Category: Darrell Huckaby

I have long been a big fan of pecans. I have never been certain how to pronounce the word — I say “pee-can,” you say “p’cahn” — but I’ve always known exactly how to devour the delectable nutty meat found inside the shells.

When I was growing up we could find pecans all over the place — just lying around on the ground. It was almost like they grew on trees. I would watch old men who worked in the mill pick up pecans and crack them against one another in their powerful fists. We ain’t talking paper shells here, either. I would try to do that in private, but lacked the power to make it happen. I was always relegated to stomping on the nut with my foot, which crushed the pecan and ground bits of shell into the meat. Sometimes I cracked them with my teeth. That would create a whole different set of problems.

One day, I told myself, I would be strong enough to crack two pecans in my bare hands. I’m still working on it.

When Thanksgiving approached, Mama would take us to visit her friend who lived out in the country and we would pick up pecans. We could have all we wanted. It was fun — for the first five minutes. After that, it was back-breaking labor, but Mama would remind us how much we would enjoy the pies and candy and other dishes she would create from the fruits of our enforced labor.

Once I was grown, I spent two years in exile below the gnat line. I lived in a singlewide trailer in a pecan grove in Meigs, Ga. I may write a book about my experiences in Meigs, once the statute of limitations has expired on all of the stuff my roommate and partner-in-crime, Ken Cooper, and I got into down there.

I was sound asleep one Saturday morning, on up in the fall, when the earth started to move under my mobile home. The trailer was shaking and trembling and I thought it would come apart at the seams, and pecans began pounding the top of the roof like they were being fired from a Gatling gun. I jumped out of bed and ran to the window. There was no earthquake and no pending apocalypse. Gathering season had simply begun for the pecan crop. Huge machines, called shakers, had been hooked up to the giant pecan trees surrounding my home and large sheets had been placed under the spreading limbs. The harvest was being shaken out of the trees, onto the sheets. I watched in fascination and developed a whole new appreciation for South Georgia agricultural ingenuity.

Some companies offer purchase viagra from canada free shipping for supplying the medicine. Spammers also use nefarious means that are akin to hacking to send their mails by using malware and the like. generic viagra from india There can be so many causes of this disease, so what’s the reason of causing order viagra view over here fallopian tubal blockage? Let’s learn about it. 1. Because it has the effect of freezing muscles, it was order cheap viagra originally developed to treat spasms, particularly overactive eye spasms. Suffice it to say that pecans were plentiful when I lived in a grove, but once I moved home, to the North Georgia Piedmont, I had to rely on more conventional sources to get my share. Once in a while Lamar Crawley would bring me a grocery bag or two he had gathered in his yard, down in Monticello — and I could always count on Ben Evans to have a fresh crop on hand at his market.

The bottom line is, like I said at the top of the page, I have always been a big fan of pecans. Now I told you all of that to tell you this. Pecans, even in Georgia, which is the leading supplier of pecans worldwide, are in short supply this season. That’s right. As many pecans as we grow here in the Peach and Poultry State, the supply is not enough to keep up with the demand.

Oh, you can find pecans all right. They will be on the shelves of every supermarket and produce stand around — but you’d better be prepared to cross someone’s palm with silver because prices are going to be sky high this time around.

John Steedman, owner of the North Georgia Pecan Company, recently reported in the Athens Banner Herald that the price of a pound of premium pecans would jump this year to $9.95 — a two dollar increase over last year. That’s a pretty hefty jump. He blamed this year’s drought in South Georgia for part of the problem. The other cause, he said, was that the Chinese have developed a penchant for pecans — particularly those of the Georgia variety.

That’s right. My access to pecan pie, glazed pecans, pecan brittle and all the other delectable dishes my lovely wife Lisa makes with pecans during the holidays, is at risk due to dry weather and Asian appetites.

Not to fear! It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving, for me, without pecan pie, and I shall prevail. I’m making a run to Monticello to see Lamar Crawley. If anybody sees Lisa at the grocery store, please remind her to pick up an extra bottle or two of Karo syrup. In the meantime, pray that the Chinese don’t discover sweet potatoes. They are my second favorite kind of pie.

I’ll watch an awards show on television for a little while. I like seeing the good-looking women stroll down the red carpet (OK. I’m a pig. So sue me. I’m not running for president.) and hearing the opening monologues and I like the little film montages and tributes that most of the shows have.

I’m not real big on the political statements some of the Hollywood shows try to make and easily tire of the acceptance speeches. I’d say that I’m good for about 45 minutes of the Academy Awards, a little less for the People’s Choice and I might watch 10 minutes of the Emmy Awards.

But when the CMA Awards come on, well, let’s just put it this way. I am down with the CMA’s, y’all. I’m there for the duration. The show originates from Nashville, not the land of fruits and nuts –and any political statements coming out of Nashville are probably political statements that I agree with.

Plus, a lot of my favorite Hollywood types seem to show up at the CMAs anyway — Nicole Kidman was there Wednesday night and so was the girl who plays in “Revenge,” one of my new favorite television shows. And when’s the last time you saw Little Jimmy Dickens portraying Justin Bieber at the Oscars?

Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood were the co-hosts of this year’s show, for the fourth year. They’ve about got it down by now and at one point in the proceedings Paisley seemed to be openly campaigning for the recently vacated job as emcee of the aforementioned Academy Award show. He was too late. I heard that Billy Crystal just got that gig. But he and Ms. Underwood work well together and are really funny — and at least one of them is really nice to look at. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the one in the cowboy hat.

Since I’ve already admitted to being a male chauvinist pig, I will go ahead and admit that I could just sit and stare at Carrie Underwood all night, even if she never opened her mouth. Before you crucify me for that remark, I want you to know that Buster Davis said the same thing and he’s a whole lot nicer than me.

I guess I like the CMAs so much because country music performers have always struck me as a lot more genuine than those in other realms of the entertainment industry. They seem to be real close family, too — even though my daughter Jenna insists that Taylor Swift rolled her eyes when Miranda Lambert was named Female Vocalist of the Year. Of course, I have always called Jenna the Queen of the Eye-roll so I guess she should know one when she sees one. Taylor was all sweetness and light, of course, when she was named Entertainer of the Year.

Kamagra jellies are viagra no consultation http://downtownsault.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Moloneys.pdf especially formulated for the people suffering from severe sexual turn down, it is wise to take the medical attention before and after the treatment of prostate cancer. It is a condition that disables a man from achieving pleasure while engaged in a sexual act. cheap discount viagra 10mg usually does not cause any side effects. Why? Apparently because when punched, the super viagra uk particles lock together. Tadalafil reverses this by improving the viagra pill regulation of oxygenated blood into various parts of the body. I loved the opening. Well, not so much the part where they sang “Footloose” in front of all the dancers wearing red hot pants — but the part where Brad Paisley sang the parody of Hank Williams Jr.’s, “Are you Ready for Some Football?” song. They were poking fun at Bocephus, because he got himself kicked off Monday Night Football for making a comment that could have been interpreted as comparing the President of the United States with the former Chancellor of Germany. Apparently you can’t do that.

Right in the middle of the parody, Hank Jr. himself walked onto the stage. I’m here to tell you, he’s a big old boy, and he jumped right into the festivities and got the party started right.

I think my favorite part of the show, other than watching Carrie Underwood and the girl in the short purple dress who brought all the hardware out, was when Zac Brown and Gregg Allman teamed up to sing “Georgia on My Mind.” I’m pretty sure that Ray Charles was smiling down from heaven during that number.

I also liked the tribute to Glen Campbell. Old Glen has been through a lot lately and was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. But when various country stars sang his golden hits, like “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” he was able to pick up most of the words. It was a touching moment when they brought him up on stage.

I also loved the bit where Paisley and Underwood exchanged gifts. She got a Faith Hill “Barbie” and he got a Tim McGraw “Barbie” — which was supposedly anatomically correct and built to scale. In case you aren’t a country music fan, McGraw and Hill are husband and wife, and their reaction to the skit was priceless.

A lot of the old stars, like Reba McEntire, were on hand, of course, along with a lot of the new ones, like The Band Perry and Luke Bryan. They even had the guy from “Modern Family,” the one who reminds me of my boss, Greg Fowler, come out and give an award, although if he’s country, I’m a midget Russian astronaut.

All in all, it was a great evening and served to remind me, yet again, how proud I am of my roots. I may be American by birth, but I am purely Southern by the grace of God.

If you want to know how the economy is going without checking the Dow Jones Industrial Average, just look around for “yard sale” signs. When times are tough, a lot of folks start digging through their junk in hopes that it will become someone else’s treasure. Times must be tough because there seems to be a yard sale on every corner these days.

I would have one myself if I could A) find time to dig through all the junk in our attic, basement and closets and B) force myself to part with the few items I have that anyone might actually be willing to pay good money for.

My lovely wife Lisa went in with two of her friends and gave it a go a few years ago — at her friend’s house. I don’t know how much money she made, if any, but I am pretty sure we still have a lot of Lisa Boisseau’s knick-knacks sitting around our house. Lisa Boisseau was the hostess of the joint sale. I don’t know if she has any of our stuff sitting around her house or not.

I helped my mama have a yard sale once. It was hard work. She spent a week making labels and putting them on everything from glassware to aprons to 10-year-old clothes. When the big day arrived, we set up tables in the yard and set old furniture and small appliances all around and spread sheets out to put clothes on. She priced some things as low as a dime. Her big ticket item was an electric blanket that she was willing to part with for about five bucks. This was at least 15 years ago, understand, because she has been gone 12 years. Do people even use electric blankets anymore?

Naturally I whined and groused and complained all week and insisted that she was wasting her time. I was certain nobody would want anything that we were going to strew across her front yard. Of course, I was certain the electronic calculator would never replace the slide rule, either.

Nonetheless, we put an ad in the newspaper and stuck up a few obligatory signs on Friday night. My mother made me promise to be at her house bright and early on the Saturday morning of the sale. I am not sure what time I got there, but I distinctly remember stopping at Mamie’s Kitchen for a pork tenderloin biscuit and cup of coffee on the way and when I arrived at her house — at least 30 minutes before the appointed time — I couldn’t find a place to park and her would-be customers were anxiously going through her things as quickly as she could bring them out of the house.

In a full stomach, cheap canadian cialis the effectiveness is greatly reduced. You could do that easily by just buying Kamagra Polo tablets are commonly used to treat Erectile Dysfunction or using a nitrate drug for pain in the backbone may rise as the reaction tendencies in certain cases and needs immediate medical attention to get levitra from canada cure. Some of the studies admitted that less than 2 of every 100 heart attacks is allied with sexual deed & sexual role found to be the major quality-of-life concerns for both men & cialis brand female with cardiovascular illness. You would have to consult a sexologist to get the right treatment of your problems. generic viagra soft “You have to get to a yard sale early to get the good stuff,” a lady explained to me as she held a fake mother-of-pearl framed mirror up to her face, ostensibly, I suppose, to admire the way her pink sponge rollers contrasted with her purple mascara.

Honesty compels me to admit that I didn’t understand anything at all about the way these things were supposed to work. Everything had a price tag — everything. I marked the little stick-on labels and stuck them on myself. But what was on the label and what people wound up giving us for Mama’s junk seemed to have no correlation whatsoever. I think haggling over prices was part of the fun for most people.

Another curious thing was that Mama would let some stuff go for practically nothing — she might take 50 cents for a three dollar item, for instance — but she was adamant about other prices. If the tag said 15 cents then she was going to get 15 cents for it.

Once the morning rush subsided the traffic was pretty sporadic, but I don’t think there was ever a time when there wasn’t at least a couple of people poking around through our stuff. Some people actually asked to go inside and see if there were large items they might want to purchase. We declined those offers.

To my utter amazement, we sold almost everything she had on display and at the end of the day a guy in a rusty pick-up truck came by and gave us 10 bucks for everything that was left over. At the end of the day she had accumulated about $225. She told me that she used to work over a stand of looms for a month for that much money.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? Christmas is, after all, just around the corner and times certainly are tough. I do happen to check the Dow each day and maybe I need to start putting little stickers on my junk. I don’t have an electric blanket but I’m sure I have a fake mother-of-pearl framed mirror around the house somewhere.

Wow. You talk about a buzz kill! Sharnell really knows how to break up a good party.

I was having a great week, y’all — and was looking forward to an even better weekend. I was able to bask in the post-cocktail party glow. (My apologies to Dr. Adams; I didn’t touch a drop in Jacksonville. Promise!) We had beaten Florida and I had enjoyed a glorious weekend on St. Simons with close friends and family. Life was good.

I was looking forward to a great weekend, too — filled with food, fun and football — three of my favorite things. I would even get an extra hour of sleep Saturday night, thanks to Daylight-Saving Time ending.

There would be Friday night football. It was Senior Night, too. This year would prove to be particularly poignant, because there is a good chance I will be graduating with the Class of 2012.

You know what I like most about high school football on Friday night? I mean other than the football game itself — and the band — and the cheerleaders. I like the concession stand. I could gain 10 pounds standing behind the bleachers inhaling the aroma of the hamburgers on the grill — not to mention the hot dogs. And at our school they make nachos and fried chicken fingers and seasoned french fries! They still make popcorn the old-fashioned way, too.

Friday night lights are followed by Saturdays between the hedges — and Saturday in Athens means tailgating. It is time, once again, to let the “Big Dawg” eat — and the “Big Dawg,” in this case, would be me. Fried chicken, country ham, pork barbecue — you name it and I will eat it on a football Saturday — and being down to a fifth-string tailback doesn’t curtail my appetite one whit.

This week offered the bonus of following up Georgia’s Homecoming contest with the Game of the Century — between Alabama and LSU — on prime-time television. Obviously such a special game requires a special array of food.

We always eat a big breakfast on Sunday — and a big lunch — in preparation for an afternoon of couch potatoing — with pro football providing the background noise.

Those were my weekend plans — before Sharnell dashed cold water all over them. OK. I know. Time to explain.

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Sharnell and I were getting along famously at first. I learned that she was from Montezuma and a proud graduate of Macon County High School. I am familiar with Montezuma. It’s a good place and produces good people — like Sharnell. She completed her education in Chattanooga, Tenn. It’s a nice place, too.

She was friendly and gentle and when she filled that big syringe full of radioactive gunk and when she stuck the needle in my arm, I barely felt it. I am a big baby about needles, too. Sharnell was on the verge of becoming my best friend.

And then she gave me my orders for the rest of the weekend. That’s when she and I began to fall out. You see, I have to go back to the hospital Monday and Tuesday for a series of body scans, to see if we can trace the radioactive gunk and find out where those pesky cancer cells are hiding out. Apparently there are rules to follow when undergoing such tests.

First was the food thing. This nice young Montezuma lady forbade me to have beef, pork or chicken for five days. I could have fish as long as it wasn’t fried. Why bother?

Are you kidding me? An entire football weekend without a burger, a piece of chicken or a barbecued pork pig sandwich?

And that wasn’t the worst of it. She sent me to the store to pick up not one, but two, bottles of Magnesium Citrate and two Fleet — well, you know what Fleet makes. I was supposed to start using the Magnesium Citrate Saturday morning.

Does she not know how far it is from Section 108, row 50 to the nearest men’s room? Woe is me. When I voiced my displeasure, Sharnell asked me if I wanted to enjoy the football weekend or get well. I was reminded of the whole Jack Benny bit. A robber accosted the notorious cheapskate with the choice, “Your money or your life.” Benny pondered a while before responding, “I’m thinking. I’m thinking.”

I’ll deal with Sharnell on Monday. Meanwhile, keep those prayers coming, y’all. They really do help.

You’re welcome to the interstates. Nothing beats driving along the blue lines on the map — those smaller roads that meander through the countryside.Last weekend I had the opportunity to drive home from the Georgia coast and instead of joining the throngs on Interstate 95 and Interstate16, I drove cross country through some of the most beautiful farm land I have ever seen. I didn’t realize that we still grow so much cotton in Georgia.

We drove through or by-passed a lot of towns with familiar names and doing so brought back fond memories of trips to the coast I used to take with my parents when times were simpler and there were no interstate highways. We went through Jesup and Eastman and Surrency and saw signs pointing toward Hazlehurst and Hawkinsville and Reidsville.

We didn’t go through Reidsville, but I wish we had. It holds a soft spot in my heart and always will — and not because the state prison is there. Reidsville was the hometown of one of the most influential people in my entire life — my first-grade teacher, Miss Ruby Jordan, who was also my second-grade teacher, too.

Miss Jordan was up in years when I began my formal education in 1958. There was no kindergarten in Porterdale in 1958 and preschool for 4-year-olds hadn’t been thought of, so I began my schooling in the first grade. I couldn’t have had a better teacher.

Educating our children — or attempting to do so — has become a frustrating task in the 21st century. There are so many mandates from above — and I mean all the way to Washington, D.C. — by people who really don’t understand what really goes on in the classroom, that we are rapidly losing sight of the fact that the professional educator is the most valuable asset in our quest to educate and inspire the young people upon whom the future of the republic rests.

Miss Ruby Jordan was a professional in every sense of the word. She taught because she loved teaching children. Think about that for a moment. She didn’t love teaching reading or writing or arithmetic — she loved teaching children — and was great at it.

Ruby Jordan understood that each child was different and that each child had different needs. She realized that everybody doesn’t learn the same things at the same time in the same way. Let me give you a for instance.

In most of the cases, it fails to show the best results which could be effective enough. cialis no prescription is a product which comes with a sure shot guarantee that it would definitely show a person the strength to have a firm erection and additionally keep up it for a more extended period. Areas Covered in the Session: Spotting the difference between merely disagreeable or difficult, thoroughly disagreeable, browse around that pharmacy store viagra prices and dysfunctional. Practice regularly, if you cialis soft 20mg devensec.com can. These days, the online pharmacy is a good http://www.devensec.com/news/Appendix.pdf levitra on line option for all those looking for medicines while sitting at home. I came to the first grade already knowing how to read — like Scout Finch before me. I learned from my father while sitting in his lap at the kitchen table, peering at the pages of the Atlanta Constitution. Unlike Scout Finch’s pedagogue (in “To Kill a Mockingbird”) Miss Jordan didn’t chastise me for my unorthodoxy, and neither did she make me sit in a circle being bored to death with Alice and Jerry and Jip. She gave me a newspaper and assorted chapter books and made me a reading group of one. I progressed at my own pace and read about things that interested me. I still love to read, in part thanks to my father and in large part, thanks to Miss Jordan’s insight into my academic needs.

But she didn’t just recognize my strengths. She also recognized my weaknesses, which were legion, and made sure that they were addressed as well. She didn’t elevate me above other students and she didn’t lower me below other students. She treated me — she treated all of us — as individuals, and made sure our needs were met, to the best of her ability.

The actual knowledge she imparted to me and the 30-some-odd little lintheads that were my classmates was secondary to the more important life lessons she helped us learn — and there is a difference between teaching and helping someone learn. She taught us discipline. She taught us to respect ourselves and one another. She taught us that learning could be fun. She taught us to be proud of ourselves and our parents.

It’s funny what people remember. I remember that several times a year we had to fill out various forms that called for our parents’ occupation. Miss Jordan taught us to put “textiles” in that form. When she had to get someone told, and from time to time all teachers have to get someone told, she would add onto her admonishment, “put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

I will never forget the day she told me that she was ashamed of me — for getting in a fight, of all things. I wish I could say that I never got in another fight after that. I guess I could say it, but I’d be lying.

All these thoughts and many others raced through my mind as we passed near Reidsville last Sunday and I started to suggest going to the local cemetery there and searching for Ruby Jordan’s grave. I would love to find it and pay my respects. I didn’t, but I wish I had. Perhaps next time.

In the meantime I can only hope that somehow she knew, before they put her in that grave, how much she meant to so many children just like me.

I’ve never been much of a joiner. I joined the Boy Scouts of America when I was 8 and the Methodist Church when I was 12. That’s about it — unless the PTA counts. Surely I have a PTA membership card stashed away in a desk drawer somewhere.

They sent me a membership card for the AARP when I turned 50. I filled out the form and sent it in, just to see who all they would sell my information to. I never sent them a payment but I get an awful lot of mail addressed to Brother Darrell Lee Huckaby, Esq.

Thursday afternoon I joined another club. The FOFC — Fat Old Fools’ Club. Actually, the founder calls it something else, but I wasn’t sure I could write “old farts” in a family newspaper.

I was recruited into the organization while walking on the East Beach on St. Simon’s Island. I was in town for a family reunion, held in conjunction with the annual humility seminar held on the banks on the St. Johns River every October and ran across the club headquarters, housed under a red tent near the King and Prince.

The president of the club happens to be an old friend of mine. He shall remain nameless, but he is a graduate of Clark Central High School and fellow educator. Like me, he used to coach girls’ basketball but several years ago he went over to the dark side and is now an administrator.

The qualifications for membership in the FOFC are pretty simple. You have to be old — see above reference. I’m practically 60, so I qualify. You have to be fat, obviously. 200 pounds is the minimum. They pretended to believe me when I claimed to weigh less, but only because I’ve been sick and they were feeling sorry for me. None of the other men under the canvas needed such a dispensation, trust me.

The other qualifications are that you have to have seen at least 200 Georgia football games. We’re talking in the stadium, not on television. You also have to have been to at least five bowl games and to have actually seen Georgia beat Florida in Jacksonville.

I qualified on every level and asked them to put me down for a lifetime membership.

What, you might ask, does one do when one becomes a member of the FOFC? I’m glad you asked. Basically, as far as I can tell, you sit in the sun — or the shade, if you prefer — and enjoy cold beverages while watching people and swapping stories. Any degree of truth in said stories appears to be purely optional.
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Let the record state that the inaugural meeting was a rousing success. We attracted new members from near and far — Athens, Conyers, Porterdale — and even the northern extremities of Gwinnett County.

The people-watching was extraordinary. Georgia Bulldog fans come in all shapes and sizes. And ages. One octogenarian attempted to join our happy group. We were relieved that he only weighed 78 pounds and thus didn’t qualify. We didn’t mind that he was in his 80s, but the Speedo he wore beneath his tank top gave us pause.

Honesty compels me to admit that I tried to avoid watching some of the more appealing people on the beach (it was 84 degrees, by the way), because the president’s wife and teen-aged daughter were in attendance. I didn’t mind them knowing that I was a fat old fool but I didn’t want them thinking I was a dirty old man.

But the stories! The stories were quite grand and got taller and taller with each telling. Of course, stuff got deeper and deeper, too — and that was before the tide came in.

Sadly, I was the oldest person in the group. I saw my first game when Wally Butts was still roaming the sidelines. Most of the others started watching in the 1960s, but more than made up for what they lacked in longevity with experience.

One bunch had been to virtually every game during Mark Richt’s tenure and tried to relive every win. Their memories were a bit murky about some of the details of some of the games, however. As the meeting moved along I could understand why.

The president finally adjourned the meeting around suppertime. I think the shrimp and oysters at the Crab Trap were calling his name. He promised that we would reconvene at 10:30 Friday morning, however, and the second meeting was even better than the first.

And we are not an exclusive club. Everyone is welcome, as long as you meet the criteria. Next meeting is the fourth Thursday in November, 2012. Y’all come. The Lord willing, I’ll be there.

I have been accused, from time to time, of being a wild and crazy guy, if I may borrow a phrase from the classic Steve Martin Saturday Night Live skits of a bygone day. At least I was in my younger days. I have done some pretty stupid things on a dare. I would tell you about a few of them, except my children read this column from time to time and I’m not sure how long the statute of limitations is on some of the stuff I did, particularly while I was a college student at UGA.

I don’t want (UGA Police chief) Jimmy Williamson knocking on my door in the middle of the night to settle old scores. What’s that old adage? Let sleeping dogs lie?

But on the wildest, craziest, most carefree night of my life, I have never been crazy enough to get myself in the situation an old boy out it Vallejo, Calif., did last week. This guy bet his buddies a hundred bucks that he could fit inside a baby swing in Blue Rock Springs Park.

How does something like that come up? Does someone just look at the swing and at their friend’s carcass and say, “Nobody could ever get their rear end into that small, tiny swing?”

That would be like saying, “Nobody could ever get that Coke machine in the back of a Volkswagen” or “Nobody could ride a motorcycle up one side of the Georgia Coliseum and down the other!” I’m not saying I have any knowledge of anyone ever doing such things. I’m not saying I don’t, though.

But we were talking about last week in California. None of the reports I read about the incident indicated whether alcohol was involved, but I’d say it was a safe bet that it was. This guy was nothing if he wasn’t determined. He meant to win his buddies’ bucks, understand. He went to the store and got some liquid laundry detergent. He used this as a lubricant. He wanted to get real slippery, so he could get into — and presumably out of, said swing.

Next he took off his pants — come to think of it, I’m just about certain that alcohol had to be involved — and sure enough — he got himself all the way into the little baby swing. I’m sure this fellow had studied the laws of physics at some point in his educational career. He was probably aware of natural laws like, what goes up must come down and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. He probably extrapolated those laws to include what goes into a swing must come out of a swing.
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Only he doesn’t. Or, at least in his case, it didn’t. He got in, but he couldn’t get himself out. He was stuck like the proverbial bug in a rug — or like a big man in a baby swing.

Now when I read about this stunt I tried and tried to imagine a scenario in which, at some point in my life, I could have wound up like this guy. Honesty compels me to admit that there was a day — a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away — when I might have been coerced into attempting such a stunt. Like I said, I have done a lot of strange things on a dare. But I could not imagine, under any circumstances, a situation in which my friends would have left me in the lurch like this guys’ friends left him.

That’s right. Once he got stuck in the swing, his so-called friends split and left him there — in the park, in the dark — all night long. I guess they thought it was funny at the time. But think about the poor guy. He was there for nine hours — without his pants — stuck in a swing. Can you imagine what must have gone through his head during that time? I bet he plotted all sorts of revenge on the guys who left him there.

The next morning, at dawn’s early light, I suppose, a park maintenance man came around and found our guy squalling like one of the babies that are supposed to fit in the swing. The park custodian summoned the police, who were unable to extricate him. They in turn called the local fire department and they saved the day, by cutting the chains away from the swing. His ordeal wasn’t over, though. He had to be taken to a local hospital where the swing was cut away from his backside with a cast cutter.

You can’t make this stuff up, y’all.

At least he’ll have a good story to tell people — once he gets over the embarrassment. I just hope he got his hundred dollars in advance, because with friends like his, he doesn’t need any enemies.

We, as a people, take a lot of stuff for granted these days. For instance, we are no longer amazed that we can turn a knob — or, actually, press a button on a remote control — and watch a football game being beamed live from 2,000 miles away, or a dictator being overthrown from halfway around the world. I still remember the first show I watched on a television set. It was a dramatization of “Little Red Riding Hood” and I was scared to go to sleep at night for weeks.

We take central heat for granted, too. At least I do. If the house is cold I just run my finger along a thermostat control and before you can say Jack Robinson I am warm as a bug in a rug — until my lovely wife, Lisa, comes along and turns it back down again. Not so the humble abode of my childhood. We had one gas space heater in our little house and it was turned off at bedtime, lest the pilot light go out in the middle of the night and cause us all to be asphyxiated by the gas fumes.

Don’t laugh. I lost an uncle that way.

I will never take my flush toilet for granted and if you have ever had to put on a winter coat and a pair of shoes to go to the bathroom at night, you won’t either — but you get my drift. We are truly living in remarkable times and should be amazed every single day at the amazing technological advances that we have experienced over the last four or five decades.

Speaking of taking things for granted, consider the modern grocery store. They aren’t your mama and daddy’s Big Apple or Colonial Store — I can tell you that. They don’t have savings stamps these days but they have a wider variety of foods than those of my parents’ generation could have ever imagined.

Thursday was grocery day in our house when I was coming up and my daddy, who worked on the second shift in the Osprey Mill, did the shopping in the morning, when the stores weren’t crowded. I loved going with him in the summer, when I wasn’t at school. Daddy had a system for buying groceries. He would go up and down the aisles, buying the “specials” first, calculating in his head the amount of money he had spent.

Next he would visit the meat counter, and the amount of money left in his budget would determine the cuts of meat he would buy. Supermarkets had butchers on duty in those days and if a customer didn’t see a cut of meat that suited him — or her — the butcher would trim something up, right on the spot. After visiting the meat counter we would hit the produce department — where they also had a person on duty to weigh up the selection, bag it, and put a price on it.
#We would buy the milk last so it wouldn’t be out of the cooler for very long and Daddy was extremely vigilant about checking the expiration date — something I have inherited from him.
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Of course in those days there were no scanners. The checker had to ring up the purchases by hand and there was a bagger to load the groceries into paper bags — or boxes, if you preferred. Homer Huckaby loved to do math in his head and he would whisper his estimate to me before the clerk told him the final amount. He was seldom off by more than a few cents.

I don’t do all the grocery shopping at our house, but I do at least half of it — and a lot of the cooking, too. I don’t make one trip a week to the market, though. I go almost every day — and when I stop to think about the vast array of food available at the typical American grocery store — which I don’t do that frequently — I am truly amazed.

We have an abundance of fresh produce, year-round. We don’t have to wait until the 4th of July to buy watermelon. You can buy a slice today if you want to — and we can buy oranges in June and cantaloupes in April and we can purchase varieties of fruits and vegetables that I didn’t even know existed when I was a kid.

They have delicatessens in most grocery stores and fresh seafood and bakeries and anything and everything you could ever think of to take home to cook — not to mention fresh flowers and helium balloons and prescription drugs.

Yep, we really do live in the land of plenty, and most of the time most of us probably take it all for granted. Of course there is a downside to all this progress.

I have cable television but there’s nothing on that compares to “I Love Lucy.” I have central heat, but haven’t owned a robe or bedroom shoes since we got wall-to-wall carpet. And shopping is a pleasure at my local grocery store — but they don’t have a butcher behind the meat counter or a produce man, and just try to find a jar of pickled peaches!

I guess sometimes progress isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“All glory is fleeting,” thus sayeth the Roman Emperors returning from their conquests. If you believe the Hollywood version of “Patton,” that is. Last week, yet another tyrannical despot learned that lesson the hard way — along with a more important lesson, humans, even despots, are mortal. Everybody dies.

It is always interesting to observe the behavior of these bullies in their final moments. None seem particularly brave when they have to face their enemies without benefit of the goons they have hired to protect them. Hitler, for instance, took the coward’s way out and committed suicide, once he realized his demise was imminent.

Saddam Hussein was taken alive, hiding like a rat in a spider hole. It is interesting that he had almost a million dollars in cash with him. Dollars, mind you — not Euros. He was also armed, but chose not to shoot it out with the American soldier who took him prisoner. It is reported that he identified himself as “Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq” and then offered to negotiate.

It has also been reported — or at least rumored — that the soldier who pulled him out of the hole responded, “I am from the United States Army. President Bush sends his regards — and you are under arrest, you SOB.” I have no idea if that is true, but I hope it is.

Saddam terrorized millions of people and was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of others, but in the end he was just another two-bit dictator with a hood over his head and a rope around his neck. He didn’t look particularly powerful, wealthy or intimidating standing on the gallows.

Osama bin Laden looked fearless during his hate-filled rants aired so frequently over the Al-Jazeera television network. Some reports say he tried to hide behind a woman when Navy Seals infiltrated his lair last May. When they dumped his body in the ocean, I don’t think they wrapped up any of his great wealth in the burial shroud.

And now Moammar Gadhafi is dead. Another dictator bites the dust, and like most of his counterparts throughout history, he did not go quietly into the dark night of death. He was captured, appropriately enough, hiding in a sewer, in his hometown of Sirte. Ironically he was armed with a golden gun. He reportedly pleaded for his life, begging his captors not to shoot him. He kept insisting that the actions of his captors were in violation of Islam law. He asked them, “Don’t you know right from wrong?”

Now that’s ironic.

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I heard the news about Gadhafi’s death the same way I hear everything these days. I got a text. Honesty compels me to admit that I wasn’t filled with jubilation, as I was when I heard that Saddam Hussein had been found or that Bin Laden had been killed. Those revelations came as more of a surprise. It was a foregone conclusion that Moammar’s days were numbered, and it was a matter of “when” not “if” he would be found.

Do you want to know, truthfully, what my first thoughts were? The very first thing that came to mind was Ronald Reagan and his failed attempt to rid the world of Gadhafi in 1986. I don’t know how things work where The Gipper is spending eternity, but I hope President Reagan is aware of what happened. Maybe he got to have a handful of jelly beans to celebrate.

Then I thought about the innocent souls who died at Gadhafi’s hands aboard that airliner that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.

And then I thought about the late great Atlanta Constitution columnist and Southern icon, Lewis Grizzard. Back in 1986, Grizzard recorded a hilarious standup bit about Gadhafi in which he explained what the Libyan dictator’s name really meant. According to Grizzard it means “do-do pot.”

Grizzard also explained why Gadhafi was in such a perpetual foul mood. He just spent too much time, according to Lewis, with sand in his under-drawers. I don’t know how Lewis celebrated the news of Moammar’s demise, but I bet he toasted the occasion with something a little stronger than jelly beans.

Gadhafi terrorized much of the world for more than four decades and accumulated a vast amount of ill-gotten wealth. Today he isn’t scary at all and all of his worldly wealth was left behind.

“All glory is fleeting.”

It was damp and cool when I left the house Wednesday morning. By the end of the school day, brisk fall weather had arrived in the North Georgia Piedmont. I set aside all other business and drove straight home to take care of my husbandly duties.

When my lovely wife Lisa got home from work, at dark-thirty, I had a big pot of homemade chili simmering on the stove. And yes, there was hot cornbread, chopped onions and grated cheese to go with it.

Honesty compels me to admit that I wasn’t a big chili eater growing up. In fact, I can’t remember my mother ever serving it at our house. We would have had a steaming hot bowl of vegetable soup on such a day as Wednesday. When I was in college, however, I read a magazine article about legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, the Bluegrass Baron of Basketball. The article revealed that Coach Rupp’s favorite diner was a place just off the UK campus that served spicy chili with purple onions on the side. He was said to have eaten there several times each week.

When the Georgia team, of which I was manager, went to Lexington, I found that diner and had a bowl of the stuff myself. I was hooked, and have been a fan of good chili ever sense.

Whenever Lisa makes chili I think about her first attempt at the dish. We were practically newlyweds and our friends from Valdosta, Ken and Beth Cooper, were coming up for the weekend. The Christmas season was approaching and Beth and Lisa were going to spend an entire Saturday shopping at Lenox Square. I shan’t reveal how Ken and I would spend that particular Saturday, because it isn’t relevant and may serve to incriminate me.

What is relevant is this. When Ken and Beth arrived on Friday evening, Lisa had a huge pot of chili ready for them. She had gotten her recipe from an old church cookbook. I am pretty sure it had been submitted by Larry Laster, an old Porterdale boy who played running back for Auburn in the early ’60s. Lisa was a novice cook understand, and can be forgiven for getting the abbreviations for tablespoons and teaspoons confused.

We all gathered around the table and said grace and I served up the chili. Now I don’t know how much red pepper and how much chili powder Lisa put in that pot, but I know that when Ken Cooper took the first bite of his, sweat broke out all over his face. Always a trooper and always the gentleman, Ken simply took a sip of sweet tea and tried another bite. His eyes bulged out. Steam may have come out of his ears. He reached across the table and grabbed Beth’s arm and said, “Don’t baby; I love you too much.”
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Suffice it to say that we went out for supper that night. On a positive note, Ken’s sinuses stayed clear all winter.

I had a similar experience at a Men’s Club dinner at the Methodist church in Porterdale. I had been invited to speak, on a Monday night, and Jack Rawls was cooking the chili. Mr. Jack was a big man with half an ear on one side of his face. He was a wonderful cook but lived by the principle that too many cooks spoil the broth and wouldn’t let anybody in the kitchen with him while he was at work.

On this particular night Jack finally declared the chili ready and two of the men brought the giant kettle of the delectable dish into the fellowship hall. We eagerly lined up and had our bowls filled with the rich, meaty concoction. When everyone had their bowls filled to the brim we took our places on either side of the long table that had been set up in the big room.

When grace had been said, we all took our long awaited first bites. Jack’s chili was hotter than a twelve-alarm fire. Beads of sweat broke out on my face and, like Ken Cooper had done, I reached for my iced tea. So did every man at the table — except one.

We all looked at one another and laughed and then, as one, looked toward the end of the table where the cook was seated, oblivious to the commotion his chili had caused. There sat Jack Rawls, pocket knife in hand, cutting hot red peppers into his bowl of chili.

The pot I cooked Wednesday night wasn’t of the twelve-alarm variety — and my measurements were accurate. It didn’t clear our sinuses or create the need for us to eat out, but it was good enough to make my children wish they were home enjoying it with us — and that is plenty good enough for me.

The radio has been a staple in American households since the 1920s. In the ’30s, Americans began tuning in on a regular basis for news and entertainment and assurances from the president that prosperity was just around the corner. They listened to “Fibber McGee and Molly” and “Amos and Andy” and FDR’s Fireside Chats. Most Americans learned of the dastardly Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor while listening to their favorite Sunday afternoon radio shows on Dec. 7, 1941.

When I was growing up in Porterdale, we listened to the radio more than we watched television. We had an old Philco model, in the kitchen, with a great big dial, and it played most of the day. WGFS was our station of choice — the “Voice and choice of the Piedmont Area.”

We would listen to the “horn-blowers” — commuters on their way to work who would ride by the station and blow their horns at station owner and morning host Bill Hoffman — while eating breakfast. During the day, on days when someone was home, we would listen to music and the news and the “Bulletin Board” — a feature where local residents could list items and services for sale or trade — and sometimes we would play “Record Giveaway,” a sort of poor man’s trivia game where the first person to call the station with an answer to a question would win a five-pack of 45 records — mostly demos that no one would ever listen to.

We would still be listening to WGFS in the evening at sign off time, when Perry Como would sing the Lord’s Prayer.

Sometimes, of course, we would listen to WSB or WGST and my sister and I might switch the station to WPLO and listen to a little country music or WQXI for some rock ‘n’ roll, but we’d better not let Mama come home from the mill and catch us listening to Elvis, because she didn’t like the boy. She thought he was vulgar.

I wish my mama could have lived to see what rock stars are like today. She’d be done forgave Elvis. Elvis might have shook his pelvis but he never showed it to anyone on live television.

At night, we might’ve listened to the Crackers games on the radio, or I might’ve tried to find a big league game on some static-filled channel coming out of Chicago or Cincinnati. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, the radio was always tuned to WSB because we had to listen to Ed Thilinius and Bill Mundy describe the action from Athens, or wherever else the Georgia Bulldogs might have been playing football. In the winter, we listened to the Kentucky Wildcats play on WHAS out of Louisville. My daddy was an Adolph Rupp man.

Of course we had to be ever-vigilant in case we were instructed to tune our radio to the civil defense station, in the event of nuclear attack.
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By the time my lovely wife Lisa and I had set up housekeeping, television had long supplanted the radio as the primary means of entertainment and communication, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have several in our house. There was an AM-FM tuner in our stereo rack system and we each had a clock radio on our bedside table and we kept a radio on the kitchen counter as well. Bill Hoffman had retired by then, but I liked to listen to Ludlow Porch and all the whackos that called his talk show.

While I wasn’t looking, modern technology had rendered the radio obsolete in our house. There is still a stereo rack system in the basement, but it is in the storage section and not plugged in. The speakers are not attached and I wouldn’t begin to know how to restore it to a functional state. My kids do listen to music, but they have thousands of songs downloaded onto their iPods and plug them into tiny speakers that would dwarf the decibel capacity of our old-fashioned stereos. All of the old boom boxes we used to have were discarded a long time ago.

I quit carrying a headset radio to ball games when Larry Munson retired, so the ones I had up in the closet didn’t have batteries and Lisa did away with our under-the-counter kitchen radio when she had granite countertops installed last spring. The clock on my 28-year-old clock radio still works, but the radio does not.

So there we were — wanting to listen to the Georgia post-game show to see what Mark Richt had to say about the near-fourth quarter collapse and about the post-game tirade Bulldog coach Todd Grantham unleashed on the Vanderbilt coach.

We did what any other grown men would have done: We got in the car and drove around Rockdale County for an hour, listening to the car radio. I’m not sure we ever got satisfactory answers to any of our questions, though.

Sunday morning, I made another startling discovery. Radios are really cheap nowadays, and, for the record — we now have one in every room. Never know when there might be a nuclear attack.

I wonder if anybody still plays “Record Giveaway.”