Bryan Mann's, Life or...'' It's life Jim, but not as we know it. ''

Returned home to "Big beautiful Clayton," as my mom used to call it, during the last week of June to transact some business.  My father and mother died in the summer of 2003, dad in July, mom in August.  My father asked me to take care of his estate when he died.  I refused and told him to give the job to my sister.  As my luck would have it he died unexpectedly on my birthday.  My sister was busy taking care of my mom who was herself dying of terminal lung cancer.  This put me in the position of taking over and handling my father's estate.  This amounts to the settling any outstandind debts.  Closing out all the accounts that were active, menial things like cable TV etc.  As fortune would have it I have been waiting for the required year to go by to give creditors time to respond to requests for payment.  None came forward so I was in Clayton to file the final phase of paperwork.

Here are the interesting things that happened while I was there.  First myself and my two daughters ended up staying at Day's Inn for $79.95/night.  So, Clayton is an expensive place to stay when considering that there's not much to do save find some relative and sit on their porch drinking lemonade.  The Day's Inn is an excellent hotel and even has free wireless Internet service!  And amazingly, the Clayton Chamber of Commerce provides free 24x7 wireless Internet access.  The only problem is that you have to be sitting in front of the chamber office to use it.  Wouldn't it be nice if the whole town took it upon themselves to provide free wireless everywhere.  Maybe travelers would have a reason to stop rather than speeding through town at 45 miles per hour to get to either Amarillo, to the south or Denver to the north, or Albuquerque to the west.  Well, a reason beyond food and gas.

We ate at the Eklund Hotel perhaps the town's only raison d'etre.  The time previous to this visit I swore that I would never eat at the Eklund again because it was one of the greasiest meals I've ever been served.  But the locals(read family) assured me that new management had taken over and the food was now excellent.  Perhaps we arrived on a bad day but my burrito grande was essentially, a flour tortilla filled with greasy hamburger meat with what amounts to a can of ranch style bean sauce dumped over the top of it.  Again another horrible meal!!  It's sad to experience what was once one of the best restaurants I've eaten at turn into one of the worst.  But it's a fair representation of what's happening in Clayton and I suppose most small towns across America.  The population of the town are dwindling and as it shirnks the services and the labor pool drys up and with it the economic base.  One of my relatives told me, "Anyone who can leave has already gone.  The rest of us are just trying to get by."

Of course it's easy to see what the town needs when you're from there.   Each time I visit I get all sorts of ideas for businesses that I'd open up.  And apparently, after giving them to my aunt she listens and opens them up.  She recently opened her fourth, known as Mary's Back Porch.  It's a sandwich shop serving a very large menu of choices at reasonably fair prices.

My obvious ideas for businesses:

1. Contract with a local rancher on whose property the great Santa Fe trail passes.  Install a ranch headquarters and charge tourists $20.00 a day for a hay ride and lunch to the trail, and extend it out to 2 weeks for those who might be really serious about learning what life was like on the great plains.  I remember, as a boy, being taken out to the Santa Fe trail and being shown the wagon track.  It was incredible to me that something I read about in history books and adventures and penny westerns went right through my backyard.  I distinctly remember squatting down and touching the ground there at the bottom of the track as if to feel the wagons that had gone by so many years ago, an action I repeated at Side, and other sites in Turkey, Portugal and India as an adult amazed at how mankind leaves it's mark, the mark of dreams, real and imagined on the land for others to see.  Of course there are other attractions too.  Plenty of "secret" native american ruins, campsites, burial sites, paintings and artifacts.
   
2. Open up an eBay drop off site.  With a high speed Internet connection I could easily research the old gas stove that stood in Grandma's house for 57 years and see that it was worth at least 600 times what Andy Cordoba was willing to pay for it.  And who knows that Navajo rug that sold for $20,000.00 might have really been like the guy on the antiques road show said, worth $320,000.00, and considered a national treasure.
   
3. Start a light manufacturing plant that builds solar powered refrigerated air units.
4. Start an Internet cafe.
5. Build another convenience store.
6. Buy some hardware, say an AS400 or a z9 from IBM, install some software and start a call center to support banking or medical software.
7. Buy a farm and start an alternative energy farmining operation.  Did you know that Britains are powering their diesels with cooking oil?
   

The possibilities are endless.

That's all for now.