By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Have you ever seen those studies that total up the amount of hours you spend doing X? The researchers total up the number of hours we sleep, commute, surf the Web, sit in line at the bank etc. I was thinking about these studies when I wandered into my regular convenience store. When you go to work at the bitterly early hour morning radio hosts do, convenience stores aren’t only convenient, but also your only option if you’re looking to scrounge up a little breakfast.

The cashier this particular morning called to me through the small gap underneath the three-inch bulletproof glass shield separating her from the patrons. “Hey where have you been?” The fact that I had missed two consecutive morning snack and drink forays into the store was so out of the ordinary my cashier in the crystal palace had noticed my absence.

“Wow, I must spend a lot of my time in convenience stores,” I thought and I started tallying the minutes per week and hours per month and days per year as I answered her “I’ve just been really busy” like I was telling my mother why I hadn’t called her in awhile.

My calculations on the amount of time in my life I’ve been surrounded by pork rinds, Funyuns, Icee machines and newspaper racks was starting to inconvenience me while I stood waiting on my change from the Hamilton I gave for the diet Vault and granola bar, when I saw my whipping boy.

My whipping boy is not actually a boy but an old man and I’ve learned something about him overhearing, which is not hard to do, his conversations over the years. He has been married for 40 some-odd years and has a 30-something daughter who is shacked up will “some ole boy who couldn’t even spell w-o-r-k.”

My whipping boy has an opinion on every headline that has ever been printed, can diagnose illness just by listening to someone’s cough and can tell you what’s wrong with that Buick on pump three without ever leaving the shadow cast by the coffee maker.

He is always uniformly dressed in clothes of his own choosing. Summer time might find him in a pair of blue jeans and a golf shirt, but for most of the year he wears Sans-A-Belt trousers (“you know that means without a belt, in French” he has confided) a button-down, off-white, short-sleeve shirt with orange and brown stripes, a blue nylon windbreaker and one of a rotation of three baseball hats – all foam, tall and poofy with two advertising a tractor rental place and one with Big Al, for game days. This man is at my store every weekday morning.

He is standard by which I then decided I don’t spend too much time in convenience stores. My guy is one of a legion of old guys who hang out at the local filling station. Forced out of the house by boredom, loneliness or wives who have heard all their stories at least a hundred times, they migrate to the modern world’s main street general store to offer commentary and make coffee. In today’s rush-rush world, the closest place to the old commissary front porch is the interior of a convenience store.

Here the old guys of the world can spend there golden years commenting on everything from that durn Iranian leader, to the government conspiracy to control gas prices to availability of University of Alabama ball caps with both Big Al and the national championship list on them. It’s kind of like having your own Oracle at Delphi, except he is at the Shell station and his answers are not always right.

These guys are also courting the lovelies working the registers at their specific hangouts. I’ve noticed the old guys are often female cashier specific and confine their visits to the eight-hour shift of the ladies who are on the clock. They defend their territory against other old guys as well.

Oh sure they’ll visit with another old guy for a little while, but the smiles and chin wagging stop when the new guy offers to make a pot of coffee or straighten up the drink lids. At that point the alpha old guy takes the conversation with the new suitor outside and does his best to help the challenger on his way.

Of course the fact that I know all I know about these guys brings me back to tallying up the days of my life I’ve spent in gas station convenience stores. I have a good relationship with a couple of these guys who man their beats at stores around Mobile, which must mean I’m still too young to seem like a threat to their territories. But it won’t be long until I set up shop myself.

Now I just have to get a blue windbreaker.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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