The Dozen Skills You Leave The Farm With

 Growing  up in the rural regions of Alabama in the 1970s.....you would eventually realize that you'd developed talents which were useful for the rest of your life.  For example.....

1.  When someone asks you how much space is taken up....you eyeball the situation and generally answer one-quarter, or double....the space of a Ford F-150 'bed'.  Truck beds seem to be a standard way of measurement.  

2.  Real 'characters' in life....always have nicknames.  If you don't have a nickname....you were never a 'character'.  The nickname crowd always seemed legendary....even forty years later after their demise....folks still remember them.  

3.  You generally assign a ranking on irrational people....with anything above a '5' requiring you to maintain a distance.  '5' usually means six feet.  '7' usually means a dozen feet.  

4.  Any movie held at a drive-in....had some action or arousing content....that made the drive-in experience worth the money.  Regular theaters were not that way.

5.  If it looks snakey....it probably is not a forest or woods that you should travel through.

6.  The minute some woman has gotten a community nickname of 'Jezebel', you probably shouldn't ought to hang out with her.

7.   There's no finer food to sample....than county-fair food.  

8.  If you had relatives who went 'off'....they are usually not talking about carnival crowd they hung out with, or the 30 days in county jail, or the year they spent in 'Nam'.  It's best not to discuss the 'off' period ever.

9.  If someone brings up 'books' they read....they typically don't mean Hemingway or Steinbeck.....they mean 'books' or chapters out of the Bible.

10.  You learned the route you took for some 3-hour travel experience....usually is important to remember because folks will ask how you got there and how you returned.  Later in life....skills like this matter.

11.   The people who got all hyped-up from the Baptist revival period....are usually people that you might want to avoid...for at least 90 days.  

12.  Chaos and tragedy often gets measured in different ways.  A fragile person might not be able to handle much on a problem.  Some rural guys might have a hundred times that amount of stress in their life, and show little.  You always need to assess who you are dealing with, and their irrational ranking in life.