A long time ago, there was a commercial that purported to demonstrate how Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were invented. One gentleman was inattentively walking down the street eating a chocolate bar. A similarly oblivious fellow was walking toward him eating peanut butter. They bumped into each other and the chocolate bar ended up shoved in the peanut butter jar. “You got peanut butter on my chocolate.” “You got chocolate in my peanut butter.” “LET’S EAT IT!” they then exclaimed in unison. Now, that is very obviously not how peanut butter cups came into being. Seriously, who walks down the street with their face shoved in a jar of Jif? If you do I’m not judging you or anything…no, actually I am. That’s weird. If you want to lick Peter Pan straight out of the jar and off your dirty fingers in the privacy of your own home, that’s cool, but not in public where impressionable children are watching. I mean, the guy in the commercial wasn’t even using a spoon…but I digress. That concept, though, of two unrelated things coming together to maybe create something better than the sum of its parts actually happened to me last week. Tucker the Wonder Dog (our Goldendoodle) seemed to be favoring one of his ears. He was scratching at it some and sort of wallowing around on the floor to rub it on the carpet. Ashley was afraid he was getting an ear infection and made him a vet appointment. I took him to said appointment and as is always the case at the outset of a vet visit, Tucker was weighed. He’s a smart dog and has been to the vet enough that he knows the routine. They call us out of the waiting room, he walks through a door and hops on the scale without prompting. The nurse scribbled down his weight, then led us to a room. The vet came and checked him out and the good news was that he did not have an ear infection. It was likely a mild allergy caused by the recent weather changes and perhaps pollen. The bad news was that Tucker weighed in at a fairly beefy 98 pounds. Now, Tucker has a big frame and lots of his weight is muscle, but the 98 is about 10 pounds higher than it should be. “Mr. Tucker needs to lose a few pounds,” the vet said. This is where we go from chocolate to peanut butter. For some reason, a friend and I started discussing whether or not we have physically put our feet down in all 46 of South Carolina’s counties. I have a fierce love and loyalty of my home state and my one trick is the ability to sing the 46 counties in alphabetical order to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” (which I learned in Mrs. Shannon’s third-grade class and have never forgotten even as I would struggle to tell you my mom or sister’s phone numbers without looking them up in my contact list). Some people can play an instrument, some excel in athletic endeavors and I can rip off “Abbeville, Aiken, Allendale, Anderson etc.” with ease. As near as I can figure, I only lack about three counties. My general travels and my job covering prep sports has taken me to nearly every far-flung rural locale imaginable, but I don’t clearly recall actually putting my feet on the ground in Allendale, Hampton or Edgefield Counties. I’ve driven through Edgefield and I think Hampton, but I didn’t so much as stop for gas or to use the bathroom. Allendale and Hampton abut one another and are located such that you don’t really go through them traveling to much of anywhere. If you are there, you are there for a reason. Then came the moment that doofus eating peanut butter with his fingers and the candy bar guy collided. Both Tucker and our other dog Gracie (a Labradodle) need to shed a little weight. Exercise (mainly in the form of walking them) is a way to do that. They actually love to walk. If I announce “who wants to walk” they both get really excited and run to the closet where we keep their leashes and collars and will actually cry if I don’t hurry up and get on with the show. They also like to walk in new places, see different sights and encounter lots of doting dog-lovers. They are my loyal, happy little buddies, so I walk them whenever I can (though handling nearly 180 pounds of energetic dogs is kind of like walking a horse sometimes). So, why not walk them in all 46 counties? That way, they (and I) would get to experience some different places and people and I would get to mark the last three counties off my visit list. It’s a brilliant and terrible and logistically difficult idea. It will require some planning and trips to some of those little border towns that spill into a couple of different counties (there is a four-corners convergence of Bamberg, Colleton, Hampton and Allendale for example…I’d need to hit that area because it’s hard to justify four separate three-ish hour drives to walk in each individually), weather and temperatures certainly come into play, but I’m intent on doing it. So if you see us, please stop and say “hey.” Even if you’re walking down the street eating peanut butter straight from the jar.
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TravisI am Travis, the king 0f SC 1A Football Archives
November 2021
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