Collected By

CLYDE EDGERTON

Mail Carrier

Because we regularly receive mail from Blufford Sparks, North Carolina, we will begin with this issue a series of letters from those members of that community who correspond with us regularly.

DEAR AMERICA:

I think I know what is wrong with the situation in the United States, and what to do about it. The economy. If people would just look at my Aunt Dormalee we would stop needing companies to hire people because nobody wouldn’t need much money. And with the lack of companies around there wouldn’t be such a deep national debt because why would you be needing to spend money when if less money is spent then less is needed to be borrowed because there wouldn’t be all that tax money, too, is the way I understand it, if I understand it correctly.

But let’s get down to brass tacks. Big companies wouldn’t be needed to produce paper towels, for example, and this is just an example, because Aunt Dormalee, for example, right now today is using just one paper towel and one paper towel only, all day, and that is the very paper towel she started using in the winter of ’91, which is when the one she’d been using since ’89 just disappeared into thin air.

There is no reason each American can’t do such as this if we all stop being so damned prissy. What are you cleaning up with a paper towel anyway? You’re cleaning up dirt. So why do you need something clean to clean up dirt with? You don’t. Why wouldn’t something dirty work just as well? It would. I defy you to find one germ in Aunt Dormalee’s kitchen, except on that one paper towel.

So see! Aunt Dormalee is right. And you, America, are wrong.

Don’t laugh, America.

It’s the same with ice. Aunt Dormalee when she finishes with a glass of ice tea, washes off all the ice and puts it right back in the freezer where ice belongs. I do not lie. The very ice cube most Americans would use for about five minutes or so, Aunt Dormalee will use for one or two months. She’ll use that same ice cube until it’s a little bitty tiny thing—and then that well-used ice cube just finally disappears on her, all used up. Aunt Dormalee is one true American if you ask me. Think of the electrical energy it takes to freeze water in our nation’s refrigerators every year. And every household in America, just about, I’d say, has a refrigerator which uses precious electricity. I’ve seen refrigerators in American homes that are equal in size and complexity to a small Navy destroyer.

You should be ashamed, America. Not only do you have to use brand new ice every day, you’ve got to have a delivery system which costs 2200 dollars to deliver it to your Dixie cup which my guess is you don’t use that more than once either.

Do you? And why the heck not? It’s wrecking our economy.

Now when you apply my Aunt Dormalee’s way of life to underwear and cornbread and leftover food and air conditioning (Aunt Dormalee would kill her bluebirds before she would use one ounce of air conditioning) and come on America, what the hell is wrong with the weather that God gave us. For crying out loud. Get off your lazy, wasteful butts and go to work on this economy, and why shouldn’t the economy be economical when that’s the root word anyway.

And the next time you blow your nose on a kleenex, if you must use a kleenex, look at that kleenex and just realize all the room for other nose blows that is left, and then think to yourself, what if there is a way, after that kleenex is used twenty-five times, you could somehow start all over? Well, friend, Abracadabra, I’ve got the answer for you—it was invented ages ago. The handkerchief. Yep. Who in their right mind needs a kleenex. Speaking of that—why do you need a paper towel in the first place?

Now my Aunt Leotie, my real serious nonwasteful aunt, she don’t have paper towels, and has been upset with Aunt Dormalee for some time for starting to buy them in the first place. She has always said—Aunt Leotie, that is—she has always said, “What is underwear for when it wears out except to do what paper towels do and why would you buy a handkerchief when you got scissors and old underwear?”

Aunt Leotie, she’s the one says she wouldn’t set foot past the vegetable bins in the grocery store if her life depended on it. And she wouldn’t be in the vegetable bins if she hadn't got too broke-down to keep up a garden.

So I ask you America, why?

Yours in good sense,

Bob Lark

P.S. Aunt Leotie is the one that kept putting off her hip replacement operation until she couldn’t hardly walk—limping around all over the place—and somebody finally said, “Leotie, why in the world don’t you go ahead and get your new hip and get it over with?” and she said, “Before I get a new one, I’m going to get all the use I can out’n the one I got.”