The Lost Folks

So, this weekend my wife and I were out in the country, inspecting the house we are having built. When, along came a car. It pulls over to the side of the road bordering our property.

Now, like I say, we are out in the country.

And when you are in that situation, you get rather nervous about trespassers.

However, I see the car out in the road, backed off a bit from the driveway, not blocking our exit or anything. I’m thinking it isn’t going to be a robbery or carjacking or anything.

Anyway, the man getting out of car is an older citizen.

He walks deliberately up to my side of the car, leaning down at my open window.

“Hello?”

“Hi.”

The other guy is obviously nervous about being out here as well, for he sees my tshirt and says, “Oh, you’ve got a ‘Bass Pro Shop’ shirt on. “You’re okay.”

I nod — glad to know he thinks so.

I notice him to visibly relax as well.

He continues.

“We’re lost.

We’re from Illinois…” I interrupt him with, “Boy, you real-ly ARE lost.”

“No, I mean…we are from Illinois, but are looking for a place around here.”

He gives me a name and an address.

“I called my daughter, who is supposed to meet us there, but all she can tell us is that there is a lot of corn around the meeting place.”

I think he has noticed that we are presently talking on a plot of land that is surrounded on three sides with long stalks of green field corn at the moment.

Matter of fact, half of our county is presently planted in corn.

My wife, who is behind the steering wheel, leans forward, looks at him, and points this

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‘Wordaholic’’

By Robert L. Hall ROBERT L. HALL (cont.)

out.

“That isn’t going to help very much.”

So the man gets back on his phone and asks his daughter where she started from to find the place.

She tells him, the Kroger store in town.

We could just as well have told him to start his trip back in Illinois and it would have been just as helpful.

“Follow us to our house down the road and we’ll make some phone calls.”

We do so.

Go to the house, where my wife finds her smart phone and we attempt to find it on Google maps. No go. So, we network with our friends, while we are out on the lawn standing there, chatting with these visitors from up north. I think my wife accessed the ladies’ prayer chain at the church, and I visualized half the cell phones in Eastern Arkansas blowing up simultaneously as a result.

Our visitors are looking around at our place as we do so.

When we finally figure out where the place is, we tell them; then we get ready to pile into our vehicles in order to lead them to it.

“You don’t have to do that,” the man says.

“By the way, are you retired?” he adds.

I tell him that both my wife and I are…yes.

“So am I. From the Air Force.”

He is an unusually wellspoken man, tall and trim, and from what I imagine is probably of officer cloth.

His wife, attractive and petite.

“But you really don’t have to do that,” the man insists once more.

“I know. But I have ‘senior privilege,’” I inform him.

“That means that I don’t have to hear anything I don’t want to and I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. But in this instance, I will. This is The South, and we have a reputation

uphold.”

Smiling, he nods and we step back into our vehicles. We go for several miles, along roads which meander between crop fields, before we find the place in question and our tail pulls in behind us.

“You are here. Our friends were right about the location,”

I point to the road address, which is on a plate, attached to a pole which is leaning over and looks like someone just stabbed it into the ground on a whim.

“I believe THAT’S why we couldn’t find the address on ‘Google Maps.’” I say to my wife, who agrees with me.

The man from Illinois pulls up to my window and calls from his car, waving, “If you are ever in Illinois, look us up!”

However, I don’t think that’s going to happening any time soon — unless, that is, I become seriously lost — like him.

Only, I didn’t tell him that.

But, who knows?

Those two people were very nice and appreciative and we felt good about helping them.

So, having finished with our business, my wife suggests: “You want to get some ice cream as a reward for our good deed?”

“Sure thing,” I respond and sit back in my seat, savoring the thought a medium vanilla cone.

“See?” I tell her.

“Sometimes you do get rewarded for a good deed.

Even if you have to pay for it yourself.”

Robert L. Hall is a resident of Marion and has a Bachelor’s Degree in music from the University of Memphis and a Master’s Degree from Florida State University. He is the pianist for Avondale Baptist Church and a writer of fiction on Amazon eBooks.