Forever Thankful, Comparatively Speaking

November 1999
Forever Thankful, Comparatively Speaking
By Bob Coskrey

As my wife Barbara and I sat in our car on Highway 78 in Ladson that late Tuesday afternoon in September 1999, I had the opportunity to do some serious reflecting. Fate, Hurricane Floyd, Governor Hodges, and all the other feckless, blame-foisting politicians and bureaucrats had unknowingly provided me and 849,999 other hapless Lowcountry souls many carefree, idle hours in which we could ponder, meditate, and contemplate matters both weighty and trivial.

Realizing that Thanksgiving was just a couple of months away, I decided, after several hours of conjuring up ways I could inflict extreme pain, discomfort, and humiliation upon all of the above-mentioned maladroits, that it would be mentally and perhaps even physically healthier for me to channel my psychic energy into something more positive, namely, to think of some things I could be thankful for, despite the miasma of misfortune in which I was currently engulfed.

Well, after focusing on my immediate environment, which included a dingy looking, cinderblock neighborhood bar, a flea market completely abandoned by its proprietors, with all of its indiscernible merchandise piled up on tables, and Rebel Flag-emblazoned pick-ups zooming by intermittently in the opposite direction (maybe they were going to reclaim the deserted Holy City for the confederacy), my first thing to the thankful for would be that I didn’t live in Ladson. My God, it makes Goose Creek look like Manhattan.

Very shortly after that, another visual stimulus, a two-foot spurt of urine from a young boy out of the open door of the car in front of us, made me thankful that my son was 28 years old and weathering the storm from Charleston.

When this incident made me aware of the urological as well as gastrointestinal problems that obviously many people were beginning to experience, I gave thanks that we were not behind a truck full of migrant workers who had recently had a lunch of high octane chili and chalupas.

After Governor Hodges came on his helicopter radio and told us that everything was going along just great and that we should just be patient, I was thankful, for my wife’s sake anyway, that I didn’t have one of those shoulder-mounted surface-to-air, heat-seeking missile launchers.

When the guy in another care in front of me insisted on keeping a six car length distance between him and the car in front of him, I was thankful again, for my wife’s sake mostly, that I was not driving a WWII Patton tank with flame thrower attachment.
I was lucky to have a pleasant conversationalist such as my wife to talk to, and this somehow made me think that even if the man is a comic genius, I was eternally grateful that Robin Williams was not with me and we had nothing but coffee to drink.

A passing thought about my not foreseeing this prolonged delay and, therefore, bringing along some sort of game to play made me thankful that I was not involved in a team scrabble match against Tony Randall and William F. Buckley with my partner, Dan Quayle.

Occasional sightings of Ladson denizens (Mobile Homo Napus Reddus), leering feral-eyed from the drool-smudged windows of their double-wides made me very thankful that I didn’t have to dash out into the woods to relieve myself, since my inability to imitate a pig’s squeal would most certainly irritate my accosters.

My eventual use of an overrun-with-humanity service station bathroom somewhere between Summerville and Harleyville made me thankful that my Yoga training had rendered my foot flexible enough to flush toilets as well as turn on water spigots.

After we finally crept up to an intersection where other cars were waiting to join our inchworming caravan, and I politely let one car in, only to another one force its way in directly behind the first, I was thankful, but only mildly this time, that my G. Gordon Liddy-engraved Uzi was at home, which is where it is always kept, the weapon having proved to be an efficient remedy for pesky squirrels.

When we snailed through another small town, whose name I forget (just as well, no sense in offending another one), and there were people sitting on their porches gawking at us, as if the circus had come to town, I was most thankful that this was not a Saturday, since would more than likely be disrupting the weekly Yankee Yank event, in which persons in cars with north of the Mason-Dixon line tags are yanked out of their cars and force-fed okra-stuffed chitlins if they incorrectly answer the question: “What are the nutritional ingredients of a mountain oyster?”

Now that my intravehicular contemplation is over, and I am safely within the confines of my Hurricane exempt Mt. Pleasant house, I find what I am still in a thankful mood, thankful as all writers should be for experiences, no matter how grueling, as long as they’re of a muse-evoking nature, and thankful, last nut not least, that I know the actual ingredients of a mountain oyster and would, therefore, never eat one, even if its nutritional ingredients would guarantee me eternal life.