Guest Post: Scotty's

By JoJo McGuire

When my wife and I went on our very first trip together, we knew it was truly love when we both stated that we never ate at restaurant chains or places we had tried before. Weird but true. We both like to support the “little man” and independent places. We have discovered some of the best food that way…

John Boy’s in Pigeon Forge is an awesome place with the best fried green tomatoes we have ever tried. The best bagels and lox, covered in tomatoes, onions and capers belongs to Skidders in Tampa, Florida. Even the Celestial Seasons Tea Company in Colorado had great stuffed tomatoes that we raved about and even took a picture of. These are places that we would gladly break our rules for to eat there again. (Truth be told, we did at both John Boy’s and Skidders.)

There are pitfalls as well. We should have learned early on that Chinese buffets and park lodges often do not lend themselves to great food. But no, it took two park lodges in Indiana and countless buffets through New York for us to discover that.

You would also think that on a drive of almost 600 miles, a straight shot down Interstate-75 to see our son, that there would be plenty of places that are new and interesting. There are. Does this make them good?  Umm, let me think…

No.

After five or six round trips from Cincinnati to Atlanta, I can safely say that on that stretch of highway, there are more places that should be avoided than visited.

Case in point. Do not ever stop at a place that claims it has “Best B-B-Q on the interstate.”  Especially if those words are followed by  8-point font stating- clean showers, truckers welcome, open 24 hours.  You cannot read it on the highway while going 70 miles an hour but you can tell it is there. Run and scream. You will sit down, order B-B-Q, not barbecue, and be served a scoop of canned meat on generic Wonder Bread. Later that night, you will also wonder where the rash on your back came from (the filthy booths) and why there is still a metallic taste in your mouth when you used plastic ware to eat.

Last year we were travelling down I-75 South and saw the Thacker Christmas Inn, the same inn that we see every time we hit Tennessee.  We decided that this time we would eat there. We got excited and wondered about what we would experience. Would it be Christmas décor? Would we get to drink wassail? Would goose be on the menu even though it was the middle of July?  We excitedly exited and turned towards the parking lot. Looking up, we saw open balconies and a seven foot gate surrounding the entire property. Looking into the rooms through the holes in the wall, you could see that there was not going to be any Wassail and goose today. How many times had we driven by and seen it? How long had it been closed?

Who cared? We were flipping starving and my mother- in- law (yes, she was with us and we enjoyed every second of it!!!) was about to see me on a food rant ready to break down and eat at a chain. There goes the “son-in-law of the year award.” (Unless I still get it for mentioning you here?)

So, there we were, starved and shaky. But wait, hadn’t we seen another sign at the exit? One for  Scotty’s, Home of the Famous Scotty Burger. It looked independent and was definitely not a chain. Let’s try there.

We pulled into the rock-covered parking lot and immediately noticed the covered porch with a sign that read: Liar’s Corner. It looked bigger than the building we were about to enter. Pushing open the grease covered door, I looked down. Was that a spittoon? Who cared? I was starving.

We entered the one room building with ten vinyl covered seats at a counter, picked out the least cracked ones and placed our naked, sweaty legs on them. Looking at the menu, it was fairly easy to order: Scotty Burgers for my wife and I, nachos for the other two. The waitress (missing her front tooth like the Alan Jackson song) turned on the grill to heat it up. Looking at all of the grease she pushed to the back of the smoking grill made me scope out the emergency exits. (Just the greasy front door.)

I watched as she took a handful of nachos out of a bag and placed them on a plate, using an ice cream scoop to place the meat on top and then, holding the mound underneath the spigot, proceeded to push the lever down to dispense the cheese. (Think movie theater style). She quickly threw them somewhere to get hot. The microwave?

She got the drink orders for us: sweet tea, Dr. Pepper and water. My daughter immediately took a drink of her Dr. Pepper and exclaimed that it was watery. My mother-in-law busily poured sugar into her tea without looking. She took a drink and gagged; it was the Dr. Pepper. The two quickly switched and I thought about how glad I was that we would soon be done. The nachos were served, steaming hot and looking like a blob of school food that we would make the janitor clean from the walls. The Scotty Burgers served with fries; old school greasy sliders that could clog your arteries just looking at them.

We dug in too busy feeding our hunger to notice anything else. We did not even notice the fly, buzzing nervously inside the sugar dispenser, desperately trying to escape his prison by banging against the greasy glass walls that surrounded him. Nope, we did not notice him until we’d finished the food and Jo had poured more sugar into her tea.

We survived the Scotty’s debacle and still insist on stopping at independent restaurants on our many drives down I-75. We figured nothing could be as bad as Scotty’s – but that was before we stopped at Pizza Inn in Jellico, Tennessee and discovered that the “secret sauce” on our pizza was mustard.

The Gift

Anyone with a cat knows that they like to bring their owners "gifts." Sometimes they only bring them up to the doorway and lay them on the ground for us, but sometimes they make it past the door and bring their gifts all the way into the house. Yesterday was one of those days.

Lucky ran in through the screen door with a bird in his mouth. He dropped it at my husband's feet (because he loves him the most). I suppose this was intended to be the most generous gift of all -- the bird was still alive and immediately began fluttering its wings and trying to fly. As Lucky watched, ready to pounce again lest his prize get away, my husband jumped up from the table and acted upon the real gift; the gift of a little unexpected excitement in our otherwise routine day.

We had four things to deal with -- five, actually, if you count trying to keep our daughter from witnessing what might have gotten ugly. We had to grab two cats whom we knew could be quick, and whose appetites had been whet by the frantic bird and feathers on the floor. And we had to grab the dog, who thought that barking and circling the bird was the best game ever.

We tag-teamed. I grabbed the dog. My husband grabbed Lucky and threw him in the garage, and the other cat ran off. Then my husband had to capture the bird and get it outside without any of the animals following him.

We felt a little bad that Lucky was not only denied his catch, but was banished to the garage and missed all the action. We praised him later for being such a good hunter, but cats don't really understand what we're saying. We'll have to just assume he saw how excited we were about the bird, and leave it at that.

Talking Heads



These medusa heads were part of the decoration
in the Kids' lounge aboard the Carnival Legend cruise ship.



Caleb, Amber and Tina sipped their Hurricane Hawaiian punches as the heavy beat of hip-hop music bounced through the room. Most of the pre-teens and young teenagers were dancing. A few were racing around the room as though they were playing laser tag. The trio of new friends were taking a break, refueling with sugary drinks before dancing again.

"He likes you, you know," they heard a vaguely-distant voice say. The three youngsters looked at each other with wide eyes, wondering whether they were imagining the voice.

"Did you do that?" Caleb asked Tina as he leaned across the table to be heard over the blaring music. Tina leaned in toward him, too, secretly excited to find their faces so close together.

"What?" she yelled back and smiled. She cupped her hand to her ear and Caleb leaned in closer to repeat his question.

Amber smirked as she watched Tina in action. Boys were so clueless. Anyone could tell that Tina was just acting deaf to get closer to him. Amber shook her head and took a sip of her drink. She searched the dance floor, looking for someone new to hang out with if Tina and Caleb were going to hook up and make her a third wheel.

"Try the blond boy with the blue-striped shirt," she heard a voice say behind her. Startled, Amber turned around. She had been looking at the boy in the blue-striped shirt. Was it that obvious? Amber bit her lip and leaned in to interrupt Tina's conversation with Caleb.

"Hey, you wanna go dance again?"

"Not now!" the same unidentifiable voice chided. "He was just about to ask her to dance."

"Yeah, and you were going to introduce yourself to the blond boy," another voice said.

The three teens leaned back in their chairs, their mouths open as wide as their eyes. "Who was that?" Caleb breathed. They each scanned the space around them. The other tables were empty and no one else could have been heard so clearly above the noise. With eyebrows raised and bodies stiff, they rose from the table and moved to the dance floor, still searching behind them for clues as to who had spoken. But the seating area behind them was empty.

"Ah, youth," the head on the left said to the right. "It truly is wasted on the young."

I Love Lucy



New York City as seen from the Empire State Building.



As I was watching an episode of I Love Lucy last night, I started to wonder: how many hours of my life have been spent watching I Love Lucy? It must rank in the hundreds, if not thousands. I've seen every episode; many so often that I have lines memorized. When I thought about that, it scared me at first. So many hours of my life spent watching the same thing. But then I shrugged and realized that that was hundreds or thousands of happy hours spent.

I first started watching re-runs of I Love Lucy when I was a teenager. My mother introduced me to it and I was always amazed that she knew what episode it was simply by the opening scene. She was quick to announce whether it was "a good one." In my first rounds of watching them, they were all good, but like her, I've grown to have my favorites.

For me, none top the zany antics of Lucy meeting William Holden in Hollywood. That episode makes me laugh out loud every single time I see it, and I've seen it more times than I can count. I also love the Vitameatavegamin episode, and the classic candy factory and freezer episodes. But there are a few more obscure ones that I like, too, such as the one where Lucy and Ethel make salad dressing to sell, the one when Lucy wears a heavy headdress and tilts down the stairs, when Lucy tells Ricky she's pregnant, and when Lucy dons a short, dark Italian-style wig and pretends to be a stranger flirting with Ricky.

I'm running through the lines and the scenes in my head as I write this. It is that ingrained in me. It's comforting to listen to the notes of the opening theme and picture the black and grey heart on the screen. It takes me back to mornings when I sat and drank coffee and played cards with my mother before we each went to work. I'd moved out of the house as soon as I finished high school, never guessing how homesick I would be. My job as a lunch waitress didn't start until 11:00, so I went back home to my mother every morning and fell into the comforting routine of cards, coffee, and Lucy.

I later introduced Lucy to many friends who'd never watched I Love Lucy before. They all loved it and I found myself watching all of the episodes again.

Then I had a daughter. I Love Lucy was playing on TV one day when she was about five years old and I begged her to watch it with me. She loved it and we ended up watching an I Love Lucy marathon. That Mother's Day, she bought me Seasons 1-4 on DVD. She has her favorites -- the one in which the gang finally leaves for California, and the one where Ricky and Fred try to teach Lucy and Ethel equal rights by leaving them to wash dishes after dinner at a restaurant. It's fun to watch them through her eyes, and interesting to see which ones she likes.

Ahhh... they're all good. We've watched them many times, spending many hours on these same classic episodes. Yes, I've definitely spent thousands of hours watching Lucy. Those have been good hours in my life, first with my mother and now with my daughter. And I'm looking forward to many more.

Guest Post: All I Could Take in the First Half Hour

by Joann Storck



7:45am

The cars are already pulling up and people are wandering up the driveway. We haven’t even put our stuff out! Doesn’t anybody care that we don’t open til 8:00??

8:00am

I was answering a woman’s question about how you fold up a Pack and Play when my eyes fell on the old gentleman gingerly walking up the driveway with his dutiful, round wife following closely behind him.  His “kind” always came to Yard Sales, but not because they wanted to find a bargain to buy, but rather an audience for their worn-out humor. 

8:05am

The woman I was helping with the barely-used 21st century model of a good old playpen from my day was turning her head this way and that as she considered making the purchase.  “Will you take less?” she asked me as I knew she would.  “Suuurrrre,” I answered with a hint of sarcasm in my voice.  After all, if I had only been asking for 50 cents, someone would have asked if they could have it for $0.49  

8:15am

Every single person has asked “Will you take less?” Maybe, if Hell froze over, and the Mississippi ran backwards, we would have another Yard Sale and at that fingernails-on-blackboard event we could put price tags on everything that said  “WHAT I WANT” and under it “THE ‘LESS’ PRICE THAT I WILL TAKE”.  Not a bad idea!

8:23am

A skeleton of a woman, dripping cheap jewelry, wearing skin-tight jeans and two tank tops with her black bra straps hanging out, stopped to ask me if we had any jewelry.  Her over-tanned skin was like a leather purse.  Whether fake or wadded up bobby socks, her boobs stuck out of her size 0 body like huge water balloons.  It was windy out, so maybe she wore them to stay grounded?  She brushed back the bangs of her bad, ginger-colored wig and I saw that she wore “diamond” rings on every finger.  My friend had put good, expensive jewelry in the yard sale and I was fairly sure this was not the right buyer for her things, but the skeleton tried them all on anyway. I just knew she was going to ask, “Will you take less?” No. I won’t.

8:25am

The old gentleman I had seen earlier, walking at a snail’s pace, was now in front of us.  He appeared to be bewildered, or mute, or confused about where he was and who we were.  My friend asked him, “Is there something we can help you find?”  He steadied himself in his thick-soled shoes and answered, “Yes.  Find me a blonde 49-year old with 19-year old legs!” he chewed the words like a cud.  “You can keep her!” he swung his flabby arm to indicate his long-suffering (my supposition) wife who was standing behind him.  He waited for appreciative laughter, and against my will I chuckled for him so he would move on, if he could.  His wife shook her head of white curls as if to say, “Isn’t he something?”  Yes.  He WAS something:  One of the leftovers from an era where women were put down and subservient to self-righteous men. 

8:30am

The old guy wasn’t moving from his spot -- his stage, as it were -- so I got up and made myself available for those wanting to know the least I would take.  Funny.  A half hour in and these customers had been the most I could take.  

Bubbles

One of the dolphin sculptures on display outside the Georgia Aquarium.

Dear Diary,

Someday when  I grow up I’m going to have a pet dolphin. I’ll name him Bubbles. I’ll ride on his back to Mexico and teach him how to do flips. Then he can teach me how to balance a ball on my nose. If we meet any penguins, we'll try to teach them how to fly. That’s all, Diary.

Love,

Bubbles Best Friend

Answer: Richard Bach

The Anonymous guesser was right!

I am Richard Bach, best known for authoring Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a story about a seagull who flew for the love of flying rather than merely to catch food. The book, which included many photos of seagulls in flight, contained fewer than 10,000 words. It was a bestseller that broke all hardcover sales recorded since Gone with the Wind.

My other works include Illusions, One, and Out of My Mind. My books present my philosophy that our apparent physical limits and mortality are merely appearances.

I am a pilot and most of my books involve flying in some way.