I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to pick up a package of Jake’s thick sliced cheese and to fill up with gas. When I pulled up at the pumps, there was another car parked in the space and Jake was busy putting in gas. Jake was talking with Lisa Hall and he looked over my way and called he would be with me in just a minute. I slid my car into park and sat to wait. Lisa was standing beside her car talking with Jake as he filled her gas tank. She is a right pretty woman with a wonderful voice. She always wears nice clothes and fixes her hair when she goes out. It strikes me that I have never seen Lisa out wearing sweats and with her hair not fixed up. She is a woman who takes pride in her appearance. I have not seen her since she sang at Mister Johnson’s funeral. I have often thought she should have taken up singing professionally, but Lisa seems happy enough with her life in Soagie and with her family. I guess she never had any desire for the high pressure life of a professional singer.

Jake finished filling Lisa’s car and she slid in behind the wheel and moved to park beside the store. I moved into the space in front of the pumps and Jake asked, “Fill ‘er up?” I told him, “Yes.” and he smiled and started the pump. I checked my billfold to see how much cash I had on hand. It’s getting so you almost need to go to the bank and float a loan before you can buy a tank of gas these days and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. The long view is for gas prices to keep moving up.

Lisa walked up as I was talking with Jake and asked about my new dog. She drives by my place on her way to and from work quite often and she has not seen the dog for a while. I told her that sorry dog disappeared just as sudden as he showed up. Mutt, as I called him, just appeared at my house one evening and took up with me. He was a clean and well mannered dog, leash trained and house broke. Someone had certainly taken some time with him. I asked around as for who he might have belonged to and no one came forward to claim him. After a couple weeks I took him to the vet to have him checked over and get his shots. The bill set me back over a hundred dollars, but Mutt seemed well worth the price. He was a good dog and a constant companion. It seemed he had come to stay. Then one Sunday morning he was laying at my feet as I read the paper when he decided to be sick. He tossed his cookies on the floor and, since I do not have carpet, cleaning up his mess was not going to be a problem. He waited a minute and was going to be sick again, so I decided to carry him outside where he could make a mess where ever he liked and I would not have to clean up after him. By the time I had him to the door, he was as limp as a wet dish rag. He lay on the floor as though he was dead, though he kept breathing. I decided to call the vet and took him to the clinic. The animal doctor arrived and examined him. Mutt was passing blood by this time and the vet advised keeping him a few days.

To make a long story short, the vet put Mutt in a small cage and stuck a tube in one of his veins to keep him from dying of dehydration. Mutt stayed two days and appeared completely recovered when I came to pick him up. The bill came to four hundred plus dollars. That was pretty steep but, considering the care that had been taken and that Mutt appeared completely recovered, I had no complaints. After all, I had come to care quite a bit for that dog. About two weeks later, Mutt come into a romantic mood and was trailing a small female dog I had never seen around the yard. He followed her off and I have not seen him since. I had plans to have the vet clip Mutt’s ideas of romance in the bud, but I guess I waited too late. I told Lisa Mutt turned out to be the most expensive stray dog I ever had. She laughed at my story and agreed that males could be expensive on occasion.

We were inside the store by this time and Lisa said she had come to Charlie’s to pick up a few things for the men who were putting down her new carpet. You can find most anything you are likely to need at Charlie’s from the week’s groceries to fertilizer to select hardware items and home repair supplies. While Lisa was looking through the home repair, she asked if I knew anything about putting down carpet. She was mostly at sea for that kind of thing. When she and her husband, Ricki, decided to add a new room to their house, Ricki promised to take care of all the details and arrangements, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Ricki has a one man garage up near East View where he does a right brisk business. He has been working all hours of late to keep abreast of the work that has been coming in. Of consequence it has fallen to Lisa to handle the arrangements for the new room and the new carpet. She explained her four kids are growing up and are needing more room to themselves and it seemed a good idea to give the two oldest boys the bedroom Lisa and her husband were using now and build on a larger room and small bath for themselves. And even so Ricki had promised to arrange for the carpenters and the plumbers and the carpet people, Lisa has found herself up to her eyeballs in dealing with all the problems that habitually arise when an addition to the house is built on.

It’s not just that Lisa is trying to handle all the extra responsibility she had not bargained for, but when something goes wrong and the plumbers do not show up on schedule or the carpet with the special pattern she and Ricki picked out fails to come in when promised, Lisa gets the blame. I laughed and asked Lisa did she not remember that men have been claiming women are to blame for whatever goes wrong since time began. I reminded Lisa the first recorded words in the Bible of the first man were, “Lord, it’s the woman’s fault!” Lisa smiled at that and insisted that even though she and Ricki sometimes have disagreements, he’s a good man and she would not trade him for anyone else in the world.

END