Saturday in October.

Had some business yesterday that required a drive out into the country, quite a ways from home in the beautiful Hudson Valley. The weather was fantastic -- cool trending to warm, sunny, and the trees were about at October peak.

I get a lot out of these drives, and I actually had some time to kill. The funny thing is, a drive in the country on a weekend would have been so BORING when I was a kid -- omigod, are you trying to kill me with boredom?!?!?! Because I was stupid and thought there was nothing worth mention beyond the city limits. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid in this regard.

Now I find it a real joy to be out where the traffic is light and the sky is visible. Rural areas and small towns look awfully good to me. I can understand why young people might want to flee their hometowns -- except for Hallmark movies, the media always tells them that small towns are spooky and creepy, places of mental illness and abuse and weird authority figures that may kill you, or barring that just bore you to death.

And there are some things I would have found very frustrating if I were a young man in such a place. I could have gone to New York and started a brilliant career! (He says with hollow laughter.) I could have met all kinds of amazing city women! (Ditto that.) And if I got thrown out of the one bar in town, the next one would have been miles away, with fifteen state troopers and sheriff's deputies staked out in between!

I can't tell you what Rural Fred would have been like, but I know that he doesn't feel that way now. I've known plenty of folks who did come to New York to pursue a dream, and even got on that ladder up, but decided they didn't like all the crap that came with it. They may not have moved back home, but perhaps to a city close to the town in which they grew up.

And hey, I did something yesterday that I never did before -- filled up in a Sinclair gas station!

I got DINOCARE!

Sinclairs may be thick on the ground where you are, but in southern New York it's always been Mobil, Exxon, Hess, Texaco, Chevron, Sunoco, Gulf, Shell, and a few others, not all of which are still around. Maybe that's why Sinclair decided to make a move into the area. And look, they brought a brontosaurus!

I drove through a couple of small cities, too. At first, on display, was all the dysfunction associated with such places -- crippled and neglected elderly with no support, hopeless teens in tumbledown houses, empty storefronts, half-empty strip malls, half-empty old A&P building (always recognizable), crappy roads, drug-addled knuckleheads, miscellaneous layabouts, people who all looked like they dressed at the Goodwill's bargain basement, whose dogs looked like they spent 90 percent of their time buried in mud (and liked it). But second glance showed parts of town that were active, industrious, and well-kept, blocks of stores and restaurants, people with busy kids, and grand old town structures still in use. People can cherry-pick whatever they like in a place like that to make a point. I can say that I'd feel safer walking through any part of that town than in half of New York City.

On a more seasonal note, I did see some great Halloween displays. My favorite:

But not at the local Lowe's, at which I saw virtually no Halloween stuff, but a whale of a lot of this:

Aieeee!! Now THAT's scary.