wagon that has any promise of keeping people from moving away from the Grand Duchy of Pulaski.
Human beings were not meant to live in that kind of concentration and they tend to do ridiculous, stupid and dangerous things when they do. Trust me on this one, gentle readers. I grew up in a large city like Little Rock but I left and have no interest in going back. Small communities have their problems, heaven knows, but in places like DeValls Bluff, Hazen, Carlisle and Des Arc, you rarely have to fear for your life if you need to go out for a loaf of bread after sundown.
I can tell you from experience, neighbors, way too many folks in cities are or the dark side of unusual. As a young man, living by myself in an apartment in Memphis, I had a stupifyingly diverse collection of neighbors. There were the two women in the apartment upstairs who kept cats. A couple hundred of them. I know because the unmistakable aroma of overused and overturned litter box wafted down into my living room far too often. Then there was the sweet old couple at the end of the building who, as I found out later, supplemented their fixed income by stealing cars and stripping them down for the parts. Seems they ran a mom-and-pop used auto parts supply business in a quiet sort of way, out of an old abandoned warehouse. Other than a tendency to commit felonies, they were some of the nicest neighbors I ever had.