A Fond Memory of Taylor

So I've been at the Taylor branch a whole lot lately. It's been fairly quiet, but there's also the possiblity for some randomly wacky thing to happen at a moment's notice. That being said, I think now's a good time to relive a happening that occurred during my first visit to Taylor.

So it's my first day of working at Taylor. I'd been in the system a couple of months before being sent on my first shift out in the booines. I make the 35 minute drive and everything's okay. This kid of about 13 or so comes in with his momma, and I can tell right away they're uber countrified. But hey, the library is a government agency, we serve all types and nothing really shocks me anymore. So this kid asks me if we have newspapers, to which I respond that we do and point him in the area of the periodicals. I don't think anything of it.

He comes back a few minutes later and asks if we have the WWE magazine. Once again, not an unusual request, we get a lot of kids who like wrestling, so I tell him they're in the Teen area. He rushes over and finds the latest issue and all the sudden goes "DAGNABIT! Ma! It's from last month! Now how are we going to find out about Vince?" So the mom comes to the desk and asks me in an incredibly thick hick dialect,

Country Mom: "Souhisvincehere?"

Me: (Quite confused and unable to put seemingly obvious facts together) "Um...I don't think we have a Vince that works in the library."

Country Mom: "What? NAW! Man, do you have anything on Vince McMahon? He died the other night! His limo done blang blew up!" (Imaginative huge hand gestures)

Now I'm taken aback. I'm sure you've been keeping up with wrestling story lines and are well aware of what's going on, but I sure wasn't. I'm thinking it's another Owen Hart, Eddie Gurerro or something. (Also, at this time, Chris Benoit hadn't happened yet) So of course I inquired more. The son answered my questions

Country Son: "Yeah! They said that he might have even committed suicide. Suicide!"

Country Mom: (Chiming in) "That man owns a million dollar company. There's no reason for him to commit suicide, it just doesn't make sense. A million dollar company!"

So while I'm giving them a reservation for a computer to get on the internet, I check CNN and other news websites for info. Cause every other time a wrestler died, mention was made of it on the real news. Nothing. Then I overhear the mom tell her son kinda loudly.

Country Mom: "You gotta go to WWE.com! The liberal media ain't gonna talk about this!"

I check the WWE webpage and it's pretty obvious that it's a storyline thing since if he had really died, there's no way that they'd be showing the explosion on the front page. But man, they are entranced by it. They watch some video of the "Vice President of WWE" say that RAW or whatever will continue on in spite of his death and they are almost on the verge of tears. After about half an hour, I guess they saw all that the website had to offer and they began to leave.

I asked if they found out anything and they started going on about "Somebody might know who did it" and "Million Dollar Company." I resist the urge to tell them that it's almost certainly fake and let them leave the library, talking loudly about what's gonna happen to the company.

So yeah, I guess there are still true believers out there.