My work here is done

It’s been a weird week, y’all, and while I’ll spare you the details I will divulge that Chihuahuas don’t make good sledding dogs.

In other news, I haven’t been still long enough to string together one long thought, but that doesn’t mean that several meaningless ones haven’t been bouncing around my brain.

For instance – and this is for you folks who have lived in Iowa Park for longer than you’ll admit you’ve been alive – Cabe’s vs. Peppy’s?

I was having a conversation with Shane Kimbrew and my husband over the weekend and this seemingly mundane topic came up and caused quite the controversy.

We lived in the same general neighborhood, and Peppy’s and Cabe’s, both convenience stores, stood on each end of Fourth Street. The neighborhood kids managed to keep both alive.

Today, the buildings are occupied by a church and chiropractor’s office.

Back then, though, they were occupied by candy, Icee’s, huge pickles in glass jars, homemade barbecue and everything you forgot to get at the grocery store.

I usually walked to Peppy’s where they had a drive-up/walk-up window, but my eight-year-old self was known to cheat and head to Cabe’s because they had cherry Icees and it smelled like chopped BBQ and happiness in there.

But one time in junior high, Staci Newman and I rode her horses through the drive-up window at Peppy’s after trotting to town from Peterson Road. I’m not sure what our thought process was other than maybe neither had a place to hitch our horses.

With or without horses, Bobby and Shane were strictly Cabe’s devotees and adament about it, and now I sense it was because that’s where the cool kids were, meaning the ones riding in cars instead of horses.

And we thought politics were polarizing.

But like a good journalist looking to hear from the best sources, I turned to our Leader Readers and others who grew up in Iowa Park with a last-minute post Wednesday on Facebook. And I just listened.

It turns out a lot of variables were involved like whether or not they had a driver’s license, rode a bike or if it was closer on foot; how many returnable bottles they could find to cash in and buy some candy and an Icee; where particular boys lived or just the way the place smelled.

Those commenting remember the trails cut from each neighborhood through fields leading to each of the stores. One woman commented that she and her friends would walk to Cabe’s because the path went by some cute boy’s house. There were stories about burritos and bike rides and comic books and memories of simpler days.

Most people who commented on those Facebook posts liked both stores for all of these reasons, but I realized the favorite store was never the point. The memories were.

And with that, like with the Chihuahuas, my work here is done.