My turn: No sense, just real-life experience

One of my columns generated an e-mail from a gentleman who said that I didn’t have a lick of common sense.

Apparently, I set him off by not toeing religious, political or fishing lines — or perhaps my tongue-in-cheek lines didn’t hook him.

The blue-collar worker clearly wanted to wring my stereotyped collar.

He probably didn’t know that I grew up the youngest of six kids on a small east Texas farm. For 25 years, my dad drove 80 miles round-trip to a steel mill.

To earn college money, I also worked there during summers rebuilding smoldering furnaces.

I also hauled hay, cut wood in a factory, laid concrete, and was a late-shift custodian in college and weekend bootlegger.

I played high school football, basketball and track, and am a military veteran.

I rode our bucking livestock for my father and his friends’ entertainment, milked cows, plucked chickens, gathered eggs, fed pigs, helped mother make lye soap, shelled peas, etc.

I squirrel- and bird-hunted with .410- and 12-gauge shotguns, fished with cane poles using crawdads caught in muddy creeks with bacon-on-a-string, then swam in the algae-and-reptile-infested ponds.

I guess that my blue-collar friend is right: I don’t have a lick of common sense.

To prove it, I will be happy to demonstrate other kinds of licks to him at a time and place of his choosing.