| Crapperton's amazingly huge hole |
| Dear Friends, in the late 80's or early 90's there was a commercial on TV whose theme was that "it's all in the name". The example it gave was that no one would want to visit the Grand Canyon if it were called "The Amazingly Huge Hole". At that time I remembered that CRAPPERTON has an amazingly huge hole! There are two primary streets in CRAPPERTON that intersect at a small shopping center. The shopping center consists of a department store and a supermarket at the furthest point from the roads. The rest of it is just one big parking lot, but right near the juncture of the two roads is a small building that has never really been able to find an identity. At times it's been a gas station, a quickie mart, and a BBQ fastfood place. I don't know what it is now, and I really don't care. The parking lot is normally full of shopping carts nobody bothered to return to the stores, as well as wads of "chawin' tobaccy" that people spit out when exiting their "veehikles". Stepping in that is right up there with stepping in dog mess! So between one of these roads and the parking lot is this huge gully, running for several yards, that I've "affectionately" named "CRAPPERTON's Amazingly Huge Hole". I've never been able to find out what the gully is for, but I suspect it's some sort of a drainage ditch. And what a ditch! It's well over six feet deep and quite wide, so there are little paved embankments you drive over to get into the parking lot, and a culvert (I think) runs through the embankments. If you ever fell into the Amazingly Huge Hole, you'd have quite a time getting out of it. And if you accidentally drove into it, it would cost an arm and a leg to get your car out because you'd have to hire a crane.. "How could that happen?" you may ask. "Doesn't the Amazingly Huge Hole have a barrier to keep people away from it?" Well, the last time I looked it didn't. But the interesting thing about the people of CRAPPERTON is that they would rather deal with safety issues after a major catastrophe has happened, and even then they prefer to wait until someone of importance is injured before they take action. You must remember that towns like CRAPPERTON are divided into the Rich and the Not-Rich. The Not-Rich could die like flies before the city would enact any safety precautions. Let me give you an example. There is a railroad that goes past CRAPPERTON at which several people had been killed because there was no barrier that came down when a train was approaching. (I believe there was a warning light, but you know how people often think they can make it over the tracks before the train gets there.) Anyway, one time there was a carload of children of the Rich who were out joyriding and, yes, you guessed it, their car was struck by a train at that railcrossing and they were all killed. Oh, the hue and cry that went up! Memorial services, interviews, finger-pointing! "Why hadn't anything been done about that railcrossing? Didn't the city realize it was an accident just waiting to happen?" Blah, blah, blah! The issue of installing a barrier had, indeed, come up in the past, but it was always voted down. Now, mind you, it was very tragic, of course, that those kids were killed, but had they put up a barrier ages ago, when or before the first Not-Rich person was killed there, then this tragedy would have been avoided. But that's not the CRAPPERTON way. Of course, there's a barrier there now; it went up soon after the accident. Now a few years ago I convinced my mother that it would be funny to dress like tourists from the 1950's and pose by the Amazingly Huge Hole. We could then have a picture taken that we turned into a postcard. I wanted to carry a fishing pole and have my mother put her hair up in curlers with a scarf lightly covering them. My mother was all keen for the idea and we started planning it all out, but my sister begged us not to do it because CRAPPERTON had had a lot of bad publicity nationwide due to some "unfortunate" incidences in the town. I can't tell you what they were, Dear Readers, because it would be too easy to figure out what town CRAPPERTON really is and the last thing I need is for a bunch of "tobaccy chawin'" yokels to be hunting me down! That just reminded me of the giant spinning milk carton, but that's a story for another time. Go back to important matters Go back home |