That's Just WRONG

Today I was out driving and I saw something that just made me shake my head and think, "Leona Hutchinson would roll over in her grave if she saw this." Leona Hutchinson was an older lady I knew when I lived in Marshall, MO. We moved to Jefferson City when I was 12 so that tells you that this memory is very old and, quite possibly, not entirely accurate. For example, her last name might have been Hutcherson, I don't really know for sure. For the sake of this story, it's really immaterial whether her name was Hutchinson or Hutcherson.

I remember three things about Mrs. Hutchinson/Hutcherson:

First, she had clear plastic slipcovers on her furniture. The kind with raised bumps on them that left indentations on the back of your legs when you got up. I now find it odd that she had these slipcovers because she was a widow and had no children (that I know of). So from whom was she protecting her furniture? Probably dirty little kids like my brother and me. For all I know, she put them on five minutes before we got there and took them off as soon as our car left the driveway.

Second, she always had a candy jar filled with these round sticks of individually wrapped candy. The candy had stripes on them and I'm pretty sure my brother and I never took our eyes off that jar the whole time we were there. Mrs. Hutchinson/Hutcherson and my parents would be having a conversation and Jeff and I would sit stock still, as if in a trance. I'm sure my parents told us we could only have the candy if we were well behaved children. So we were. Anything for a stick of that candy. Once we got it, we'd suck on it until we'd formed razor sharp points and the proceed to stab each other to near death on the way home.

Third (and this is what made me shake my head), every year she bought a new Cadillac. It might have been every two years, but one sounds so much more decadent. And back then, Cadillacs were The Bomb. Huge, huge cars that were so long they actually bent in the middle when they turned corners. Only people who "came from money" had Caddy's and you could almost bet that any woman who stepped out of one would be wearing a long fur coat and elbow-length gloves. Ladies like Cruella DeVille.

So today, when I saw a Cadillac that looked more like a Ford Taurus, I was dismayed. It was tiny, tiny, tiny and was nowhere close to being a Bomb. Maybe a bomb (little b), but for sure not a Bomb (capital B). And, to make the situation even more pathetic, it had a spoiler. You know, to me, that's almost a heresy. I'm guessing Mr. Cadillac is rolling over in his grave as well. Sigh.