Last weekend Marsha and I needed to go to Kokomo. We had time constraints, so it needed to be pretty quick in and out, but we also needed to eat. There are some pretty good restaurants in Kokomo, but we were limited on time, so it pretty much had to be a fast food place. However, fast food is not usually good food and is rarely healthy. You might see my car at the McDonalds drive-thru first thing in the morning, but that is a coffee run. Other than that, we don’t do fast food much.

          On Saturday, though, it really couldn’t be helped.

          We talked about it on the way. Neither of us could come up with anything. But then a place came to mind. I’ll refrain from naming the place for fear of litigation, but they serve little hamburgers on little buns with little boxes of fries. The building is white and sometimes it looks like a castle. But I cannot use the name. We had passed this place many times in Kokomo and it always got us talking about our experiences in Tennessee with this same place (it is a chain) when we were first married. Like most married college kids in the mid-1970s, we tended to be pretty broke. The prices back in the day at this place were really cheap. This was back when McDonalds advertised their basic ‘meal’ for under a dollar, so the white building in the rough shape of a castle had to be cheap to compete. Like fifteen cents for one of those tiny hamburgers. You could buy a bag of ten for $1.40. We ate there on sort of a regular basis.

          And the stories we have! Some of the people we remember seeing, some of the people who worked there, running into people, we talked about it all the rest of the way to Kokomo.

          My favorite story of the white building in the rough shape of a castle concerned the auto parts store where I worked while in college. McCoy, Inc. Cleveland, Tennessee. I was the only non-family member who worked for McCoy, Inc. Consequently, I got all the drudge jobs. Didn’t matter, though. I needed the pay check and working on cars or with people who were working on cars appealed to me. Every day was a late day, but Saturdays were long and hard. Cleveland, Tennessee had a popular stock car race track called Cleveland Speedway. This was before NASCAR was the force it is now and the only place you could watch racing was at a stock car track. And Southerners love their racing. The track in Cleveland ran races on Friday and Saturday night. On Saturday morning, I arrived for work at 6 AM to open the store. There would always be a line stretching for two blocks. These were fellas who had raced the night before and now needed to fix their cars so they could run that night. Broken tie rod ends, fractured drag links, busted rear ends, wheel bearings, blown engines and always new brake shoes. What made it harder was that these guys would have a Chevy engine mounted into a Ford body with a Plymouth suspension. You had to make things fit where they were never intended to fit. This was something I was actually very good at. The most common replacement items on Saturday mornings were engine mounts. Engines under high torque and straining against mounts that were not designed for those engines resulted in broken motor mounts.  Because I was always there early on Saturday I became known as the motor mounts go to guy.

          Anyway, this one morning the owner of the local tractor supply dealership came in. 6’7”, 300 pounds, rough talking, demanding, nothing you ever did was good enough. He wouldn’t come in until 9 when he knew the owner of the store, Mr. McCoy, was in. But the big man wouldn’t let the owner wait on him. He wanted me. He loved to berate me, call me names and in general try to tear me down. I’d smile, tell him Jesus loved him and try to satisfy whatever his need was for that night’s race. Inwardly, I just didn’t like him.

          On this morning, we were trying to match up motor mounts for him. He had come back into the aisle with me. I was squatted down going through the mounts while he told me what a worthless slug I was. Behind us, against the wall, was a floor to ceiling rack of batteries. Batteries for cars, trucks, tractors, semis, boats, you name it. Beyond the wall was the parking lot. All of a sudden there was a loud bang behind us. The owner’s daughter-in-law had pulled up to the building and then hit the gas instead of the brakes. She bounced over the curb and into the wall. I didn’t know what happened, but something in my mind click and said “DANGER!” I came out of that squat at full speed, knowing those batteries would be coming down. The tractor supply owner was right there, so my shoulder buried into his gut and his body folded over mine and we shot down the aisle. We got about halfway down when, out of balance with his body, I lost my footing and went down on the polished floor. I was on top of the big man and we slid to the wall, ending up under the exhaust pipes. I was higher than him, so I hit the pipes, knocking a lot of them down on us. Meanwhile, behind us there were dozens of batteries hitting the floor and bursting. Battery acid began to eat at the floor and the fumes filled the air. I rolled off the guy and sat up, looking behind me and knowing that I was going to have to clean that mess up. Meanwhile, the big man jumped to his feet and yanked me up to my feet. His face was beet red, he had lost his cap and his hair was sticking out all over the place. ‘Oh boy,’ I figured. ‘Now I’m dead meat.’ “BOY!” he screamed in a falsetto voice. “YOU SAVED MY LIFE! YOU SAVED MY LIFE!” Then he hugged me like a long lost brother. He pushed me away but held onto my shoulders, tears in his eyes. “YOU SAVED MY LIFE!” I tried to tell him that he was just in my way, but he wouldn’t hear it. All he knew was that he was alive. Then he hugged me again. He left after a while. Everyone did except me. I did have to clean the mess up. Every bit of clothing I had on, including my shoes, were ruined by the acid, but the boss replaced everything. Breathing in the fumes was hard, but that wall was down, so I had air.

          Now, you might ask, how does that figure into the white building that was roughly built like a castle? We had one of those in town. From that time on, every Saturday at noon, the tractor supply owner would walk into McCoy’s and call me out. “PREACHER BOY, COME OUT HERE!” I’d stop whatever I was doing and go up front. “FELLAS,” he would shout, “I USED TO GIVE THIS BOY A HARD TIME! REALLY HARD! AND HE’D JUST SMILE AND TELL ME JESUS LOVED ME! MADE ME MAD! BUT I TELL YOU, JESUS DOES LOVE ME! WHEN I WAS GONNA BE KILLED, JESUS PUT THIS FELLA RIGHT THERE FOR ME! HE THREW ME OVER HIS SHOULDER AND GOT ME OUT OF HARM’S WAY, THEN, PRAISE GOD, HE SHIELDED ME WITH HIS OWN BODY AND KEPT ME FROM MORE HARM! YES SIR, I BEEN IN CHURCH EVER SINCE! THIS HERE BOY SAVED ME, THEN JESUS SAVED ME AND NOW I AM SAVED TWICE OVER!” Honestly, I tried to explain, but he was determined to tell the story his way. And, every Saturday, when he showed up he had a bag of a dozen of those little hamburgers for me. After he would leave I’d split them with the boss’s son. After all, his wife was the one who crashed the wall.

          We were laughing about that as we walked into the white building the other day. Marsha said, “You know, I don’t think we have been in one of these places since those days. Wow. 41 years!” Yes, 41 years since we had enjoyed one of those wonderful little burgers.

          We got our food and sat down. It was more expensive, but it has been 41 years. We both bit into our little wonderful burgers at the same time. They were……….awful. We both looked up and made faces. Marsha choked her bite down and said, “So that’s why we haven’t been here in 41 years!” The buns are steamed in what tastes like steamy grease. The burgers are like a spreadable paste. The fries weren’t awful, but they tasted like the buns. The pop was good, but it came out of a preloaded tank. Neither of us finished our meal.

          It got me thinking about memory. Our good memories have many elements. We have good memories of our church because of weddings or baby dedications or whatever, and we forget the things we didn’t like. We don’t think of the rotted step that broke or when the furnace went down on that cold day. We tend to push the memory of conflict and hardship to the back of our minds. More pleasant to remember the stuff that made us smile until the day comes that the memory is better than the reality. Always nice to take the trip into the past, especially when the past has been sanitized. But, we can’t live there. We live in the present and in this present, we have things that need to get done. Which means there is work to do and we need to get to it.

Blessings.