I’ve never climbed Mount McKinley in Alaska or even been to Alaska, but there’s a huge part of me that suspects that when you get to the top of that mountain peak, you’ll find a Dollar General (DG) store. Right outside of it likely sits a 16-year-old Hyundai Elantra with a fender that’s duct-taped together. That’s the car that the kid who works there drove up to the top of the mountain for his shift. So when you get there, don’t be too pleased with yourself for your accomplishment. The DG kid is not impressed. He’s never impressed.
I’m also guessing that between the top of that mountain and the foot of it, you probably will pass about 54 other DGs, which are there just in case you forget something, like a USB cable, a laundry basket, a crossword puzzle, your toothbrush, or some Doritos.
In all honesty, I’m relatively new to the whole DG thing. We only moved to this beautiful rural area a couple of years ago, so DGs weren’t all that necessary in the old neighborhood. But here, they are a necessity. A very affordable necessity as well.
Cal Turner opened the first Dollar General store in 1955 in Springfield, Ky. The rest, as they say, is history. The chain now boasts more than 20,000 stores across 48 states.
What the stores lack in charm, they usually make up for in price and selection, that is, depending on how badly you needed whatever it was that brought you into the store. When people go into a Dollar General, they go in to buy, not to shop. Usually, you’re there for a specific item, but somewhere between the front door and the thing you came there for, you may see about three other things you didn’t know you wanted, but now you do.
One of the things that happens when you move into a small-ish town, you can get to know people pretty quickly, and every new person you meet will help you connect the dots on this new community of yours. People do double duty. The barber is a volunteer firefighter. The retired public works director is now one of the township commissioners. The guy who changes my car’s oil is a leader in his church, and so every time I get my oil changed, he lays a little of God’s lovin’ on me as well, which I don’t mind.
It just so happened that on the day we closed on this house, the lawyer who handled the closing also happened to be one of our very nearby neighbors.
After we took care of all the paperwork, I asked him if he had any advice or tips for living in the neighborhood. Of all the things he could have said, he limited his insights to just two things: “It gets dark up here at night, so we all keep our outside house lights on. On Halloween, we only hand out full-sized candy bars, and we get a lot of kids.”
So, last year, our first Halloween in the house, I did not want to disappoint. Dutifully, I made the short trip to the nearest DG to see what kind of candy would work. What I realized is that the vast majority of the kind of candy they sold in any real quantity for Halloween almost entirely came in “fun-sized” bars. Sure, you can buy some full-sized bars at DG, but not in the quantity and price I wanted.
And so, off I went to Sam’s Club, where they were ready for me and about a thousand other fellow Sam’s Club members. That’s where I loaded up on my all-time favorite full-sized candy bar, the original Hershey bar. After I stocked up on both chocolate and non-chocolate varieties of full-sized candies, I stocked the shelves at home and waited for Halloween night.
My neighbor Bob was right. We had a ton of kids, and I ran out of the chocolate bars and most of the non-chocolate candies as well. Doing the math, based on the number of candy bars I handed out, I’d estimate that two-thirds of the kids weren’t from our little neighborhood at all. That’s when I realized that since so many of these kids live on farms and in very sparsely populated areas, the ones who live within a certain radius of our neighborhood come here to trick-or-treat.
I’m not sure what your thing is on Halloween night, but mine is to be the one who gives out the candy. My wife sometimes joins me, but nowadays, she likes to walk the neighborhood with my son’s little guy. That leaves me to hold the fort, playing some kid-friendly Halloween music, sitting next to a lit Jack-o’-lantern, and meeting all the kids and their parents as they come by the house in their costumes. That’s when I’ve had the chance to get to know some of the neighbors we hadn’t met yet, and to catch up with some I already knew.
The kids here are nice and polite. They come from good families for the most part, and it shows. Needless to say, during election season, you don’t find too many yard signs with Democrat names on them, and you still see a few signs around here proudly proclaiming “Trump-Vance 2024.”
This year, I’m even more ready for Halloween night, and I’m really looking forward to it. I already made my stop at the DG for incidentals, and my “big shop” at Sam’s Club for the full-sized candy bars and a few other things. We’re stocked up, charged up, and by the time the kids come knocking, I’m going to be caffeinated up. The weather promises to be a perfect crisp fall day and night. I’ve got two college football games that I want to watch and a couple of steaks from a nearby farm that I plan to grill.
This is MAGA country, to be sure. As I drive the country roads around here all year long – because I know what it’s like to live in a blue city – I don’t take any of this for granted, not for one second. This is the heart of America. Cliché as it sounds, that's literally how I feel, and I’m loving every minute of it.
Reading what I read, watching what I watch, researching what I research, and knowing what I know from experience, it’s easy to get frustrated with the never-ending battle against the left to try to keep America on its straight-and-narrow path and its upward trajectory. The woke left can drive you nuts sometimes.
But every now and then, you see a sign that tells you all is not lost, and that the America we love is still alive and has some fight in it. Not long ago, that sign for me came literally in the form of the marquee outside of a little honkytonk bar on one of my regular routes. The sign read, “Tonite: Midget Mud Wrestling.”
Sure, it's a little thing, but when you chuckle as you read it, you also realize that no matter how hard leftists try, they can’t keep us down. We’re still going to laugh, have fun, have a few beers, and not surrender to their wokeness. And they can’t do a thing about it.