Low Rent District – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have read a few of my recent posts, you know that I have written about my family’s departure from Hawaii on our way to Tacoma enroute to North Dakota and the East Coast.  I was ultimately headed to the East Coast to Fort Lee, Virginia to attend the Logistics Executive Development Course.  The stops in Tacoma and North Dakota were to visit relatives.  That reminds me, I should probably tell you my theory of relatives sometime.  Not now, but sometime in the future.  See, Einstein had his theory of relativity, and well, my theory is kinda like that.  Only, my theory is about relatives.  Kinda neat, huh?  Oh yeah, the stop in North Dakota was also to retrieve my red Chevy van.  There was the really rough landing that my luggage experienced.  To be brutally honest, my luggage was beat to hell.  But enough about my luggage.  After I settled all of the claims for my lost, damaged, and destroyed luggage with the airline and the Army, my family and I relaxed and enjoyed some vacation time with our relatives in Tacoma while also celebrating my son’s birthday.  After we had celebrated my son’s birthday and visited all of our friends and relatives that would see us and visit with us, we decided it was time to head for North Dakota.  We got to North Dakota without any problems, but there were a few hiccups.  For example, my brother Jethro was supposed to show up to pick my family and I up at the airport.  Well, that didn’t happen.  My brother Ron ended up picking my family and I up and we stayed at his house for a couple of days.  During which we went to the county fair where I got trapped on the Zipper with my niece.  No.  I didn’t say that I got my junk trapped in a zipper.  Damn!  There was nothing about Mary happening that day.  Then we went to my parents’ house to pick up my red Chevy van so that we could travel to Minneapolis and on to Fort Lee, Virginia.  While there, we went to see a Minnesota Twinkies (Twins) game all the while being outclassed by an eighty-year-old spinster during batting practice.  Finally, on the drive east toward Fort Lee, Virginia we experience a biblical flood and highway robbery.  Now, once we arrived at Fort Lee, Virginia, the first order of business was to sign in at the Logistics school to let everyone know that I was there and then to sign back out on leave.  My second order of business was to get my family checked in at the guest lodging at Fort Lee while I searched for a suitable residence while I attended the Logistics Executive Development Course.  Since school started in August.  I had to get both of my children registered for school as well.  The search for a place to stay took about three days.  We finally settled on a trailer house in a trailer park that was close to Fort Lee in the town of Petersburg called Ford’s Trailer Park.  The trailer park was on the bus route for my son’s school, which was good.  And we registered my daughter in a Catholic school, which sent out a shuttle to pick up students.  So that took care of transportation for my children to and from school.  The trailer park was very close to downtown shopping.  However, it did have some drawbacks.  The first drawback was that you had to drive down a dirt road to get into the trailer park.  I say that the road was dirt but it was really a mix of dirt and gravel.  Okay.  Not a big deal because the dirt road wasn’t all that long.  It was maybe a quarter-mile long at best.  The trailer that we rented was really nice, but we later figured out that it was in the “low rent district” of the trailer park, if you catch my drift.  If you don’t, this “low rent district” was for the “other-colored” people.  The family living next to us was also military, so I thought at first, that was why we were put next to them.  Wrong.  We were really put next to them because they were black, and my family wasn’t white enough.  All the exclusively white people were closest to the trailer park manager.  I had never thought we were categorized as “other-colored” people?!?  But it seems like we were.  Now, the trailer park manager was one of these guys that looked like he came from the back woods and the swamps and drove an old rusted pickup truck with a rifle rack in the back window that only held a 12 gauge Mossberg shotgun.  He claimed he used the shotgun to hunt varmints and critters and deer and such in the swamps.  Varmints and critters and deer and such my ass.  I’m pretty damn sure he was a card-carrying member of the KKK.  I cannot prove that.  I never really saw him running around wearing a white sheet with burning crosses or none of that shit.  But I am pretty sure all the same.  He seemed like he was the personification of “Johnny Reb.”  He had an emblem of the Confederate flag superimposed on the back window of his pickup truck.  He couldn’t outright mess with us.  Cuz, he knew that us military folk had some weapons training (and probably some weapons) of our own.  For the most part, mister trailer park manager didn’t mess with us.  But he didn’t socialize with us either.  He made it perfectly clear that we were not in the same class as him.  Although, I am not really sure what class that was.  I had experience dealing with white people from south of the Mason-Dixon line before.  But I was always regarded as a white boy.  I was just always considered a Yankee, even though North Dakota wasn’t in that war.  That’s the thing, you learn how to mimic that accent right quick and, in a hurry, to keep your ass out of hot water.  I was damn good at mimicry.  My kids and my wife, not so much.  This was the first time that I was really considered “other-colored.”  Mister trailer park’s wife was easy enough to get along with and she was the one that we had to deal with most of the time, thank goodness.  Most of the time her husband wasn’t around.  He was probably off working somewhere or attending a rally, if you catch my drift.  I always conducted business with the trailer park office so that I could keep my wife and my family away from the office as much as possible.  As a result, while we lived in that trailer park, we didn’t experience too many exercises in futility.

***Racism is something that can be unavoidable in life. It is unfortunate that it occurs and in no way is condoned by the staff here at Springtime Folly. But as something that happened during the course of the story it must be mentioned, but in a way that is no way meant to approve of or condone the type of behavior discussed.***

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