Meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans with a double side of banana pudding. Now that sounds like one of my wife’s meals or my mother’s or maybe the Stigler Café. But it isn’t. Who knew that such a meal could be prepared in the gourmet kitchen of a gas station? I don’t recall the gas stations of my youth having more than a coke case and a Tom’s jar with peanut butter crackers.
Reeder’s. This is not the first time I’ve written about Cheryl Reeder’s business model, just the most recent. I do not know of another service station where I can get blackened wasabi salmon.
As I was picking up our meatloaf, I saw a friend who lives in a nearby walled and gated community. It is bounded by a stone wall that looks at least 10 feet in height and a manned entry gate.
When I got home, I heard our President and our previous President were going to be on the Mexican border on the same day this week. When I think about the Mexican border and these men, I think about walls.
As a species, we have long been enamored with walls. Walls that keep people in and walls that keep people out. Walls of Jerico to a gated community in midtown Tulsa. Walls make us feel safe.
Walls keep coming up in conversation. I got to thinking about walls in general. Has there ever been a successful one? The Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall?
Hadrian’s Wall. Now the Romans constructed that wall to keep themselves safe from my ancestors. My ancestors kept getting naked and painting themselves blue then they came screaming down the hillsides, terrorizing the Roman Legions and raiding the villages. The Scots and Picts came to use the wall as an “all the outs in free” line. They raided south of the wall and then retreated to safety north of the wall. The Romans were hesitant to follow.
The Berlin Wall, in 1961 Russia (USSR) built a 96-mile-long wall separating East Berlin from West Berlin. It was built to keep folks from leaving East Berlin and resettling in West Germany. Despite heavily armed guard towers, manned by soldiers willing to shoot and kill people attempting to escape into West Berlin, people kept coming. The seductive lure of freedom and a better way of life was potent. The wall failed and was abandoned in 1989.
We built prisons with all types of walls and fences. We put people behind walls to punish them or to rehabilitate them. How is that working out for us? Sir Issac Newton of falling apple fame said, “We built too many walls and not enough bridges.”
Maybe if we could all have meatloaf for lunch, we wouldn’t need so many walls. Just thinking.
Any time you see a turtle on top of a fence post you know he had some help. – Unknown.
