It would seem that I have raised the ire of the local women's club, as testified by the three phone calls I got last Thursday.

It all started innocently enough, at least in my way of thinking. I started off last week's column with "many Alleghanians (or rednecks) enjoyed the lawnmower race last Thursday night."

The ladies apparently took affront to the sentence, which I considered good-naturedly poking fun at myself and not indicative of all locals. Like I have said a million times before, sometimes you make people mad without ever knowing what you did.

Having considered myself a redneck for sometime after listening to Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be a Redneck," I was rather surprised when the ladies took offense.

When jokes like, "If your car is worth more than your home, both of which are on wheels, you might be a redneck," and, "If you have to take the transmission out of the bathtub so your wife can take a bath..."

Foxworthy really hits me pretty close at times. A bathtub is a wonderful place to rebuild a carburetor on a cold winter evening.

If you listen to Jeff Foxworthy's jokes and marvel at how close he is to some aspects of your life as I do, you might be a redneck.

However, the ladies explained to me that a redneck to them is a very low-class, bottom of the barrel type person. Not the noble southern "average Joe" that I picture in my head when I hear those jokes.

All I can say is, for those of you who disagree with my joking definition and consider it an insult, you have my most solemn apologies. The rest of you will just have to live with it. After all, I hear that being country is a lifetime affliction.

On a lighter note, one of the ladies who called mentioned that a lot of people don't read my column anyway because it's "not about anything."

That really tickled my funny bone, though I am not sure if it was intended as such. I thought maybe I had at least one or two people out there who like to read something about nothing.

That would be as opposed to reading nothing about something, which really means nothing at all. On the other hand, newspaper stories are generally something about something, and so on. So perhaps I should even change the name of this column to "Much Ado about Nothing" or "Treatise on the Unimportant."

The whole episode reminded me of a story my father told me, I don't really know why. When he was in the military, he served with boys from all over the country, including some from that never-never land above the Mason-Dixon Line, who thought he was quite a spectacle to be sure.

A fellow who pronounced words so funny and already knew how to fire a rifle with accuracy before he ever set foot on a military base certainly stood apart from some of the city crowd. A number of the city boys hadn't even held a rifle.

Once one of them asked my father just what he was, anyway. His reply? "I'm just a hillbilly."

I liked that answer. Some people, no doubt, would take offense at being called such as a hillbilly.

I don't think it would bother me at all. My father was proud of where he came from, of what he was. So am I.

He still calls a chair a "cheer" and says phrases like "over yonder" and "much obliged." In my way of thinking, all Americans who came to this part of the country early on were hillbillies by necessity. A hillbilly is a country person with a country accent who uses ingenuity to make up for a lack of resources, I suppose. They hunted their food and ate wild greens like creasy greens, kale and wild mustard.

Out West, hillbillies became frontiersmen or guides or settlers. Daniel Boone was an obvious hillbilly, with that absurd-looking coonskin on his head. Life is all just what you want to make of it, be it good or be it bad.

Perhaps there is more to it than that, like the picture of a fellow in short bibbed overalls and no shoes chewing on a piece of straw.

For those of you who just thought of a blood-relative, you might be a redneck, as Foxworthy would say.

I hear Hank Williams Sr. taking off on I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry on my stereo. I think I'll sing along.

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Email: allnews@ls.net