Buyer's Edge

I was thinking about my dear departed dad this Fathers Day morning while walking the purebred Tennessee Black Dawg, MacGuyver. This just popped into my head during the mile or so walk, and in my head I hear it played on the banjo with a voice like Dougie Maclean's (or mine, which is very different from Dougie's ) singing it. Searching for a picture, I came up with this great one at The Consumerist website, but I don't have rights to share it but I'll just link to it. A great article , too, very much to the point. I share instead a charcoal sketch I did decades ago from a photo of my dad (that's an Antonin Artaud poem with it--yes I was a poser bohemian). I have yet to put a melody to this but it scans pretty nicely, so read it aloud singsong-like, or sing it yourself to a melody you invent. I share:

Buyer's Edge

By Scott Merrick

Daddy sold country stores
machines to keep things cool,
drove Tennessee backroads
while we were all in school.
Those backwoods local groceries
had meters I am told,
they plugged and plugged with quarters
to keep their foodstuffs cold.
And when he left my mother
who was never to let him go,
his boss, my mother's father,
took him off the road.
My dad took to selling cars
each and every day
He worked every workday of his life
and not just for the pay.
His used-car salesman's secret
I'll share with you today:
The buyer's edge in any deal
is the one who will walk away.

And my daddy surely had it

until his dying day.

the buyer's edge in any deal

is the one who will walk away.

My Poppy kept bird dogs

and they were not their pets.

Working dogs are different,

their lives by their work set

He took me out to buy a dog

to a farm one day.

The price too high he made to go

but the farmer pleaded with him to stay.

That blue tick hound became his best

and I learned again that day:

The buyer's edge in any deal

is the one who will walk away.

My daddy surely had it

up until his dying day

The buyer's edge in any deal

is the one who will walk away. 

The buyer's edge in any deal

is the one who will walk away. 

The buyer's edge in any deal is the one who will walk away. 

Buyer's Edge by Scott Merrick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .