The winter always seems so Christ-less right after Christmas, and people always act like it is a sin to mention it.  The nights are long, the days are hard and cold, and all of it serves to make the very thought of spring seem foolish.  I was thinking about all of that on the 30th of December, headed into a local grocery store to eat lunch with my father.

We had just passed an old man walking out.  His beard was scraggly and long.  He had on  a pair of dirty blue jeans, mostly tucked into rubber overshoes.  The right side of his shirt was tucked beneath his belly, and the left side hung loose, flapping in the breeze from the bottom of his old coat.

In his hands he clutched two grocery bags, holding two buckets of fried chicken and three 2 liters of pop.  It would be his meal for the next few days.  Santa doesn’t make the rounds for grown ups, I guess, and on the whole we don’t do it often either.

A couple of days later, courtesy the Stanford Marching Band, people would be up in arms over the band’s portrayal of rural life.  Being part of an area damned by a marching band didn’t offend me none.  It had already been damned by a President as “clinging to its religion and its guns.”  What was the damnation of a marching band compared to that?

Somehow the President and the band had missed “clinging to buckets of fried chicken and two liters,” but I have some hope they will correct it next time.  It is an old song anyway, always played in the key of affluence, and always tone deaf to the world outside my door.  It’s sung by the President, it’s played by the band, and lest I watch it, it is hummed by me.

Last year I read a Facebook post hoping for the day that beef production in this country ceases.  I objected to their desire to put my neighbors and friends out of business.  They offered me the assurance that it would only be done after an extensive retraining program, moving all of us onto bigger and better places in life.

A bucket of chicken in every bag, I suppose, and when we get them retrained there is always tofu.

“Like we did with the coal miners in Kentucky, then?”

Sturgill Simpson could have told him how that worked out.  We don’t hear Sturgill, though.  We don’t see the guy coming out of the grocery store.  We never notice the sour note of that which we think we know but isn’t so.  And the band always plays on.

Old King Coal, Sturgill Simpson

Many a man down in these here hills
made a living off that old black gold.
Now there ain’t nothing but welfare and pills
and the wind never felt so cold.

I’ll be one of the first in a long, long line
not to go down from that old black lung
My death will be slower than the rest of my kind
And my life will be sadder than the songs they all sung

Old King Coal what are we gonna do
the mountains are gone and so are you

They come from the city to lend a hand
carrying signs saying, Shut the mines down
We ain’t looking for pity and you don’t understand
So go back to your city now cause this ain’t your town

My Great Grandfather spent his days in a coal mine
and his nights on the porch in a chair.
Now he’s in heaven and down here in hell
the rivers run muddy and the mountains are bare