Mom, David, Beavis, Butthead, and the redneck kid

Mom got her first pedicure after she was in her 80’s, and she liked it. Who knew? She even had a favorite manicurist, David, who owned the little nail salon with his wife. I don’t have the right photo to accompany this story, so you’ll have to imagine the scene as I took Mom in for a mani-pedi one day.

Mom had become a tiny and stooped little old lady from the effects of osteoporosis. She moved slowly, shuffling along with a cane in one hand as I held the other to steady her for the walk through the parking lot of the strip mall where the nail salon sat. Although I am, of course, younger than springtime, technically you might say I was, um, approaching middle age.

As we inched along, a dusty old pickup truck with a gun rack in the rear window careened into a space near us, and a young man with sunburned skin and ripped blue jeans jumped out, almost in our path. You could even say he looked ruffian-ish in his faded t-shirt and dirty baseball cap.

As he crossed in front of us on his way to the liquor store, I noted the Metallica logo on his shirt and touched his elbow as I said, “You know, I never can remember. Is it Beavis or Butthead that wears the Metallica shirt?”