Saturday

Here's a sure sign that you are old. I just saw a commercial for The American Music Awards and of the ten performers and groups that they featured in the commercial, I have only heard of three. I couldn't name a single song by any of the three. Speaking of music, the lovely Mrs. Sneed and I go to a local Mexican restaurant in our neighborhood many Saturday evenings. It is called El Charro Cafe. The Cafe is an offspring of the most famous of Tucson Mexican Restaurants, El Charro, which has operated downtown since 1922. Purists turn their noses up at the El Charro Cafe, insisting upon the original restaurant or nothing. We like either one, but the El Charro Cafe is more convenient. Charro is the traditional cowboy of Mexico. They are noted horseman and wear ornate clothing. Think Duncan Renaldo, in the Cisco Kid, if you happen to be a million years old, like me. Mexican cowboys are also sometimes called caballeros or vaqueros. An interesting fact about Duncan Renaldo is that he live in the country illegally and was actually convicted of illegal immigration. FDR pardoned him. The El Charro Cafe has a strolling musician, who plays acoustic guitar and sings Mexican songs. He always comes up to our table and asks what we want to hear. Since I don't know the name of a single Mexican song, I always tell him to play anything. Having him stand at our table and sing to us kind of makes Mrs. Sneed uncomfortable, because she doesn't like to be the object of attention. It used to make me uneasy, but I've gotten accustomed to it since he has kind of adopted us. I am amazed that so many people don't have the grace to tip the guy though. I can't help but notice that people mostly pretend that he isn't standing there singing or seem to have the attitude that they didn't ask him to sing. Seems very tacky to me. The few dollars that I spend tipping mean a lot to people making their living through service. In fact, the down payment for our first home was from change that Mrs. Sneed saved from her waitressing job, as I recall. And speaking of tacky, the lovely Mrs. Sneed had to run into a store this evening and I decided to wait in the car with Sneedlet, rather than taking him out of his car seat and then having to buckle him back in. While we were waiting, some people came out of the store and got into a truck parked close to us. Apparently, the wife had lost an important receipt and the man was going ape-sh*t about it. They sat in the truck while she looked everywhere for the receipt and he shouted at her at the top of his lungs. They had their windows down and so I put mine down to get a good listen. After awhile the angry guy ran out of steam and Mrs. Angry Guy gave up looking. I heard him say that he would "just go over there and if they gave him a hard time, he would kick the door down". I'm glad I wouldn't be there to see that. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky