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I may not know Joe the Plumber, but I've known Pat the Mail Guy for years now, first as a customer, but he grew into a friend. Mr. S.J. (Pat) Carlile drives truck and delivers mail to post offices around this region. Pat's father originally served this nation in the Army at the position of Infantry Field Artillery (Combat Infantry).

Pat's father and his uncle (father's brother) each served in past wars. One lost an eye, the other lost an arm. After the wars of the past he opened and ran a Shell gas station here locally. One young employee once touted, "One of them has one eye and one of them one arm...and I cannot work hard enough to keep up with either one of them!". Those are the Americans that Joe the Plumber refers to, and Joe is one of them too.

After the passing of his father, he found a newspaper clipping from the time of the Normandy invasion with a photo of his father in the paper. He wrote the Library of Congress to get a full copy sent to him. He was amazed that even then as he read the stories...folks were rumbling about Socialism, Communism, and even Marx. And the front page story in that particular paper was a big "to-do" about Charlie Chaplin and a nasty divorce he was going through at the time... just like our "Hollywood Gossip" that makes today's front pages instead of real news. We commented that guess things haven't changed much, but at least THEY were willing to fight against it and they defeated it. The ideas are now creeping their ugly heads back into our daily lives and the masses aren't fighting it now like they did then.

Pat served in the Army as a helicopter repairman, his son Ryan followed suit and served multiple tours in our current war in the Army as a field medic. Even in big cities, the world is small :) One of my other customers has a daughter that ended up marrying Pat's son Ryan. It's like two friend families joined. The brother of Ryan's wife is currently abroad serving in our Air Force as a military police officer. We are surrounded by great Americans!

Pat was by my office the other day and we were discussing the upcoming election, the horrible tax policies Barack Obama wants to implement, and the redistribution of wealth scenarios about to be placed upon us. Pat is like I am, just about fed up to the gills with the whole mess and that feeling we often get as a "Joe or Jane Plumber" that no matter how hard we try, there's not a lot we as individuals can do because the Government "has us by the short hairs". Pat even told me his horse felt the same way.

I laughed and asked Pat, "How ya figure that horse of yours feels the way we do?" He sighed and said that while working on his place the other day, his horse just kept pestering him while he was trying to weld and catch up on projects. He said he was just really annoying him. So Pat stopped what he was doing and talked to the horse for a bit. He told the horse joking with it that he understood how he felt and this was a crazy election. The horse would shake his head and whinny at him as if to understand. Pat told the horse that rather than bother him with it as he felt all the same ways the horse did, plus he sure had a lot of work to finish; he should climb up on his soap box and announce it to the rest of the world, perhaps he'd reach someone that needed to hear it worse than he.

Pat said it was the darndest thing! That horse immediately left his side and trundled over to what we assume the horse considers to be a soap box, raised his head and expressed himself! Pat had captured the moment in a picture on his cell phone. Since my blog is named "Blah Blah Blog - The Soap Box"...I told him I'd tell the horse's story too :)

The really hysterical part of this story though was the time it took Pat & I in my office to figure out how to get that photo off the cell phone and sent to my computer. We're both still pretty "old school" folks that just use the cell phone to talk on :) It took me so many tries, and we passed that dang cell phone back and forth between us so many times we were both laughing so hard we cried! I had to call my kid who's a sophmore in college to get cell and text instruction! Maybe I should take back all the complaining I've done about the "text message", "thumber" generation :) He was able to walk me through it.

Here's a nod to Pat Carlile, his past family I never met, and his new expanded family we all love too. For they, and me, and you, and Joe doing the plumbing work, are all just Joe Americans who love this country and work hard one act or one word at a time to bring it back to its roots. So many died in decades past to fight for that America. We owe it to them to fix the problems and get centered on life's basics today. God Bless Pat, God Bless America, and God Bless the expressionist horse :)

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