I like the U.S.

I like it’s too salty French Fries.

I like the super unhealthy deep fat fried food.

I like the smells of vegetation.  You don’t think about it, the smell in the air you breathe every day, until you visit another country and smell their vegetation.  Theirs smells good too, it’s just a smell that isn’t home.

I like the street system in the cities.  Most of the time it makes sense, and sometimes, as recently as Dallas, it downright freaks me out when I take the top interchange (5 high) and peer down several hundred feet to the ground below.

I like the smell of 70,000 cattle being fed on a crisp fall morning, as it wafts its way over to my place from the surrounding feedyards.

It doesn’t get much better than to see a 379 Peterbilt come coasting to a stop after a 600-mile run.  If you are lucky, you will see a puff of black smoke when he’s still down the road about a mile and after a bit you’ll hear the mellow tone of his jake brakes as he brings all the speed that his 500 h.p. has put down on the road to a stop.  He’ll sit there, his own heat waves shimmering and glimmering around the hood and off the top of his 6-inch stacks.  When he pulls away, you’ll see twin trails of black smoke and hear that sweet sound of a Cat urging the load back on to the road.  That’s about as bona fide U.S. as it gets right there. 

I’m a sucker for the sunsets, especially when viewed from the corrals west of our place.

I’ll take the wind; it helps get rid of headaches; some I know don’t like it.  Like the woman who stopped me on a round of disc golf and asked how in the world I could even throw in all this wind. 

I said, “Wind?” 

“Yes,” she said, “I could hardly drive in it coming over this way.” 

“But this isn’t wind, it’s only a breeze.”

“Breeze!  If you are from Minnesota like I am, this is wind.”

And I know the Moon looks the same from anywhere on earth, right?  But it seems just right, from here.

I like the friendly folks I meet uptown, who take time to chat with me and look me in the eye.

I used to dislike the sound of irrigation engines, thrumming away for days and nights on end, but nowadays, if they aren’t running it seems rather quiet.

Oh, and don’t ask my good wife what happens when we roll up beside a beautifully sounding Harley at a stop light.

Yeah, it’s a pretty good country, and a guy could go on with more of the good things.  The same could be said about the bad things in this country, there are too many of them.  But let’s not go there.

Every once in a while, though, here in this good country, I’m brought up short in my views and opinions by one that is better.

We sort of have this thing about how it’s all supposed to work, don’t we? 

Like, when we go through a drive through, we don’t want the person ahead of us to order and reorder, trying to use up their points in the best way, delaying all of us behind them.

Or we don’t like to wait at the window very long for our food.

There is a little blue bus on the east side of the town I do business in that I wanted to try.  I had heard they made some good Central American food.  El Salvador, to be exact.

I stopped there and found a better way.  No, this better way won’t work on a large-scale basis like we are used to in the U.S., but it works much better in some things, if you are willing to go along with it.

I stepped up and gave my order in my normal brisk fast food speak.

I wasn’t understood, and the question from the lady asking what I had said contained only two English words out of ten.

I got enough of the drift that she wondered if I wanted a bean and cheese pupusa.

“No, shrimp and cheese,” I said.

Again, we experienced a language barrier, and I was forced to cast about in my mind for a better way to say it.  I knew the word for shrimp in Spanish, but I could tell her accent was different enough that she wouldn’t get it even if I tried to say it in Spanish.

I also began to realize that I probably wasn’t going to get my food as quickly as the fastest fast line at a nearby chain restaurant.

A nice lady who was sitting in the shade nearby quickly translated for me; the matron smiled and told me it would be 15 minutes.  I told her that was fine, and I would wait in my truck nearby.

Fifteen minutes ran up and caught twenty when I saw her packaging my food.

I went to the window and asked for a Coke with my meal, but she was out.  Another small detail that we miss by getting just what we want when we want.  She offered me Sprite instead, and I took it, realizing I hadn’t had one in years.  It tasted perfect with what came next.

I took my food and found a good parking spot.  Already on the way over there, I was having gastric sensations that demanded attention as the olfactory sense made its way down to my hungry, waiting stomach.

This was my first pupusa.

When I opened the Styrofoam box, I was assailed with 20 minutes’ worth of goodness and goodwill.  I almost went back and gave the cook some more tip, even though I had left plenty already. 

For the next while, I was on a dirt street corner in a humid country with my freshly cooked, scorching hot meal in my hands.  I saw the cheese on the outside still smoking, and I saw, here and there, little happy pink shrimp swimming away in their new lake of white cheese, bordered, not by land this time but by the edge of the pupusa itself.

I tried the hot sauce and still wonder what was in it.  Its savory sensation perfectly accented the medley of flavor that was making itself known in mouthfuls of deliciousness.

It’s true, we barely could understand each other when I gave my order.  It’s true I had to guess at what she said the meal cost because my interpreter had left.  It’s true, I had to wait probably five times longer for my food than I would have at the nearby chain restaurant.  When I compared what I had to the instant, chemically dried, last half cent figured in for maximum profit food I would have purchased at that chain restaurant, I knew I had made the right choice.

It was the better way to go today. 

Some countries occasionally, and very politely I must say, show the U.S. that it simply ain’t the dude it thinks it is.