When you go for walks and look at the road and toward s the sky as far as your eyes allow you to see, the world seems impossibly big and you feel incredibly small. When you get right down to it, though, the world really isn’t that big a place. On Thursday, Tucker, Gracie and I rode to neighboring Spartanburg for the second of our 46-couunty walks. It’s an area I know very well as I finished up my college education there, it’s my wife’s hometown, I worked a couple of jobs there (for those that know me and know the story, that would include the place where I once asked a surly boss that thought that my vocabulary was a little too fancy “when basket be empty, what me do then?”) and I was one-third of the now sadly-on-hiatus “Piedmont Pick ‘Em Show” radio program on Spartanburg’s airwaves for a number of years (for those not familiar, imagine if Keith Jackson, Jerry Clower and a jug of moonshine could somehow have a baby). I go to Spartanburg at least once a week now, but it’s easy to forget how far away it once seemed. When I was a kid, splitting my time between Chester and Santuck, rare was the occasion that we “went to town.” Hard as it seems to believe now, driving 12 miles to Union seemed like a big deal. It’s funny, I always seem to be out of something and have to run to the store about every other day. Back then, my grandma would drive to Union once-a-week at the absolute maximum. If she ran out of something, then she just wasn’t going to have until the next week when she made her next trip to the Community Cash (her grocery store of choice since they were the only one that refused to open on Sunday). Why, there was a Pizza Inn and a McDonald’s there that my dad would take me and my cousins to sometimes and for really special occasions (and I mean like someone graduated from school or got married), there was a Quincy’s. At that point, in my young mind, there was no culinary offering on planet Earth that could surpass their sirloin tips. They came with this little plastic stick jammed in one piece that said “medium” or “well done” on them that my cousins and I actually played with. Electronic devices that stimulate the senses constantly were years away from being commonplace, so those little plastic things that indicated how your sirloin tips had been cooked made decent pretend/toy spaceships in a pinch. But I digress…getting in the car and going to Spartanburg was an exciting occurrence then. There was a mall and movie theaters and an auditorium where pro wrestling TV tapings took place regularly and a restaurant that made pizza’s big enough to cover an entire tabletop and buildings that stood more than two stories tall in Spartanburg. It’s a small world and gets smaller when you get older. Getting in the car and driving 20 or so minutes to “Sparkle City” doesn’t seem like anything now, but back then, when your normal surroundings were cow pastures, woods and long dirt driveways, you had no means or travel yourself and the only lights at night came from stars and lightning bugs, it sure did. I decided we’d walk on the Rail Trail, a nice path for walking and biking that mostly runs parallel to Pine Street. For the most part, there are trees and foliage on either side, so it normally stays shady and relatively cool. I knew going in that we’d likely have less interaction with folks than we did in downtown Union. It’s not that Spartanburg residents are less friendly, it’s just that if they are on the Rail Trail, they are usually jogging or riding a bike. They are there for a reason, not just randomly standing on a street corner. I also knew I would get a workout in. There is a dog park along the Rail Trail that we used to take Tucker to fairly often. We stopped because there were some folks who had the bad habit of bringing their dogs there and leaving them unattended. As an aside, let me note that if you put your pet in a dog park and leave to run errands, you pretty much suck as a human being. They also put some little kiddie pools in the park and Tucker CAN NOT walk past water without wanting to jump in it. So he’d plop down in those pools, get soaking wet, then roll around and waller in the dirt with other dogs and turn into a muddy mess. I love my pets and want them to be happy, but washing and drying a 90-plus pound dog with thick, curly fur is not a thing I sign up for if I can help it. Being as smart as he is, though, about the time I start to turn at the Ingles, he knows where he is and what he’s close to and goes nuts. As I pulled into the parking lot for the Rail Trail, I almost couldn’t contain him. Gracie has never visited the dog park and doesn’t get torn out of her frame over stuff very often, but when Tucker gets excited so does she, so I now had almost 180 pounds of panting, hyper dog on my hands. It was all I could do to get them out of the car. Once I did, they bolted down the trail, but Tucker took a hard right into some grass. He jerked me with him as he did and Gracie had conveniently snuck up under my feet, which led to me hitting the ground. So it was an illegal chop block, basically. I don’t know how she does it, but Gracie often sneaks up behind me at home. I’ll walk to the fridge, get something out, turn to walk back to the living room and nearly get tripped as she’ll have quietly walked right behind me and sat at my heels. How does an 80-pound Labradoodle do anything quietly? She’s like a fuzzy little ninja. As I hit the ground I said a word I shouldn’t have said in public and was within earshot of two walkers (hey, sorry y’all). But, I got back on my feet, got them on the trail and started walking. It was fairly difficult to actually keep Tucker on the paved path as he kept wandering off into the grass. He also felt the need to check out every post that we passed. I think some are part of a fitness trail, so there will be a sign on the post that suggests that you do sit-ups or toe touches or something. Tucker was less interested in a full body workout than he was with the fact that other animals probably pee on those posts. He thoughtfully responded in kind so that the next person walking their dog would get jerked toward every post too. As I predicted, we didn’t have a lot of interaction with anybody on the trail. Two girls riding skateboards waved at Tucker and Gracie, we got some smiles and “heys” from people and one lady riding a bike blurted out “ooh, pretty dogs” as she sped past, but that was about it. That changed as we passed the dog park. Tucker made a beeline for the fence and started crying, desperate to get inside and play. There were only two dogs in there and both were being attended to, but not only was there a kiddy pool, there were four of them, full of water. To let him go inside would be to sign up for a car seat caked in mud, plus a wash and dry once we got home. I opted not to do that, but it was still a worthwhile stop for Tucker and Gracie. A beautiful standard poodle saw them and walked over, greeting them. Without being too graphic here, um, any relationship Tucker has with a female dog at this point is strictly plutonic, but he’s still quite the lady’s man. He and the poodle (named Belle, I soon found out) licked and sniffed at each other and as they did, a woman (Amanda) came over and introduced herself. Belle was her parents’ dog, she’d brought her to the dog park for some exercise and she was having a bit of trouble corralling her and getting a leach and collar back on her to go. Since Belle was so drawn to my dogs, she asked if I would walk them near the double-fenced gate, which would, for lack of a better term, sort of trap her for a second. “OK, Tuck, you get to be a decoy,” I said, as I walked he and Gracie to the gate. Belle followed and Amanda was able to get the leash on her. This is where the world started getting smaller. Belle, I learned, was a rescue dog and her life story was almost identical to Gracie’s. Someone decided they wanted a dog, got Belle, then decided in short order they didn’t really want a dog after all. If someone hadn’t taken her, she’d likely have gone to the pound, at which point who knows what her fate would’ve been. Luckily, as with Gracie, she now has a home that she makes a happier place. Interestingly, Amanda and her husband both once worked at a very large metro daily paper, she told me. After that, she worked for several years for a well-known watchdog group writing their press releases. I’m on that group’s email list, so though we’d never met, I’d probably gotten 100 or more emails from her over the years. She mentioned that she volunteers with a dog rescue group. I’m obviously a fan of folks that try to take care of dogs, so if you are so inclined YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT THAT GROUP AND DONATE TO THEM BY CLICKING HERE. Much to Tucker’s annoyance, we did finally have to get back to our walk. We weren’t 10 steps past the dog park when a couple approached us. “Do they bite?” “No, not unless you are food.” They both rubbed Tucker and Gracie’s fur. They commented about how big they were and how pretty both were. By the time we parted company with them and walked a little ways further, it started getting noticeably darker. At this point it was almost 9 p.m. and I had a mile-long-plus walk back to the car, so we turned around. I could hear traffic still going back-and-forth from Pine Street, but I couldn’t see much more than my faithful hounds happily trotting along, trees that bracket the Rail Trail on either side and the familiar glow bursts from lightning bugs. The world was small…and beautiful.
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November 2021
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