Just had an interesting visit from an older gentleman (probably in his seventies). He was driving by very slowly (which is really common with our construction project looking the way it does) and I was sitting in the garage, so I waved. He stopped, backed up, and pulled into the driveway.
I walked over and he told me he used to know someone who worked at our construction company. I confirmed who it was and said I’d pass along a hello. Then the conversation started to range all over… mostly from his side.
It went from…
- This is quite a project. People are generally building smaller these days, not bigger.
- It seems a shame to do this to a 1950/1960 rancher (ours was built in 1977).
- His brother put an under-powered heating system in his home.
- He just bought his first house last year and it’s very small.
- The soil at his house is all clay and all the trees he planted died.
- The roads these days are paved wrong.
- There’s an oddly placed stop sign where he lives.
Then is started to get odd (odder?). I can’t remember the segue (if there, indeed, actually WAS one), but it went something like…
- We just passed the mark where more of our cars are built in China than in the USA.
- We also passed the mark where more music is downloaded than bought on CD.
- The number of Christians in the US is decreasing more rapidly.
- It won’t be long before God takes his blessing away from this country.
Then he said, gesturing at the house, “You’ll probably only get ten to twenty years out of this house.” Expecting some sort of “end times” religious reason (and kind of looking forward to it), I asked, “Why’s that?”.
He replied, “That’s when the Russian missiles will be coming.”
Ummm…
Then he went on about how we lost our chance to be friends with the Russians a couple decades ago and how they have three times more missiles now than they did five years ago, all trained on the USA. But we did sell them special weapons that fire rubber bullets for crowd control and they were appreciative of that.
That seemed as good a place as any to acknowledge the conversational dead-end that had just occurred, so I politely told him I’d pass along a hello to our builder and wished him a fantastic weekend. We shook hands and off he went.
And I thought, “Crap. It’s probably too late to build an underground bunker here.”
