The Good, The Mad and The Stupid

I’ve almost lost track of how many times I’ve been in Cincinnati on this trip. Just to clarify things, I consider a trip the entire time that I’m on the road away from home. A run is an individual leg of that trip. That is, a pick up from a shipper to be delivered to what they call a “consignee” is a run.

Thursday morning, February 25 found me in Walton, Kentucky at the Pilot, having a breakfast of a bratwurst and cheese link with Sumatra coffee. The bratwurst is actually a good excuse to consume a tube of fat. Healthy choices of food on the road are a challenge when you’re in a hurry. Some days, I end up eating like a billy goat. I know I have to make a more concerted effort to eat well. My favorite healthy dish is a bowl of chopped spinach with just enough liquid for cooking. Not creamed, cheesed or combined with any other flavor enhancers, save some fresh garlic. I don’t know why, but this dish scares the bejeebies out of a lot of folks. I love it. It makes my stomach feel good and it digests well. Maybe it was all those Popeye cartoons when I was a kid to drive me to this phenomenal vegetable. A frozen box of Pic Wik Chopped Spinach at my neighborhood Publix Grocery store is around 90 cents to a dollar. Now, there’s value!

I rubbed the Q-comm as if to induce some good luck in a run and it rang up Paterson, New Jersey, delivering on Monday morning. OK, I’ll go there for the weekend and plant myself in the middle of my original home area. I could spend months there and not see all my old friends. Somebody has got to be around. This will be a good run, provided I get to stay for the weekend.

I pointed the Fat Cat back up I-75 to Cincinnati, again, to the shipper to pick up a hazardous load for a food processing company in New Jersey. Think about that one for a moment. It was an easy navigation over the mighty Ohio River to the Queen City. I don’t know why they call it the Queen City, but I’ll report the news to you when I find out. My Grandmother, Dad’s Mom, lived in Cincinnati as a young girl, and I recall seeing some sort of paperwork describing Cincinnati as the Queen City. So this nickname isn’t new at all.

All loaded and fueled up, I cracked the whip on the Fat Cat and it was on to the Garden State. As I rolled her up I-71, the temperature dropped considerably and snow began to fall as I had Columbus in sight. Here we go again. I think this was snow storm number ten this year. The storm strengthened through Pennsylvania and by the time I was in the middle of the state, I was down to forty five miles per hour. My driver’s side windshield wiper blew out on the top, leaving me only a three inch slot to look out. I adjusted my air ride seat to put my eyes right at the little arc of relative clarity as conditions worsened.

I finally came upon a truck stop and ventured in for a replacement. I approached the parts counter and inquired about such a part. The gruff looking man there, seated comfortably on a stool, grumbled to me that I had to go into the other part of the store. When I found myself on the other end of the building, a young fellow behind the counter retorted in an annoying nasally voice that the wipers were somewhere along the back wall. Well, there were no wipers along the back wall and I kindly asked again and received a rather rude reply of “you got to look, they’re there someplace.” I did find some on the end of an aisle and thought, the hell with this, I’ll just go further down the road looking out a sliver of clear windshield. I’m not going to reward this crappy behavior with my business. I put my drink that I was going to get back in the cooler and left.

I found another truck stop of better people about twenty miles down the road and located the perfect replacement. Now that I could see clearly through the windshield, the snowstorm was beginning to subside approaching eastern Pennsylvania. Figures.

Before long, it was over the Delaware River and back home. Sort of. I was tired from driving in the storm and dropped the Cat down in the TA at Bloomsbury at Exit 7 in familiar territory. I'd been here several times before and the TA has a good restaurant.

Every time I come into New Jersey, I’ve been in a fairly good position to visit old friends in relation to my location. Time can be tight and sometimes I get called right back out when I think I’m going to have a little visitation furlough. This time, I would get to visit with some good old friends. It was great to see our old friend Lori Dobson in Clinton. We laughed so hard telling old stories over Pizza, I could have had mozzarella cheese come out of my nose. I’ve known her and her sisters and brother since the Seventies. We talked about Bob Swensen’s annual delivery of “S” and “O” cookies at Christmastime. We knew what the “S” was for, but the “O” ones have remained a complete mystery all these years. I worked at the A & P with her Mother, Ma Dobson in the store butcher shop. The meat room stories that came from that era at that grocery store is a War and Peace sized book in itself. Top comic writers couldn’t come up with the stuff that went on there. There are lots of people even today to attest to that collection of characters who worked, and I use that term very loosely, at the Pluckemin, New Jersey A & P. We had a lot of fun in those days. Someday, I will tell those stories when I can come up with enough fake names to protect the innocent.

Sunday arrived and I met up with my long lost pal, Jeff Crosby for lunch at Cracker Barrel. Jeff lived in my neighborhood and we went all the way though grade and high school together. It was good to see him and re-live some old memories and talk about where we’d been and hope to be since our last visit. Jeff reminded me of the last time I saw him and his better half, Bonnie. It was when I worked at Magic 98 in Central New Jersey in the 80’s. They came in during my evening show there for a tour and nice visit. Too much time has gone by since that time.

Early Monday landed with a thud and way too quickly as I awoke to the Waltons Theme on my phone alarm. It was time to head up I-287 and 80 to Patterson for a 7:30 am delivery. The early morning commute was surprisingly smooth and I made good time getting there. As I’m driving around downtown Patterson, I’m continually amazed at the stupidity or boldness of people here walking right in front of my moving truck as I drove nearer to my destination. Were these people brain dead? Or perhaps trying to be knocked down so they could sue me and get some money? Personally, I’m not walking in front of any moving truck, I don’t care if you’re going to hand me a million bucks. As I continued, a guy on one of those motorized scooters that people who can’t walk use, drives right off a perfectly good sidewalk right into the middle of the road right in front of me! He’s not riding near the side of the road, or next to the curb, but right next to the yellow line in the middle of traffic! Does this man have a death wish for himself? Is he deaf or even blind? Maybe this man is just plain stupid. All these thoughts ran across my mind in an instant. My favorite funny man, Ron White, put it best in one of his routines once. “You can fix bad eyesight, you can fix bad hearing, but you CANNOT fix stupid.” Then again, maybe there were Superfund Toxic Waste Sites here that polluted the environment so badly, that people are missing key brain functions from ingesting that stuff in one way or another.

I was glad to get out of a town where everyone was trying to kill themselves . I scurried back to the relative safety of the Hampton stop off I-78.

After a short rest, my Q-comm offered a run to Dayton, Ohio from Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Now, it would be back to the Buckeye State and another visit to Dayton. From Dayton, I would travel back down to Cincinnati for another pick up. I’ve got to get a clicker counter to gauge the number of visits there. Then from Cinci, I would get to travel back down south again to the Lonestar Nation. Time to rummage about and come up with the appropriate hat. I like Texas. A lot.