I just spent a weekend in Mariposa and couldn't help noticing the differences between the haves and the have nots up here. Mariposa is a small town with only about 2000 residents, and even though the county was originally the largest of California counties in terms of geographic size, population, and income (when it was the center of California's gold mining activity) it is now one of the most sparsely populated and poorest counties of all.
Bob and I are lucky to be one of the "haves", as the PG&E inspector noted when he came up to our property to assess our request for underground power lines."You folks aren't from around here, are you?" he twanged. "You know how I can tell? You have all your teeth." And so it started - I began noticing the haves and the have nots all over town. Tom, the owner of the electrical and well supply store, was definitely a have not - all his lower teeth were gone, until he took a trip one summer to Latvia and got a whole new set for a fraction of the cost of 1-800-DENTIST. The Burger King employees are haves. They know how to read between the lines of the employment solicitation posted on the drive-through window. It reads, "Are You Good Enough To Wear the Crown?" Dental crown, that is. It's not explicitly stated, but they all know what it means. The sign on the front door might as well say "No Shoes, No Teeth, No Service."
I was walking down the main street yesterday after finishing dinner at the local pub when a group of Japanese tourists disembarked a bus returning from Yosemite. Suddenly I noticed a woman unabashedly taking a picture of me. What? Ok, sure, I was covered in red dirt, but that's because I was digging in my garden and I don't have a house to clean up in. And yes, I was wearing boots and hoisting myself into a 2 ton pickup truck, but I needed the boots to make sure I didn't get bit by a snake when walking through the tall grass on our property, and I had to drive Bob's truck because I needed to shuttle him and his friends on their rafting trip down the Tuolomne. Ok, fine. I guess it's conceivable in some stretch of the imagination, that an unschooled foreigner might have mistaken me for a closet redneck. Obviously she didn't notice that I had all my teeth, and they were straight too, and Crest-white-strip enhanced. What is she, blind??? Enduring the humiliation, I quickly opened the car door and jumped in, after picking up the half empty bottle of Bloody Mary mix which rolled off the car seat and into the street. Don't look at me like that! It was left over from a morning break while sea kayaking the day before on Tomales Bay. I didn't have time to clean out the car because after kayaking we went to the beer festival, got home late, and then came straight up to Mariposa at 6 the next morning. And NO! That chew on the dashboard doesn't belong to me! It's Garen's! Whatever. Take your stupid picture. I have better things to do than worry about what some tourist thinks. Like purifying the well. Or cleaning up the mess left on my road by Glen's cows. Or siphoning the septic tank. Or something.
