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Blogs by Marge B. Fulton
Crazy Quilt 9/5/2008 4:50:12 AM
A crazy raft of characters in a small town. Kentucky was the happy hunting ground. Shawnee, Cherokee, and others crossed our piece of the Applachian mountains in search of game. The place where we live was once a wilderness and in many ways it still is. Untamed, unspoiled and unencumbered by conventional thinking. On the fringes of society you can say or do what you want. Quite often, the really bizarre people here get all the media attention.
Last week I saw a man walking near Food City. His clothes were all tattered and he had a black hat on. I guess it was a hat or it could have been a black rag. He looked like an ancient Johnny Depp kind of pirate. I wondered if this was the man people say lives in a cave down from Wal-Mart.
You never know who you will run into these days. In the next county years ago, there was a woman who everyone said had gone mad. She drove her car in the nude. This vixen wanted to get stopped by the cops. I wonder if she wore a seatbelt.
Most small towns have them; crazies in our quilt. In the city you don't notice these folks. You don't dare look them in the eye in the subway station. They could be anybody and become nobody.
Here in small town America, those wild characters add local color. They have a name. Like a three legged dog, they defy the odds. I love the stories about people who do crazy things. There is one I ran across about a black man who worked in the old hospital many years ago. When a body sat up in the morgue, they say he ran down the hall and jumped out a window to his death. Others say he didn't die. The legend has many variations.
The term "Urban Legend" is well known. Country or rural legends are often obscure. In the country, you can sometimes get away with things and people respect your privacy. We have elbow room and apply elbow grease.
The man who lives in his old station wagon and has even put skirting around the bottom, is not seen as down and out. He is independent and resourceful. He seems more like a cross between John Wayne and Dustin Hoffman. He is just another piece in our crazy quilt.
