Today I went to my hair appointment before I left Idaho and drove to the Seattle area bunker. The lady who was just finishing up in the chair next to me turned and said, “Hello Barbara Scott.”
We had a pleasant short conversation about Dixie where she is trying to sell a bar and house — a remote and beautiful part of Idaho. We briefly talked about Boomershoot and another long distance shooter she had read about in the Lewiston Tribune. After she left a man in expensive “casual” dress sat down.
While he was getting his silver grey hair cut, he started talking about his former student who he had seen working at Tri-State. Apparently this was a typical “Idaho boy” — his words — who was poorly motivated, not very smart, married by the time he was twenty, etc. My ears perked up.
“A typical Idaho boy?”, I said.
He said, “Oh, yes. A typical Idaho boy.”
“Well tell me about this, I am very interested”
He said, “Of course this is an East coast point of view.”
And he told me all about it repeating the “this is an East coast point of view” line several times.
I said, “That is fascinating! I’m just a physical therapist and I can’t wait to tell my husband and son who both work for Microsoft all about it. They’d like to hear about a “typical Idaho boy.”
He muttered again, “It’s just an East coast point of view.”
About that time his hair dresser who is another Idaho boy chimed in, “Well, I’ve got all my teeth.”
I congratulated him and said something like, “We just got our first indoor toilet last year and really like it!”
The conversation died. The man looked kind of truculent.
I was having fun with the conversation and was really disappointed because there was a great deal I hadn’t got to say. Like my son graduated Suma cume laude from college and he was a National Merit Scholar. My husband is an Idaho boy who has been written about in Newsweek, Outside Magazine, Idaho Magazine, Motorcyclist magazine, and has been on television and radio several times. And my brother is a professor at Loyola in Chicago and I would have liked to have mentioned all the savvy men who like to work in lower stress jobs in the Idaho paradise where they can spend their off time hunting and fishing instead of spending hours commuting to work. But that’s just an Idaho point of view.