It's all in the perspective.

While I was looking over the flooding in my neighborhood on Sunday, I realized that I live near some Urban Hillbillies. I call them Urban Hillbillies because their speech pattern doesn't match the area in which they live.

They pronounce creek crik, water wuter and they say things like "I swum" and have an accent that belies the fact that they live 20 miles from Philadelphia. They're fascinating, mainly because they have managed to develop their own voice and mannerisms while others around them find it strange.

I saw a few of them in the local Wal-Mart this afternoon. If you hyphenate Wal-Mart, you are not an Urban Hillbilly. Urban Hillbillies call it Walmert and show up in whatever they happen to be wearing when they rolled out of bed into their pile of clothes that morning. I wandered in there because I needed Benadryl and had almost given up finding some.

The Deptford Wal-Mart is relatively new. It's been there a year or so, and today was the first time I had gone in. I needed Benadryl, and the Wal-Mart was my third stop trying to find the stuff. When I go into one of those places I instantly feel out of my element. The place is huge. It has a supermarket, pharmacy, a Subway sandwich place and (even though I didn't look) I think they had chewing tobacco and white tank t-shirts, but I didn't look for them.

I tend to wander in, make a bee-line for what I want and get out. Having all that stuff so close together scares me a little. OK, a lot. The Wal-Mart philosophy must be to give people not only what they want, but everything they want all in one place. Then the pile on by making everything less expensive than it is almost everywhere else. I suppose that's why they have been around since 1962.

The non-Urban Hillbillies hate the Wal-Mart and everything it represents. They claim that their low prices and product availability hurt local businesses. I suppose that is true, since people do love low prices and available products. Don't hate the player; hate the game.

Can I hate the Wal-Mart because I had been to 3 other drug stores (big chains, not the local rabble) in an attempt to find the elusive Benadryl, only to find it at the local Wal-Mart. And for a paltry $6.97 for 48 tablets. Take that, Rite Aid and CVS. You had your chance. It would have been to find an ounce of weed than it was finding Benadryl, which they tell me is legal.

Perhaps the reasons the Urban Hillbillies survive is that they don't mind wading into brown stream water and they know where to find bargains? Whatever their reasons, perhaps we can learn something from them. They're smarter than us, anyway. They know that you can wade into dirty stream water without rubbing your hands in sanitizer and they can unload a cart full of groceries and products while saving money in the process. I think the literati cal that "street smarts."

That they will live longer than us is their reward. Or their curse, depending on your perspective.