Life is so easy when you’re sitting on the front porch watching the sun set and making homemade ice cream, and surrounded by friends and family, and watching people walk by. That’s just about any day here in Moccasin Gap. We’re pretty laid back. Stress isn’t a factor in these parts. Hell, we don’t even know what stress is. To us, stress is what happens when you stretch a rubber band. The stress is what makes it break. I suppose in the bigger cities that’s what happens to people. They’re like rubber bands. They get so stressed out they break. In Moccasin Gap we never thought of looking at it as a way of life.

There goes Ol’ Clyde Hensley walking down the street with his wife Estelle. Now if there was anyone who has a reason to be stressed out, it’s Clyde. Estelle is the worst nagger in the county. (As Clem said, “Is she a nagger?” Clyde answered, “No, she’s white. But she nags all the time.) She nags about everything. Like the time Clyde went into the Army. She nagged for a month because he was leaving, yet he had no choice. He was drafted. It doesn’t matter to a nagger. All they want to do is nag, nag, nag. Clyde was in World War II. He got shot in the leg and had to have it amputated and Estelle nagged because he had only one keg. And then one night while she was sleeping, Clyde took his artificial leg and beat her over the head with it. She doesn’t nag anymore. 

And here comes Jasper and his wife Louise with their two little boys Aaron and Eugene. They should’ve named them after biblical characters like Satan and Lucifer, bless their hearts. I believe that God gives us children as punishment for all the hell we put our parents through when we were growing up. Those two boys could wreck an empty room.

I don’t know what they’re going to be when they grow up. All I know is if they were my two boys, they wouldn’t grow up.

Here comes Rita Muldoon prancing down the street. She knows every single guy in town and a few married ones too, but we won’t talk about that. We’ll save that conservation for the barber shop. The barber shop is where all the men go to gossip. They say that all women do is gossip, but if you’ve ever been in a barber shop, you know that men can gossip just as well as women.

And when a young person dies in Moccasin Gap it’s because of drugs. You see, that’s the only way you can grow old around here – never do drugs. If you died young, you were on something and that is all there is to it. I remember my Aunt Myrtle telling me, “You remember that Johnson boy who used to live up the street?”

I said, “Yeah, little Rickey Johnson. I remember him. What ever happened to little Rickey?”

Aunt Myrtle said, “Well, he was struck to death by lightning yesterday.”

I said, “Wow, what a terrible way to go.”

She said, “He was smoking that blamed ol’ Marijuana (or, as she calls it mar-ig-an-na), and just walk right into it.”

I said, “You mean to tell me that smoking pot will make you walk that fast? Most of the people I know who smoke can’t even get up off the   couch. I’m guessing that Williams boy who was shot to death last week was smoking real good pot to walk in front of that bullet like that – SIX TIMES.”