Meet Charlie, our racist

Jo and I wandered around the camping area Sunday (as opposed to the permanent area) of the resort. We wanted to meet the folks who visit for a 10-day period.
We chatted with a couple who were talking with an overweight fellow who was missing most of his front teeth.

Charlie seemed to be the complainer of the park. He had complaints about Dick, the owner, about the neighbors who spy on him. About just about everything and everyone. You could feel the negative energy encircling him.

He told us he retired as an electrician and asked what I did. I told him I had been the publisher of a group of weekly papers. He immediately decided to pigeonhole me. "Oh. So you're an educated man?" he asked/stated.

I told him I had left school at 15 and he just couldn't buy that a high school dropout could scale the lofty intellectual heights of being a newspaper publisher. We danced around on that for a while and then the conversation rested on the five young people that Dick brings in from the Czech Republic each summer.

"Course, they don't pay them much," Charlie announced. "But the government pays them." He pronounced it "govmint".
I couldn't figure out what he was talking about and told him that. "The govmint pays all these people to come in. Just like they pay the niggers."

Mmmmm. And Barack Obama has to win over the Charlies of our country.
We left Charlie sucking on his toothless mouth and continued on around the campground.

At the end of our first two weeks of work here we were sucking air on Friday afternoon. Jo and I had been assigned to strip the flaking paint off more than 110 chairs and almost as many tables. Then we spray painted them. After we finished that (four non-stop days), we were assigned to rake the loose leaves on some of the lots owned by the park. We have discovered muscles that had long since atrophied.
Oooooh. the weekend rest seemed even more welcome.

On Wednesday of this coming week, we drive north to Connecticut to remove the winter cover from our boat. We'll spent a couple of days with her, getting her cleaned up for the broker we're contracting to act as our agent to sell her.