Got Nothing Against a Big Town

 I feel like I've been on kind of a quest lately to find the beauty in the place I'm from. Well, I guess it's not really a quest, because that's more like the die-hard effort made by Clark Griswold to get his family to Walley World. Mine is more of a...noticing. I've been taking "the long way home" recently (when I have the gas!) and so many times I've wished for a camera to document the sometimes beautiful and many times strange or unusual things I see in the area where I grew up. Tonight I happened to have one.

This shadowy figure is a dog. In a bar. In Missouri.

For those of you who aren't familiar, I live in the very southwest corner of Missouri, within about 20-30 miles of the borders of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. It's called the Four-State-Area by those in the know (when I was a kid, I thought the Tri-State-Area in the northeast stole their moniker from us). I grew up with Jim Jackson giving us our Four-State news at 6:00 and 10:00 (still does), going down to Elk River or Big Sugar Creek in Mac County (still do), and searching endlessly for the Spook Light over by Seneca (never found). Tonight, I had the pleasure of going with a good friend to a favorite local restaurant, Undercliff Grill and Bar (yeah, the one with the dog).

 

If you're very clever (or went to the website), you might have already surmised that Undercliff was built, yes, under a cliff. Actually, it's more so built into the cliff. Builtintocliff doesn't have quite the same ring to it, though. Anyhow, Undercliff is a family-owned business that serves great food and drinks either inside "under the cliff" or outside at the patio bar, "The Hangar," where you can pal around with the local dogs.

As you can see, bikers are welcome. Tonight, we ran into a couple we knew who had gone on a ride a couple days ago and lost the wife's sunglasses on the highway somewhere between town and Undercliff. She is the kind of woman who buys "real" sunglasses, not Panama Jacks from Wal-Mart. We sadly reported that we hadn't seen them but would keep an eye out. What I appreciated about the wife tipsily explaining that she hadn't lost any in a really long time and the husband soberly muttering under his breath, "two months ago," was that they actually had faith that they might find them. And I love that about where I live.

Here's wishing she finds her sunglasses...