Patrick’s Rants

I was in Payson for a couple of days this last weekend.. and now it’s almost next weekend before I chanced to write about it. I had a few unusual experiences thatI just have to share.

I took a football team from a local high school - well “took” isn’t the right word, but that’s for another time, maybe - and they were practicing on a field in the public park. This particular park was interesting in a few different ways. First, it’s a large park with several fields for football, soccer, baseball and even volleyball. On the same piece of land is the public library - saving the taxpayers money I’m sure. The port-a-potty was particularly humerous in that it was chained to the fence. So they either had trouble with vandals tipping the thing over or had a port-o-john theft ring in town. The other interesting thing was the sign posted on the field fence. Oh sure , there were the usual, “No dogs on field” and “No alcohol”, but the sign that struck me odd was, “No golfing”. Serious. There is was. Not only that, it was an ordinance - meaning that it was a big enough problem that they had to pass a law making it illegal to golf on astroturf.

Another interesting thing is that some little kid playing Pop Warner football or something like that walked right up to me and asked if I had a cell phone that he could use to call his folks to come get him. I’ve only been through Payson a couple of times stopping at Dairy Queen and the Super Walmart - and had lunch a couple of times at the Payson airport (a friend of mine owns a single engine Cessna that I get to ride around in once in a while) so for some kid to come up to me like that is just weird. What happened to, “don’t talk to strangers”? I let him of course but I made sure to dial since I have a wallpaper photo on my phone, that while not indecent, might evoke questions of why a picture of that? Hmm… how did I get here from redneck? Dunno, but I’ll send you a free email if you can guess what the photo is. I just might have a reader out there who can guess.