By Ricky Swindle

Muffler Shop Musings

God is good all the time, and all the time God is good.

Last Wednesday, a little before 6 p.m., I was sitting at our kitchen counter with my wife checking to see if she followed all my orders for the day (now folks that IS a joke) and my cell phone rang.

My friend, since longer than we both care to remember, Les Taylor, called to tell me the back of my building was smoking. I told him that ain’t good, Bud, call the Fire Folks for me and I’m on the way.

I called my brother Mike because he lives closer to the shop than I do, and he was already on his way there.

Mike arrived at the same time as the fireman did, so he unlocked the door and let them enter the building. The corner of the west side bay was on fire blazing and Mike had the mental ability amid all that chaos to realize that it had to be the gas heater.

So, he grabbed a crescent wrench, ran behind the building and shut the gas main off.

I am so thankful that Mike was there.

When I drove down Eureka Street  and witnessed the flames licking out of the back of the building my heart dropped all the way to the heel of my boots. There is no way I would have considered shutting off the gas main as quickly as he did.

Our town is fortunate to have a top notch fire department. They are the most dedicated bunch I’ve ever seen. Their main priority was, of course, putting out the fire, but they went above and beyond to cause the least amount of damage to our building.

Whenever you read about Chief Taylor asking the City Board for more funds for manpower and equipment, you can take my word for it, the money is being well spent. I felt blessed to have the service of those professional firefighters and their state of the art equipment doing all they could to save our family’s business.

In the midst of all that action, fire, smoke, firefighters everywhere I asked my wife, “Hey Hun, did you leave the oven on when we flew out of the house like escaped convicts?”

Uh, yes she did, but as I’ve stated before, we live on a road smack dab in the middle of God’s Country so our neighbor went over and turned our oven off for us.

That old store is our life. Sure, we have insurance that would have paid for the building and everything in it, but that is not the point. Mike and I were 11 and 12 years old when Daddy opened that store and we like it just the way it is.

That building is more than a store for us, it’s home. Even when we are not open, we ride by and look, and so do our children, and also a lot of you good folks do the same for us as was proven Wednesday night.

It is a very old building, one of the oldest in town, and we spend thousands yearly updating it because we want our old store to look good for out of towners and locals, too, when they drive down the main drag of our town.

We are proud of our old store and our Swindle Family tradition on that corner.

I get home Wednesday night and walk out back to my DewDrop Inn to my quiet place to listen to my favorite radio stations on my phone blasting through my Marshall speaker. Yes, radio. I would rather listen to a DJ rattle on and play songs than watch TV any day.

As I sat on my couch with the music playing, I gave thanks to the Good Lord above for blessing me yet another time as He has blessed me so many times before in my life. He is good all the time.

Let’s always give God the praise and support all our First Responders and pray The Lord protects all of them always. We would all be in dire straits without all those dedicated people taking care of us in our time of need.

Take care of yourself, folks.

Write to Ricky Swindle at rickyswindle@bellsouth.net