The Holiday Road Can Be Long And Winding

From today's Times and News-Star

Attention, all colons: May I have your attention please.

This is a public service announcement. It is meant to be helpful and not tacky, but sometimes the two roads converge.

During this holiday season, keep plenty of meds on hand to quell digestive issues. Sometimes, even the most well-meaning stomach can write a check that its fellow digestive tract members cannot cash.

Let’s be careful out there…

Last weekend a buddy of mine lost a bet with a fish taco.

We were on the road in San Jose, Calif., a long way from home and actually working at a football game. Being sick at home is no picnic. Being sick at a Marriott two time zones from your home bathroom is pure panic.

I was alerted and immediately gathered up a banana, dry cereals, water bottles, sport drinks and enough various kinds of medicines to eventually rope off every passageway in my buddy’s body except his nostrils. I’m like the character Red in “The Shawshank Redemption” -- I’m a man who knows how to get things.

So while he was in bed and the bathroom all day – it was a night game, which proved to be a blessing – we tried to trace the source of the problem. Perhaps it was the seafood restaurant. I don’t know as I had “tossed greens” and some au gratin potatoes. I don’t trust much fish on the road. My fish comfort zone is more along the lines of Port Au Prince or Jan’s River Restaurant or the Mohawk. Or at my brother-in-law’s table.

 

By game time, my man was a bit pale. But he’s a gamer, and we are part of a radio football broadcast (for lack of a better term) team, so as he made his way somewhat gingerly to the sidelines to report, we strapped in upstairs for the play-by-play by Dave Nitz and analysis (again, for lack of a better term) by me. This was but the calm before the storm.

I stuck my head out of the press box at halftime. Mistake. One of our crack photographers appeared to be throwing up (there is no better term) in much the same way, I suppose, that the Titanic appeared to be taking on water. I thought he was either going to die or was giving birth. It was a sickening sight. A three-heaver.

I rushed back inside and told Dave, “The whole system’s breaking down!”

Again, I do what guys do. I traced it back. Though this is totally unfair, the West Coast-based “In ’n’ Out Burger” would be the guilty party if I were going strictly by definition. But nothing that good can make you sick.

So I don’t know what it was. All I know is that he literally left it all on the field, and that’s about all you can ask for in an athletic contest.

The game and a few pounds were lost, but we persevered. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson, right? We returned home wiser, I hope. Certainly more medicated.

A lot of you will be traveling this month. Please watch your diet. Order food wisely. Stick with the classics. And carry medicine as backup because sickness can strike the fickle innards at any time. Of course, I’m no expert, nor a doctor. I’m just telling you what a little fishy told me.

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10 Reasons, By George, To Like Texas

From today's Times and News-Star

                     

Went to El Paso and San Marcos in the past month. If these were the only towns in Texas you’d ever visit, you’d swear the state bird was a rock and the state flower was a Mexican restaurant. These parts of Texas have depth at both, especially around El Paso, where a brown suit is called “camouflage.”

This is an entirely good thing: I’ve always been pro rock – you know it, I know it, the American people know it – and I could take Mexican food daily through a tube to a vein in my arm. Good stuff.

But a lot of Louisiana people don’t like Texas, something I’ve never quite understood. It’s probably just competitive border rivalry. I say a state that gave us Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Willie Nelson and the log ride at Six Flags is a keeper any day of the week.

Texas has also given us country music star and authentic cowboy George Strait, surely one of the faces on the Mount Rushmore of Texas singers. Strait is in he middle of his “Cowboy Rides Away” tour, which will end 30 years of getting jiggy with it in a country kind of way out on the road. Those driving from north Louisiana might already know that the closest concert stops in early 2013 are Oklahoma City, North Little Rock, New Orleans, Houston and San Antonio’s Alamodome, where tickets cost an arm, a leg, two steers and Hoss Cartwright’s 10-gallon hat. The tour is to finish with 20 more dates in 2014, giving us time to save up some pesos.

I am trying to achieve liftoff on a pair of tickets but am not holding my Louisiana breath. After looking at prices, well, this is where the redneck rides away.

BUT, a guy’s got to make a living and George certainly has given me and his other fans our money’s worth over the years. In honor of this real-life rodeo roper, rancher and Texas singer, here are the Top 10 George Strait Songs According To Me. Keep in mind that this challenge is too big for me: I never thought any person or group would break Conway Twitty’s record of No. 1 hits, but Strait, with 59, got it done.

1.    Amarillo by Morning: Strictly a peer pressure choice, though I like it. Country Music TV picked it as the No. 12 country tune of alltime. (He Stopped Loving Her Today by George Jones was No. 1.) Also chosen by “The Austin Chronicle” as the No. 7 song about a place in Texas. (El Paso by Marty Robbins was No. 1 – Amen, brother! -- if you’re keeping score at home.)

2.     She’ll Leave You With a Smile:And your Stetson, but that’s about it.

3.     Honk If You Honky Tonk: Written by stud Dean Dillon, who also wrote the following:

4.     The Chair and

 

5.     I’ve Come To Expect It From You, and

6.     Easy Come, Easy Go: I hope George is giving Dillon free tickets to the concerts. This guy writes songs like Charlie Daniels plays fiddle.

7.     The Cowboy Rides Away, by Sonny Throckmorton. Strait knows where the best songwriters hang out, rest assured.

8.     Give It Away: The boy in the song can’t even give his broken heart away. Bummer.

9.     Go On: It’s a happy song!, at least sort of.

10.     Designated Drinker (with Alan Jackson): When the guy hands over his keys in the first line, it’s NOT going to be a feel-good tune.

Adios, George.

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The Little Things Mean A Lot -- And Aren't So Little

From today's Times and News-Star

This is the time of year when we traditionally give thanks to George Halas for inventing the NFL, to Bubba Chinet for inventing the plastic fork and paper plate, and to Dorcas Reilly, a staff member in the home economics department of the Campbell Soup Company in 1955, for inventing the green bean casserole.

Dorcas Reilly. Momma D. Queen of the Kitchen. They don’t name ’em like “Dorcas” anymore.

But they do MAKE ’em like that still, if it’s green bean casserole we’re talking about. Dorcas set the simple standard, and now her dish is a Thanksgiving Day classic.

Thank you, Dorcas. ’Preciate it. Were it not for you, there would be a lot of homeless cans of Cream of Mushroom Soup walking around.

Maybe there is something to learn from Dorcas here, from how she thought to invent something when asked to come up with a quick and easy dish made from basic things you’d have hanging around your kitchen on any given day. If we apply that same thinking to cooking up a gratitude list, we can look around right now and see what we’ve got handy to be grateful about.

Few things are as humbling as realizing all the simple things we can do that some others can’t. Just to be able to look around, for starters. To be able to walk to the bathroom. Brush your teeth. Afford toothpaste.

Just to be able to dress yourself. To have clothes to wear. To be able to tie your shoes, maybe walk to a car, maybe drive it to a job or to the store or to a friend’s house.

Some people -- more than we care to think about? -- can’t do any of those things.

This morning before 7, a dog had pooped in my car. Tough break. Just dealing with the fact that that really DID just happen is enough to get your emotional center out of whack. And, once you accept it, I promise you it’s more than enough to get you to pull your car over.

There are two ways to react when your day starts like that: either “It’s gonna be one of those days,” or “Surely it can only get better from here! Sweet!”

So I started my gratitude list, as I’ve been instructed, in those fragile moments after this mini-disaster. And decided that, first of all, I love that dog, though her colon, not so much.

I’m thankful for the animals my son grew up with, for Elfie, for our supplemental dog Spot, and for Jingle Bell, the cat who thought he was a dog. What a break, to have those three for as long as we did.

I’m thankful that when I was only 8, a group of five grown men let me go with them to the South Carolina football at Clemson, a day I have never forgotten and never will forget. They didn’t have to do that.

From that same year, I’m thankful for the farm mom who taught me, in about two minutes, how to drive a tractor. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to work since then, thankful for the jobs I have, for the people who I work with who could be mean or short under pressure but aren’t.

I’m thankful for good green bean casserole and bad, because even if it’s bad it means that at least somebody’s trying, and thought enough of you to share. Besides, in general, things could always be worse. We could be the seat of my car.

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Hard To Miss The Ghosts Of Ole Miss

From today's Times and News-Star

                     

I love Mississippi. I love Willie Morris and magnolias and the Neshoba County Fair. I love Oxford most of all, and am lucky enough to have spent a few days there I will never forget.

And maybe that’s the problem, for lack of a better word, with Mississippi. It’s hard to forget for all the right reasons, harder to forget for all the wrong ones. Mississippi just can’t get much of a break in history.

ESPN’s most recent “30 for 30” offering, “The Ghosts of Ole Miss,” explores the University of Mississippi campus in the fall of 1962, when the football team went undefeated despite campus violence over integration and the enrollment of James Meredith. It’s not entertaining television, but it is compelling. Old footage, football and racism never fail to draw a crowd.

The ghosts keep hanging around.

“I really don’t mind paying for my mistakes,” said one of my best friends, born and raised in Mississippi, “but it sucks when I have to pay for the foul ups for people who, for the most part, are dead and gone. At some point, I guess everyone from the South has to yell ‘Uncle’ in unison, just to see if the rest of the country will let us get up.”

The hour-long piece is online for viewing. You likely will learn little new, other than the football team was undefeated that fall, and Coach Johnny Vaught told his players, “The whole country has seen the worst of our state. You 46 guys can show them the best.”

And the Rebels did.

But the piece focused less on the team and more on the situation on campus and in the state, something that’s been done in no small part before. Still, the only real inaccuracy I know of concerns John Hawkins, who was elected as the school’s first black cheerleader, in the 1980s. He did not say, “I shall not carry the Rebel flag,” as the show suggested, but rather quietly declined. According to my Mississippi friend, an Ole Miss student then, the uproar came only after Hawkins was pressed about it.

If you are from Mississippi, you will have watched a different show than I did. Either way, it’s worth thinking about, maybe worth saying a prayer for Mississippi for. Here’s how my Ole Miss friend put it – and this is only after I asked him to watch it; since he’s been down this historical road so often, he knew what to expect, and would have preferred to pass:

“I suppose my real feeling about the program is one of regret -- regret all that stuff happened, regret the responses, regret the attention and regret that nothing seems to be able to wash off the stench. All these many years later, Mississippi remains as a state suffering as the vanquished. For that matter, Mississippi is not alone. Only Southern states are required to submit redistricting plans to the Justice Department. There obviously was a time and place for such actions, but what has to occur for that burden to be lifted?

“The South in general and Mississippi in particular remains the convenient whipping boy for the nation as a whole. I suppose the program was about what I had expected -- a few people trying to promote themselves and a few more making money at the expense of people who weren't part of the problem. We're just the ones who have to deal with the carnage after the fact. They say time heals all wounds. Well, we're waiting.”

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