Super WalMart - grace grits and gardening

I’ve become a dingbat. This seems to coincide with turning 50. A coincidence? I don’t know. Dingbats can’t reason.

Driving into Mountain Home from Yellville, which I have done nearly every summer since the State of Arkansas gave me a license, I stopped at a huge Super Walmart for groceries. Afterwards with the car loaded down, I pulled out of the parking lot, onto the bypass and immediately through downtown passing the other Super Walmart….Huh? The whole point of the bypass is to bypass downtown. Right?

Although baffled about how the bypass still took me through downtown, I was extremely impressed that Mountain Home now has two Super Walmarts. Wow, Mountain Home is really growing!

The bypass in Mountain Home, Arkansas confuses the heck out of me. I drive in Dallas every day never getting lost or turned around. I know every high five interstate and ten lane expressway. I’m the Tate girl who always knows which direction points to the Mississippi River. I’m always the navigator when we go to Ft. Worth or wherever we travel. But NEVER have I gotten on the Mountain Home bypass and really understood where it starts or stops or its purpose in this town. Is it really necessary to bypass downtown when the downtown is teeny?

I think it’s a wormhole.

I was unconditionally convinced there are two new shiny humongous Super WalMarts in a town with 12,000 people and no Starbucks. Makes perfect sense to a new dingbat who is accustomed to a Walgreens on every corner.

My family hasn’t stopped laughing and talking about how I drove around and around the bypass, double counting the same Super Walmart. I attempted to explain myself, stuttering and stammering. I argued that a new Super Walmart had been built on the other end of town, near Gassville. Or maybe I really stopped in Flippin on the way in, instead of Mountain Home. You know all those little towns start to run together. (Ok I knew I wasn’t in Flippin….I was grasping…)

Two days later, still convinced I was correct and attempting to debate this with my children who could debate a politician under the table, I drove back to the ‘second’ Super Walmart to buy hamburger meat and to clear up my family’s confusion. Ready to check out, I searched out not the empty lane but the most normal-looking-checker and posed my question…

Me: Is there a new Super Walmart on the other end of town, like driving in from Gassville?

Checker: No, but there’s an old abandoned Walmart building. It’s empty.

Me: Are you sure?

Checker: Yes. (laughing at me)
Me: When’s the last time you were in Gassville?
Checker: I live there.

Me: Oh. I thought I went to a new one on the other end of town driving in from Yellville, but I got on the bypass and it always gets me so confused.

Checker: I’m gonna need to check your I.D. now.

Me: Because you think I’m a dingbat??

Checker: (laughing) No, because you are buying beer.

Me: Oh.

Checker: (looking at my license) You’re from Texas, where?

Me: Dallas.

Checker: I can’t drive in Dallas, it’s terrible.