Small Town America--Meg and Ernie

     “Ernie!” Meg exclaimed as she looked out of bleary eyes through her storm door.

     Her exclamation expressed shock, surprise, disbelief, wonder, maybe even a little fear.

     Meg and Roe participated in the guidance of the small community.  They both held seats on various boards and committees.  They had plenty of support from the community, enough to keep getting elected and appointed to those various boards and committees.  Unfortunately, such positions also create detractors, adversaries, enemies, even.

     Ernie probably fell into the latter category.

     In a recent campaign, a poster touting Roe for a political position appeared on Ernie’s fence smack dab in the middle of town.  The poster had been defaced, Roe’s picture doctored unfavorably, the campaign message altered, also unfavorably.

      Some community members voiced their opinion that such tactics were unsavory and uncalled for in a decent community, which we certainly were.  Ernie blamed Roe.  Roe had defaced his own poster and pinned it on Ernie’s fence in the dead of night when no one was watching, to make Ernie look bad.  So Ernie claimed.

     Once many years ago, in a fit of discontent with the city dads, Ernie had filed for and run for mayor.  He won.  He beat a respectable businessman.  The businessman was so incensed and humiliated to have been beaten by an iconoclast like Ernie, he vowed never to have anything to do with community government ever again.  So far, he has kept his promise.  He probably wouldn’t have been a very good politician, anyway.

     Ernie held the position for maybe six months.  Apparently, he found life on the dais as unfair and stacked against him as life had been on the floor.  Anyway, he abdicated, mothballed his local interests, and moved to California.  The council chose his replacement from among their own and life went on, a little more smoothly than before.

       Some years later, Ernie returned to his hometown.  He drove the vehicles and displayed the equipment of a man who had started and run his own successful business. 

     Things picked up kind of where they left off. Ernie bought a local beer joint and started an eatery, a successful one—while it lasted, which was less than a year.  He was living on the premises.  When he closed the business, he continued to live there.

     While Ernie was away in California, the city had struggled through a zoning ordinance.  Ernie’s place was zoned commercial and private residences were verboten.  Ernie was in violation of the zoning ordinance, another of the city’s attempts to infringe on his right to use his private property as he saw fit.  He refused to move. 

      The battle was joined again, this time with Meg and Roe the human faces of that amorphous evil force called “the city”, the thing trying to control private persons.    

      It had been a long day for Meg.  Cataract surgery thirty miles away in the Oasis where bigger and better medical facilities attracted doctors who came from yet bigger cities to staff satellite clinics on weekly and monthly visits.  The clinics were equipped well enough that the itinerant physicians could do outpatient surgery.  Meg had been one of many patients to be treated by the ophthalmologist on that day. 

      The physician and the nurses and the checkout lady had all impressed upon Meg the necessity of using the eye drops, the same ones that had been administered by them while she completed the post-op procedures, at regular and frequent intervals for the next two days.

      As soon as Roe helped her into the house, she searched for the drops to administer them to herself as directed.  The little squeeze bottle in the plastic zip lock bag was not to be found.  She looked in her purse, in the carryon bag, everywhere.  Roe went back to the car.  Not there.

       It was in near panic she called back to the clinic and got the checkout lady who was just about to leave for the night.  What should she do?  Was it possible she had left the eye drops there?

    A slight pause while the lady looked, then sure enough, the drops in the bag were right there on the counter.  Meg had neglected to stow that bag safely in her purse before leaving.  Would the local pharmacy be able to duplicate those drops?  Doubtful.  Then Roe would just have to make the 60-mile round trip again.

     But wait, there was someone standing at the receptionist’s desk who was from Meg’s town who was just headed back that way just now.  This person volunteered to deliver the drops and save 60 miles of carbon footprint.  She would get the drops sooner and be more nearly on schedule, a lot closer than if she had to wait for the hour it would take Roe to make the round trip.  Oh, thank goodness!

     So it was that thirty minutes after she hung up the phone, Meg’s doorbell rang, and there stood Ernie on her stoop, holding out the plastic bag with the eye drops.

      “What the . . . .?” Meg wondered.  Then it dawned on her.  Ernie was the local standing near the clinic’s front desk when Meg put in her emergency call.  Had Ernie regretted volunteering when he saw whom the drops went to?  Had he been reluctant to back out when he found out?  Had the nurse, knowing Ernie and Meg were from the same town, pressured Ernie into delivering the eye drops?

     Then, more sinister thoughts flickered through Meg’s mind.  Had Ernie doctored the drops?  Did the bottle now contain some kind of acid that would blind her if she put it in her eyes?  There wouldn’t have been time for Ernie to think of that and to actually make the change, she reasoned. 

     The need to administer the eye drops took precedence over all else for the moment.  “Oh thank you, Ernie!  You saved us a long trip and I have to do these eye drops.  I just had cataract surgery.  I really do thank you.”  She took the bag proffered by Ernie.

     Ernie turned and stepped off the stoop.  He muttered something as he left.  It might have been “Welcome.”  Meg wasn’t sure.  Meg didn’t have time to watch Ernie or wave goodbye.  She had to get those eye drops in.

     When that job was done, she did have time to speculate.  Roe had nearly missed the whole episode, it had been so brief.  They pondered together.  Had Ernie changed his stripes?  He had offered to do somebody a good turn when he volunteered to act as courier and save that somebody a 60 mile journey.  True, he probably would not have volunteered if he knew whom he was serving.  Or had they been wrong about Ernie all along?

     In the next week or two, after a suitable recovery time, and a suitable time to cogitate on things, Meg made up a batch of cookies.  She arranged some nicely on a fancy paper plate that would not have to be returned and paid a call on Ernie.  He answered her knock and accepted the gift.  The conversation was brief and one sided, Meg again expressing her gratitude and asking Ernie to accept her gift as a token of her appreciation.  Ernie said little if anything.

      Did Ernie eat those cookies?  Like Meg, did Ernie suspect that some of those chocolate chips might be Exlax?  Meg said she wasn’t concerned about that.  She had made the effort.  She had returned Ernie’s favor.  What he did with her gift was his business. 

      There it ended for the time being.  Both fighters returned to their corners it seemed, to rest and to prepare to resume the battle, maybe. 

    The zoning commission granted Ernie a variance which allowed him to continue using his former business place as a residence.  Ernie used his place to manufacture, display and sell some artistic creations, so he wasn’t entirely out of compliance.  The fence that began life as the enclosure for a beer garden now protected Ernie’s privacy and hid from public eye things that might not have found favor in the eyes of the compliance officer.

      Ernie has managed to find himself in court since then, not as defendant, but as plaintiff, in a harassment suit.  Imagine that.  Meg isn’t involved in this one.

     Life goes on in small town America.  Neighbors settle their disputes with words, mostly.  There was a fistfight at a county commissioner’s meeting 20 or 30 years ago.  It didn’t last long.  Most folks sided with the aggressor.  Harry had it coming to him, they said. 

     Aren’t we glad that issues are settled with elections and meetings and, once in a while, in the courtroom?  It could be worse.  Watch the news.