Buyer's Edge

I was thinking about my dear departed dad this Fathers Day morning whilst 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 to 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 daddy took to selling cars
each and every day
He worked each 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 will to walk away.

And my daddy surely had it
until his dying day.
the buyer’s edge in any deal
is the will to walk away.

My Poppy he kept bird dogs
and they were not his 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 plead him stay.
That blue tick hound became his best
and I learned again that day:
The buyer’s edge in any deal
is the will to walk away.


My daddy surely had it
up until his dying day
The buyer’s edge in any deal
is the will to walk away. 
The buyer’s edge in any deal
is the will to walk away. 
The buyer’s edge in any deal
is the will to walk away. 

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