Rednecks on Parade

Today I have walked in the midst of red necks and lived. Of course given where I live in the heart of the south that’s stating the obvious. I am a red neck and am constantly surrounded by such. I have about a dozen stories just from today but one is a shining example of redneckism-meets-absolute-stupidity. The reason this sticks with me is I made eye contact and saw the deep hollowness and I guess ignorance.

I pull into the parking lot and find a spot available which happens to be closest to the store. As I am angling into the spot a mom, dad, two teenish looking sons are are frozen in time discussing something and the father is slowly moving back toward the car which I gather is the spot next to mine which by the way is the spot the second closest to the store. That means someone pulled out of my #1 spot after they parked which means I already see big L stamps on their foreheads. I stop to let the father get to the car and he looks at me, stops, looks back to the family, says something to the wife and moves to the car. The wife instead of allowing me to finish my parking manuver decides she wants in on irritating me and moves into my path back to the car. She also looks at me with an emotionless face and they complete their moves to the car and I finish parking.

My daughter and her friend are in the car, I said nothing and was very controlled but my daughter’s friend(8 year old) says “you ought to act like you’re going to run over them”. I love her. She’s a sweet little african-american girl and is very sensitive to racial tensions in our city. One time she was at our house and my wife was painting her finger nails and she chose black finger nail polish. She said “no offense but black is my favorite color”. I thought I was going to throw up from laughing so hard…in another room…because she was serious.

I can’t get this out of my head because that man and woman acted as if either I wasn’t there or they thought I was satisfied with my parking half in and half out of the space. What else could they be thinking? They both looked right in my face and continued to block me from parking. I seriously wanted to gun the engine but I was more interested in letting it play out because I was so floored that they were acting that way. I don’t know them, I don’t owe them money, my car doesn’t have any offending stickers on it and is an average.

I’ll never know why that happened. Maybe if I’d pulled into the parking space a giant meteorite would have crushed my car. I hope when I die and get to heaven there’s a list of answers to the unexplainable events in my life because I will forget this in another day or two because of the endless other rednecks I’ll run across along with their incredible feats.