Memories are snippets of time, caught forever in a little fold in our brains, and often, in our hearts. We visit them from time to time, perhaps talking for hours, hoping they will remember us, mostly just wondering what they mean to our present lives. Now and then, however, those memories are made of metal riding on four wheels. Those memories are special.

Every week they line up in the parking lot between the bank and the Chick-fil-A, their quarter panels and hoods and trunks polished so perfectly you want to reach elbow deep into the candy apple red and pull up a night from 1979 or ‘69 or ’59.

“I had one just like this when I was in high school,” said a nattily dressed man in his mid 60’s, his skin weathered and his thin white hair scrambled from driving the convertible Mustang to this same spot every weekend.

“We used to go to the drive-in all the time,” said his wife of forty years, her own silver hair pulled into a tight ponytail. “But I never told my daddy that.” She smiled. “He’d have killed Billy.”

Billy showed me every detail on the car, from the leading edge hood to the chromed “260” emblems to the pristine 160 horsepower engine.

“See the battery cooling louvers behind the grill and the generator charging system and the large horns?” said Billy.  “Those are special to this car.”

He made a point to take me around back and point out the slotted spare tire hold-down. While he talked about his love of original paint and his hatred of aftermarket hype, Lindy, his wife, sat in her folding chair reading a Kindle, oblivious to Billy’s ramblings.

“This is what’s known as a ’64-1/2 Mustang,” said Billy. “Some people say it’s just an early ’65, but not me. This beauty came straight out of Dearborn back when men with brass balls made automobiles out of Detroit steel.”

I asked him if it was true that the ’64-1/2 Mustang was really just a Falcon with buckets because the real Mustangs came later. There was a stoic silence in him that made me uncomfortable. He did not seem to take kindly to my suggestion.

“Son, that is no way to talk to a man standing beside one of the finest automobiles ever built in this country,” he said sternly, his bushy brows arching and his lip curling a bit. Slowly his face relaxed into a laugh.

“Had you going there,” said Billy. “Us old Mustangers know all those Falcon stories. It is sitting on a Falcon chassis though.”

“I thought there was a little Falcon in there,” I said.

“Ignore the Falcon part,” he said. “There ain’t no such thing as a ’64 Mustang anyway. I lied earlier. This is sort of a pre-’65 Mustang, built somewhere between March and July of ’64. I’ve studied this stuff a little. Most people would just call it a ’65 and be done with it, but not us. This baby went from an idea to the highway in just 18 months. Figured they’d sell maybe 80,000 that first year. They sold more than a million in a couple years. I bought one when I got back from ‘Nam. Wrecked it a year later. Then we started having kids and I drove 4-doors until two years ago when I got this little horse. ”

Billy offered me a “cold drank” from his ice chest and rubbed the Mustang’s door with a towel he never put down the entire time we talked.

“He pampers it more than he ever did me,” said Lindy. “I should be jealous. He calls it his pony girl. Surprised he hasn’t just given it a name and divorced me and run off with it.”

“It cain’t cook,” he smiled, trotting over to Lindy, hugging her tightly, half moon-shaped shrapnel scars from the battle of Ho Bo Woods straining against his forearms as he squeezed his wife and best friend and she kissed his ear.

“This is a by-God-1964-1/2 Mustang pulled right out of the brain of a young Lee Iacocca,” he said, then paused and squinted. “No, I take that back. This car came from the genius of Donald Frey, God rest his soul. He died a couple of years ago.”

Billy folded the towel and nodded across the antique cars.

“If you want to see a wannabe pony car, go over there and look at ol’ Jimmy’s ’66 Camaro built in Norwood, Ohio,” he said. “It’s green because it’s envy suffering on 4 wheels.”

Billy waves at Jimmy. Under his breath he says,  “When Jimmy talks about his car, he looks over here and wants mine. I know it. I can feel it. I’ve known Jimmy for 30 years.”

“Oh, come on, Billy,” said Lindy without ever looking up from her Kindle. “Jimmy’s your damned brother.”

“Well, there’s that too,” said Billy.

Before you get offended by those words you should know this: Anna Jarvis, the mother of Mother’s Day started the modern celebration of mothers in 1907, but later, when it was hijacked by commercialization, Ms. Jarvis turned on Mother’s Day and was even arrested for protesting against the holiday which now uses sentimentality to fill the bank accounts of florists and other companies all over the world.

If that sounds harsh, please remember, I am just relaying how Ms. Jarvis viewed the money making scheme that Mother’s Day has become. And now that the facts are out of the way, let us talk about real mothers.

We all have one, like it or not. Biologically, there is no other way to get a ticket to this planet. Mothers run the world, even according to scumbags and holy men. Few people ever worry about saying something that embarrasses their fathers. Mothers, on the other hand, are the ones we think about offending when we type a curse word in a blog post, dammit. Mothers are the ones who washed out our mouths with soap and sent us to bed without supper and fed us a fine meal even when they did not eat themselves. Mothers held us when we were afraid and reeled us in when we were too confident. Mothers went to talk to the teacher who hated us and defended us to the kids who accused us. Mothers took us to practice and stood screaming our names as we scored touchdowns or hit homeruns or drained three’s at the buzzer. Mothers were also there when we rode the pine and never got a grass stain on our uniforms.

“I love you, mama!” has been a constant refrain by famous sports figures since Joe Willie Namath guaranteed victory in the Super Bowl 43 years ago. So this year, let’s celebrate our mothers ­– by doing something for them every day, not just once a year above our quickly scrawled signatures on a Hallmark card.

Starting today, tell your mother you love her, not in an email, but in person or call her on the phone. Yes, call her every single day and tell her what she means to you, and do not use the same story twice. Do it for a year. She probably sacrificed a lot to get you where you are. The least you can do is say, “Thanks mom,” and give her specifics surrounding those two words. That is what she really wants, not a store-bought card or e-card or flowers or candy or a trinket. She wants your love. And that gift costs you nothing. Think for a second what loving you has cost her? Her career? Her health? Her time? Her life?  Or maybe it cost her nothing but her love, in which case it is still a pretty good bargain. Better than $75 for a box of long-stemmed roses.

My mother is no longer here. I called her around 6:30 pm every day for ten years after my father died. We talked about what she did that day and I told her that I loved her and why. It seldom took more than fifteen minutes. On Mother’s Day the year before she died, mom told me that Mother’s Day was nothing special to her. As her voice cracked, she said, “It’s the 364 other Mother’s Days during the year that makes being a mom so special.” She paused. “When that phone rings and I see your number, it’s worth more than all the roses in the world.”

Her single mother stoically pushes away the thought of sleep. She knows there will be none anytime soon. A technician in dreadlocks pushes a machine into the room to her right. Jokes bounce off the tile from inside. No one laughs in the hallway, however. The jokes are for employees only.

From the opposite direction comes another girl in a wheelchair, PICC line cinched in an armband, a girl not much older in years than the first girl, but decades older inside. She looks serene, almost happy in a weary way. Wheelchair girl knows every hallway here, every elevator, every floor, every view out every window, every style of room. She has been in almost all of them. She knows the tired women who do the housekeeping. She knows the tired nurses and tired doctors and tired residents. She has met them all under the worst possible circumstances. She knows what days fried chicken is served in the cafeteria, and when the therapy dogs come by, and what it feels like to have a deadly staph infection eating away at metal plates and screws in her bones.

The two girls eyes meet. They each recognize the pain in the other. There is a pause. The girl in the wheelchair reaches up to touch the arm of the girl on the gurney. Gurney girl’s eyes widen as the Dilaudid mixes with Percoset in her veins. The motion of compassion jiggles the IV bag.

“Are you afraid of the pain?” asks wheelchair girl who has weaned herself from pain meds many times. “Are you afraid you will never walk again?”

There is a strained pause.

“Yes,” says gurney girl. The word catches in her throat as if it has barbs and will not come out. Pain is the tread that holds everything together in this place.

Wheelchair girl has been here for six months and nine surgeries. She has beaten the fear, tolerated the pain, and overcome the odds. She knows things the doctors will never know. She knows what the nurses fear. Wheelchair girl has cried through horrors that morphine and all of its hydro-cousins could not dull.

“You will not walk,” says wheelchair girl.

Gurney girl recoils slightly at the bluntness of the words.

“You will run,” says wheelchair girl. “And so will I. Soon.”

Gurney girl nods, a small amount of hope filling her face. A longer, silent conversation has taken place that only they can hear. Wheelchair girl makes her way down the hall to another test, smiling.

He did not call her an angel at first.

“She didn’t have wings,” said the man, staring out the hospital window across the rooftops. “She just held my hand tight as the heart monitor leveled off. She also told me something I didn’t want to hear at the time.”

Two years later, he saw her again. This time she said nothing. She did not have to.

He did not tell many people what happened because he did not want to be seen as crazy, which is how people view those who see things that cannot be easily explained.

“Was she an angel?” he said. “In a world of high tech medicine it’s hard to see how an angel could keep a job,” he said. “But it sure did look like she had a job.”

Angeling is as old school as it gets, yet most people do not even believe they exist. The man was skeptical himself before she showed up in the middle of an operating room with his heart shutting down.

“She squeezed my right hand so hard I thought she broke it,” he said.

As he talked, each line of his face showed the wear of that night.

“‘You cannot go yet,’ she told me, ‘You have something else to do.’”

He asked the doctors and nurses if they had seen her. They all said no.

“I suppose saying that she was an angel is dependent on my understanding of the profession,” he said. “Or yours. Either way, I didn’t go that night.”

Perhaps he fought to stay. Perhaps she fought for him. Perhaps a lot of things.

“It’s hard to say when you’re busy dying,” he said. “I did wonder what it was I had to do, though” he said. “I still do.”

Then four months ago, in a surgical trauma unit of a giant urban medical center, the tall woman showed up again. Same alabaster face. Same pale arms, long, sinewy, thick bones, taut muscles, fragile and strong like a horse’s legs. This time she was holding a broken and dying girl – the man’s daughter.

“She was over my daughter’s bed, face to face, eyes to eyes, kind of hanging there, suspended, arms gripping my frail, bleeding girl with all those tubes and wires draping up out of her into computers and monitors and bags of liquid,” he said. “You don’t forget something like that.”

At the foot of the bed, the woman’s legs hung over bending awkwardly almost to the floor, her feet, like her hands, spindly and muscular and bare like an animal. Her clothes were not clothes, but a shape. Hard to make out. A shape that defied the man’s attempt to describe it.

“The room was shaking slightly,” he said. “Could have been a helicopter bringing somebody in. There’s probably a scientific explanation, but science and angels probably don’t cross paths too often, do they?”

Perhaps they do.

“You can make of it what you want,” he said. “I’m still alive. My daughter’s still alive. Neither of us should be.”

He paused for a minute, searching for a way to say what he was thinking.

“Maybe she’s just the angel of hard times,” he said.

His daughter survived massive internal injuries and five surgeries. A deadly staph infection still rages in her broken pelvis. Another surgery is looming. Her fight is far from over.

“You have something else to do.”

“Those words seem louder these days,” he said. “Is helping my daughter get through this what I was left here to do?” He lingers on the question. “I don’t know. All I know is what I’ve seen and heard.”

It is all any of us ever really know.

The menu beside the cash register reads: The Burger, “One of the greatest burgers in the world you must have before you die.” – GQ Magazine. It adds to that: “Burger Bling.” – ABC News.

BGR, just outside Washington, D.C., is where President Obama goes when he wants a serious burger, which means Bill Clinton has probably been there too. Even if you do not agree with their politics, you cannot argue with their taste buds. The “exclusive, award-winning, blend of Prime, aged, all natural, hormone-free, grain-fed beef” definitely tastes different than most burgers. Perhaps the “buttery brioche bun”, baked especially for them, helps. Rosemary fries do not hurt. Whatever it is, the soda machine alone would make a Star Trek convention beat you down for a shot in line at lunch. On this contraption, you control every aspect of your drink from brand name to flavors from an iPad-ish screen.

I’ve been in a lot of burger joints in my life and few have ever framed this statement and hung it on the wall next to the front door: “You are about to eat the worst damned burger to ever ride between two buns.” They all claim superiority.

The burger, I mean “The Burger” at BGR takes the whole category to a new level. It comes in many versions beyond the basic. “The Cuban” is a favorite of Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post. The Greek won the “Throwdown With Bobby Flay” on Food Network. Everything on the menu has an accolade of some type. “The 9-Pounder” has starred on The Travel Channel, Food Network and an I.F.O.C eating contest (whatever that means). It is so big BGR needs 24 hours notice if you want to order it. Not exactly fast food.

Gourmet burgers are no new thing if you have been out to eat in the last five years. They are everywhere. Some people just do it better than others. BGR does that in every way, and in appreciation the joint is packed. Across from me right now is a dude that, from my angle, looks like Charlie Daniels after being shot in the face by a cheeseburger. There is an entire onion ring perched in his beard. His wife, while destroying a hormone-free burger, can hardly make that claim herself since she has a five o’clock shadow at 1 in the afternoon. A plains-clothes cop – I assume he is a cop since he is wearing a gun in a holster – stands in line behind three women dressed like they are at the opera. Two lawyer-looking men chat up the office slut over in the corner while a table filled with loud crew-cut men behind me yells opinions about the difference between Merlot and Pinot Noir. I’m here to tell you, that only happens in D.C.

I can still smell raw fertilizer, cow feed, cigarette smoke and country hams hanging from rusted hooks in old roadside stores where my father was trying to sell sausage to crew cut men in bloody aprons. When he was talking sausage, my father’s Lower Alabama accent crisped up like the people I saw on TV, at least the people on Channel 12. The apron’d men’s words, however, were hard for even my Southern ears to understand.

“Mhm y’all gotanyadim redhots cause we sellinbunches a dem.”

If you have been in the South long, that sentence may make sense, or perhaps not.

In my entire life, I remember exactly three Wednesdays during the summer when my father let me go to work with him since I was out of school anyway and if left alone would likely to ride my bike around Montgomery in the middle of the American Civil Rights revolution with no thought to the historic gravity going down around me. I never saw the danger of a white kid riding through Washington Park all the way up into downtown where my friend’s father’s gas station hunched on a asphalted hill overlooking the familiar, bleached white Capitol dome jutting up from the oaks and church steeples as a beacon to remind black people that this was a white man’s town. And even though I was white, I did not feel as superior as the local news said I should be. I felt ashamed at how poor black people were being treated. We did not have much, but we were not unlucky to be both poor and “colored,” a word that always seemed misguided to my young brain since we were all some kind of color.

I drank from colored water fountains and rode the infamous city busses alone without understanding that blacks were supposed to sit in the back even years after Rosa Parks was arrested not far from my house. We lived in the western side of the city on Mobile Road in surroundings that never let us forget that rich people lived far from here.

On this particular day, however, I was riding east out of the city with my dad in his 1965 Chevrolet Impala with the red seats and the aftermarket air conditioner hanging under the middle of the dash blowing a wonderful fog as ice cold air met Alabama humidity. The towns had Indian names like Wetumpka, Notasulga and Tuskegee. The spaces between them were dotted with fading, white cinder lock stores or leaning structures with paint so thick it was likely the only thing holding up the splintered walls against the termites and water rot.

In those old stores I learned how to tell a story, how to cut meat, how to read inventory sheets, how to tell jokes and how to interact with people who have strong opinions. I learned something else too: racism.

Those three trips provided an education that my school books dared not touch. The history of the Civil Rights struggle had not yet been written. It was still happening all around me in the streets and in those stores. Newspapers, the Montgomery Advertiser and the Alabama Journal, told stories of violence and protests and riots and dogs attacking women and children at the loose end of police leashes. My father did not make enough to buy a newspaper every day, so as he talked about meat in the back, I would slip out a paper and read about lynchings, bombings, beatings and arrests of people caught being black in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was not a story I was hearing in school civics or history. But I saw it on TV and in the streets and on the busses. I saw the crowds camped at St. Jude’s up the road after the March from Selma to Montgomery. But mostly I heard it in the words of those men in the stores. I remember counting the times I heard the word “nigger” one day, either in jokes or insults or angry diatribes by old men fearful that black people might get the right to treat them the same way they had been treated for 200 years. In a small spiral pocket notebook I wrote these words with a No. 2 pencil sharpened with a dull pocketknife: Nigger llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. Each mark represented that word being used by someone that day. Sadly, even my father used it. And if you grew up white in Alabama in those days, your father probably did too. It was not the “N” word yet. It was just the brutally ugly, naked, embarrassing word: Nigger. Not even church was safe from its use.

Reading those papers and seeing those wounded faces and hearing those old men talk, I remember a heavy, profound feeling of making a choice. I could continue the rich and horrible tradition of that word or I could try to carve it from my mouth by reading as much as I could. The librarian knew me on sight and assumed if a book went missing, it must be one I really loved. She could have taken me to the library jail more and a few times. Instead, she just turned her other cheek.

It is impossible to live in the world today without hearing the N word, even in music. The popularity of the word, to the credit or shame of those who had the same choice as me, has waned, at least with the people I hang out with. But it is not gone. Last week, in a store just up the road from my house, I heard an African American man yell it to a friend of his in the parking lot. For a few seconds, he and the old white racist in the bloody apron from 1960′s Alabama had something in common.

A Guest Blog From RudyTheJack

Twice a day, I get my meds. The people giving it to me slather the little pill in peanut butter. I like Jif, but I’ll take any kind they got. During the last few months since this has been going on, I have become a PB connoisseur. And as such, I can tell you that connoisseur is French for a dog that knows his peanut butter. I looked it up. Unfortunately I looked it up on the day Wikipedia was shut down, but still, I found enough to back up my point. That point being: dogs are smarter than you think and even the French can see it.

Let’s be honest, you could probably hide the taste of anything in a dollop of peanut butter – pills, seeds, sparkplugs, an entire cat, you name it, peanut butter fools your tongue every time. Works better than bacon and isn’t so greasy. PB breath beats dog breath, right? That’s what I’m saying here.

While we’re talking about dogs and breath, I’d like to get something else off my tongue. Just because us dogs eat our own poop – or any poop for that matter – it doesn’t mean we have no taste, just the opposite. It means we have such refined taste that we can tell what a stranger ate a week ago. Bobby Flay couldn’t do that. But his dog could. Maybe his dog should be on Iron Chef. I think we know what the secret ingredient would be.

And don’t get me started on that tired old “licking our butts and drinking out of the toilet” argument. Been there, licked that. Doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve seen people lick stranger things than dog butts. Ever seen Fear Factor? Ever seen Andrew Zimmern on Bizarre Foods? Are we smelling each other yet?

I see carrots, beets, radishes and lettuce as evil food. So don’t hand me that. I’m not biting. Wrap that stuff in peanut butter, though, and boom, down the gullet, pronto. And toss in a broccoli spout.

Dog and peanut butter can solve a lot of household problems. Got a stain on the carpet? You don’t need that Oxy-something stuff they’re always advertising on TV. Smear a little PB on it and your dog will take that stain out in about 15 hard licks. Just make sure you pull your hound off the stain before he eats it right down to the sub-floor.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is this:

Okay, I can’t remember what I was saying because they just opened the jar of peanut butter over there and my concentration went to mush. Geez. Besides, who listens to a Jack Russell? Hmm, I guess if you’re still reading, you do.

“John?”

“No, it’s Pearl.”

“Pearl? Why do you sound like a man?”

“That was Earl. He’s on here too.”

“Hey y’all.”

“Earl, how’s that gout?”

“How many people are on this thing?”

“Gout’s doing great, but I’m not doing so good.”

“I need to use the line, please.”

“Who were you calling?”

“I wasn’t calling you. I need to call my grandson.”

“He still in Tuscaloosa trying to get above his raisings?”

My grandmother had a party line. Some called it a multiparty line or shared service line. Basically several customers were on one phone line. In a cell phone world, few people today have ever experienced such a thing or participated in the total confusion and wicked gossip it can cause. In other words it was awesome. There were no secrets on the party line.

“Pour the neck out of that RC and fill it up with Early Times,” said a man who sounded like Percy Walker, but who had likely never read anything stronger than the instructions on a snuff can.

About eight people were on my grandmother’s line. If you picked up the phone while two of them were talking, you had to wait until they finished. Or yell at them to finish. Or, better yet, just listen and try not to let them hear you laughing. What I heard was better than television. There were divorces in the making, Bible thumpers, and insane babble, cheating preachers, cooking advice or detailed descriptions on the location of a rabid dog. To hear old people talk, we had a lot of rabid dogs loose down in Lower Alabama at the time. Yet I never saw but one, and he was freshly shot by a man who some people said stole cars, but I never believed it. Sometimes the conversation on the party line would be about me.

An old woman complained about how long my hair was, and how fast I drove my old 1962 Galaxie 500 that had belonged to my grandfather, and how it was a shame that a heathen like me was driving my grandpaw’s car “straight to hell,” and on the way I was probably making multiple stops at liquor stores and “beer-and-a-beating-for-a-dollar” joints with “them nasty neon signs advertising sin and inebriation to the wicked.” I actually heard those last words exactly as I typed them. You tend to remember things like that when you are bored and live out in the back forty with pigs and chickens and enough ammo to shoot everything you have ever seen in your life.

Things said on that line defied the laws of Southern hospitality. Face to face, folks were genteel, but if they stayed too long on the line, words became heated.

“Lilly, don’t make me come down there and snatch that phone off your ear.”

“You think I caint hear you listening to us?”

“I heard what you said about me last night and I’m here to tell you that if I hear it again on here, I’m going to tell everybody about you and that preacher.”

After that exchange, I heard the preacher cussing a man who ran through his wife’s clothesline on a tractor.

“”Your wife was on the tractor too!” yelled the man in guilty defense.

This type of entertainment went on day and night. It was better than movies at the Martin Theater and cost nothing but a skinny phone bill, which my grandmother paid.

One day the phone company came out and gave everyone their own private line. It broke my heart. A few years later I asked a woman at the A&P about how she liked her private line.

“Them changing that thing was the worst day of my life,” she opined. “I had to start going to church to hear gossip that good.”

{NOTE: The pic up there is my grandmother’s old phone. It is in my house now, and still works perfectly minus the drama coming through the receiver.}

The old black leather aviator-style jacket is scratched and scraped by 30 years of life, each mark a memory etched in a long dead cow’s hide. I think it was given to me for Christmas, but by who escapes me. Most likely it was either my in-laws or my wife. It was so long ago I cannot remember. It was not my parents, I know. We were Naugahyde people.

In 1982, I survived a run-in with a concrete highway barrier on a frozen bridge in Texas back when my hair was brown and the black leather was new. The coat sustained no injuries. The same could not be said of my Buick Regal.

I nearly drowned in the early 1990’s, wearing it after our canoe sank in a Potomac River whirlpool above Great Falls, riding the rocks and rapids down into hypothermia. The incident required a gutting of the jacket lining. The tailor, stupidly, did not put my old familiar pocket back inside. It still bothers me.

In 1994, I wore it while jumping from a second floor window behind the Lowes Santa Monica during the big LA earthquake as the building heaved and leaned and rocked back and forth. Sliding down a palm tree – the ragged trunk scratching the front of the jacket and me – I wandered in the pre-dawn cool beside Douglas Fairbanks’s and Mary Pickford’s old beach house, waiting for a tsunami that never came.

I was wearing it on a Boeing 747 flight when the engines began to die one-by-one, requiring an emergency landing in Denver. I also wore it during a zero-gravity drop in a 757 over the Gulf of Mexico. Similar feeling, same coat.

This will be a tough reckoning, but that black leather jacket has gone through three children, nine jobs, seven moves, 58 cities, five funerals, one heart attack, three automobile accidents, an altercation with a cop, a near arrest, months of hospital visits, 60+ TV productions, more than a million miles of driving, three million miles of flying, probably 500 miles of walking, 350 hotels, at least 500 restaurants, and more meetings than I care to remember. The happiest days of my life, along with the saddest, have happened in that leather. I even played HORSE with Michael Jordan wearing it. That thing knows me better than anyone except my wife, and perhaps even better, now that I think about it.

When you start breaking your life down into things you have done while wearing a particular garment, it quickly turns pathetic. Few people own something wearable that long. Guys understand this. Women do not. But there it is, still doing its job. And I respect it for that. The weight of life riding inside that coat makes it feel heavy at times. Yet I’m wearing it right now as I type this. It’s chilly in here. If I tried to estimate how many stories I have written or told while it was on my back or hanging on a chair behind me, I could not finish the list.

Never did I think I would ever have such a relationship with a dead cow. And I imagine one day, just like that cow, I’ll die in it, as it should be.

Recently I took my daughter – she was a wheelchair, sadly – to Bass Pro Shops for an outing after a couple of horrid months in the hospital. I love to go to Bass Pro Shops. For me, going there is a bit like walking through my childhood without the fire ants. It was just before Christmas and the place was packed. I did not expect people to move out of our way just because we had a wheelchair, but I also did not expect 350 pound men dressed like they had just fallen out of a deer stand to push us out of the way so they could jump in front of us to get into the elevator with friends who were loudly bitching about Obama taking their jobs.

A bit later, a woman sporting an impressive mullet nudged us out of her way as she was in a hurry to get to the fudge display in the little fake general store, leaving us in her stale tobacco-tinged wake, but not before glaring at my daughter as if being in a wheelchair was an impediment to her fudge-tracking fervor.

“Watch out.” She grumbled in a drawl that took five syllables before trailing off into a sound that may have either been a burp or a nasally snort.

“Excuse me,” I said, sarcastically. “You better hurry. They only have 40 pounds left.”

She gave me the Elvis lip curl, which all Southerners know can either be arrogance, disgust or gas.

So when did rednecks become so un-mannered? Manners used to be the one thing for which a redneck could be counted on. Holding open a door and saying “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” and letting women go first. Real rednecks had old school politeness. I am not talking about those Deliverance types. They were just crazy peckerwoods. Rednecks were a brand, a cultural lifestyle, a food group. Rednecks took pride in being down to earth. Not once did I notice basic Southern hospitality during our wheelchair visit. If this is what it has come to, I am ashamed I was once a redneck. I renounce the art form. Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be this.

It seems we need to get rid of this new fangled, angry, Fox News, fudge-aholic rudeneck and start teaching some proper redneck manners to these people. Here are six basic rules of redneckry:

1. Respect your elders, even if those elders drive slow, in the wrong lane and park crooked in handicapped spaces.

2. People in wheelchairs are usually there for a reason. Cut them a little slack.

3. Do not curse, burp or fart loudly, especially all at the same time.

4. Wait your turn, even if fudge, beer or camo’d thongs are on sale.

5. Do not have a Bible verse on a bumper sticker next to a pair of red, rubber bull balls hanging from your trailer hitch.

6. Stop using God as an excuse to hate people who are not like you. Remember, you will never find a velvet painting of Jesus wearing a camo robe.

After having typed that last one, I found this on the Internet: