Is That a Cow, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Lon Rizzo always wanted to run his own garage.

As long as he could remember he was interested in cars and engines and how they worked. As a boy he would hang out in the local garages and ask the mechanics all kinds of questions, at least until they got sick of him and told him to get lost.

When he grew up Lon opened his own business. He rented a run-down garage on the south side of town, put up a big sign that read “Lon Rizzo’s Garage,” and slowly started to build his cliental from folks looking for a good, honest mechanic who charged reasonable prices.

Once in a while someone would look at his sign and ask why he put “Lon Rizzo’s Garage” on it instead of just “Rizzo’s Garage.”

“I don’t want anyone getting my business mixed up with any other garages owned by any other Rizzos,” he would explain.

When it was pointed out that he was the only Rizzo in town, Lon would say that he always dreamed of seeing his full name up in lights. When someone would point out that his name wasn’t really up in lights, that the sign was just a simple painted sign, Lon would mumble something and start working on a carburetor or some other engine part.

And the conversation would pretty much be over at that point.

One day Lon was working in his garage when Slim Salisbury, one of a group of guys who liked to hang out there, stopped by.

“What’s with the paint on the side of your building?” he asked.

“It needs repainted,” Lon said. “That cheap landlord doesn’t want to pay for it. It looks terrible.”

“No, I mean what about the spot on the side of your building that looks like a cow?” Slim countered.

Lon didn’t know what Slim was talking about, so he followed him to the area in question. Sure enough, the paint had chipped off and it sort of looked like a cow.

“Well what do you know,” Lon said. “What’s the odds of that?”

“Maybe it’s a sign of something,” Slim said. “Maybe God put it there.”

Now at this point it should be noted out that Slim, although being one of the nicest men you’ll ever meet, wasn’t the brightest blub on the Christmas tree. He based a lot of his knowledge of the world on the tabloids they sell at the checkout counter in the local Walmart. Indeed, he never seemed to question the apparent proliferation of alien beings, sea monsters and unexplainable happenings reported on these publications’ pages.

“I’m telling you, this could be a big thing here,” Slim insisted. “We should call someone.”

So Slim called the local newspaper, and he was quite surprised to learn that paint chipped off a building in the form of a cow wasn’t exactly stop-the-presses material.

Eventually, the local paper ran a picture and caption on page 19 (of a 20-page edition).

In the following days people began to stop by just to see the chipped paint that looked like a cow. Slowly the number started to grow. Sometimes small crowds could be seen standing and staring at the cow.

Word kept spreading. People from all over would make their way to Lon’s garage to see the cow. Anytime a bus of Hindus was passing through town, which admittedly wasn’t very often, they would stop to pay homage to the cow.

Someone put a video on YouTube and it went virile, although truth be told, when Slim heard that he thought someone had a caught some kind of disease from the cow.

NBC News called and said it might come by to do a story on the cow. Slim got so excited at the possibility that Natalie Morales from the Today Show might show up that he got his hair cut every day for a month, just to make sure he presented just the right look.

Lon was featured in an article in Herefords Today magazine. Slim put a blanket over the cow every night to protect it from the elements.  Slim wanted to charge money for people to see the cow. Lon thought that was going too far.

But Slim was enterprising, even if he wasn’t very bright. He had “I Saw the Cow on Lon Rizzo’s Garage” t-shirts printed up. He even sold a few of them, mostly to the Hindus.

Slim thought there had to be a way to make big money on the cow. He called countless companies seeing if they would like to use the cow in their advertising campaigns. He tried to get the cow declared a national historic landmark.

He even attempted to have the cow declared a religious miracle, reasoning that a lot more people eat beef than actually go to church. That was also a non-starter.

One day Slim stopped by the garage and the cow was gone. Lon’s landlord had finally gotten around to repainting the building. The miracle cow had been put out to pasture.

He was crushed at first, but he got over it. Things settled down and returned to normal around the garage.

Then one day Slim stopped in and told Lon, “You know, you have a pothole on the far side of your lot that’s shaped like a rooster.”

You can imagine where this is going.