KEEP YOUR DRAWERS CLEAN #2

Well alrighty then! I had so much fun doing the belt buckles post that I thought I would try at least one more similar. Who knows what I will find next week.

Monday was house-cleaning day at Mushy’s, a bi-weekly chore I share with my lovely bride of 26 years, known affectionately as “Sweet Angel’s Baby’s Doll Face” only to me. Now the secret is out and I’ll catch hell from the B&Ss-in-law about it!

During my cleaning tour I decided to clean out another drawer and a couple of World’s Fair, Yosemite Sam, and VOLS glasses that are collecting dust on my bedroom display shelves. This shelf holds my prize Mustang and AC Cobra Hot Wheels collection and gives my room the appearance of a little boy’s room. What the heck…I am a 60-year-old little boy and will forever be so! I dare you to try and make me otherwise!

Anyway, back to the intended task –

Appearing in the upper left corner is a tiny little sheriff’s badge from the Smoky Mountains. Who knows how long this has been waiting around to be seen and handled again? It’s kind of cute with a little black bear in the center.

Extending across the top are two crab-eating utensils obviously from Hooter’s! They reminded me of the day I embarrassed my brother-in-laws for cussing out our waitress. It went something like this; she took our beer orders, left, and almost immediately went back to the table she was previously flirting with – young dudes, naturally! We noticed the beer bottles were placed on the bar (We don’t drink the pitchers there because for some reason the beer has a tin or metallic taste, and we’ve even noticed it in the bottles! Must buy in bulk is all we can figure!). We kept waiting for the waitress, whose belly was pooching out over her tight orange short-shorts, and she was obviously too busy making time to notice. Finally, mostly because we are Americans and hate hot beer, my brother-in-law goes to the bar and gets the four beers.

When we are almost finished with the beer, Miss “too stupid to know old men can make car payments in tips if stroked enough,” comes back quickly, still looking over her shoulder at the “young table” and asks if we want another round. We say yes, she turns in the order, and returns to her hand-on-stuck-out-hip stance at the other table.

The beer is placed on the bar; we look in her direction, and give her 10 minutes. No beer…so Ron gets the beer the second time.

We have now had enough and have decided not to eat lunch there and want our tab so we can leave. Eventually, with dry bottles in front of us, we wave at her and finally get her attention. She wobbles over and asks if we want another round. I say NO…we need our ticket.

“Oh,” she said, “So you’re leaving me?”

“Yes, we are going somewhere where we can get waited on!”

“What do you mean? I waited on you and brought you your beers!”

“Bull shit,” I say, “Ron here went and got our beer off the bar twice while you were over there flirting with the young dudes! I sure hope they tip you as well as we would have, ‘cause you AIN’T gittin’ nothing from us!”

She threw the ticket on the table, and instantly I detected she had charged us for an extra beer. The old hand went up and I pointed out her mistake. She was furious and stormed off. We left a dime on the table – which should have inferred her service wasn’t worth a dime!

Anyway…did not mean for that to go on so long, but suffice it to say we don’t go there anymore. “You mean you go to Hooter’s for the beer?” Used too!

Moving on down from the left is: another Marlboro memento for a keychain, two dinning room cards from two Carnival cruises, a pair of 3-D glasses that still come in handy occasionally for TV, a plastic Cracker Jack bookmark, a special trigger housing for an SKS (that’s all I’ll say here about it), the backstage and onstage pass I once got for an Allman Brothers concert (once in a life time event), a tiny deck of World’s Fair playing cards, a P-38 Folding Pocket Can Opener that I’d like to say I had in Vietnam, but I actually lost that one and bought this one at a gun show, a 60 year celebration pin from K-25 where I used to work, a SecurID card I used for access to network equipment at work, and lastly but not least, a 1997 game schedule card from when Peyton Manning played at UT. Old Peyton never could do for us what Tee Martin did the next year, but he was good and did a lot for promoting our university.

You probably did not enjoy this trip down memory lane as much as I did, but I’m glad you came along anyway. See ya soon!