Standing in line at the Thornton's gas station near my neighborhood, I spied a rack of novelty car plates--the kind you screw to the front of your car to make sure your it professes your religious beliefs or sports team affiliation or desire to waste your presidential vote on the dangerously inexperienced Willie Nelson.
The plates were stacked deeply on the rotating rack, and these were the four I saw:
1) Against a deep purple background, a hot pink script proclaimed the car's occupant "Blessed"
2) On black, the red, slashed lettering let everyone know the driver was "Sucking Gas and Hauling Ass."
3) Three red crosses centered in a white background admitted the car's owner was "Not Perfect--Just forgiven."
4) Another white background, this time with cartoon rhino warning the reader: "Cautious: Extremely Horny."
An open tension between sacred and profane shapes the atmosphere of so many small Kentucky towns. For my money, no literary work captures this as perfectly as Silas House's Clay's Quilt.
While this little rack of novelty plates did not sum up this tension quite as well, it certainly did so more succinctly--in just about the time it takes the old guy in front of the line to finish up his scratch off tickets.
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