What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Every summer—or better yet, every late spring—the Jowers women and I like to go back home to South Carolina for a little vacation. We rent a house on one of the barrier islands, where wife Brenda and daughter Jess frolic in the waves and patronize the little stores while I sit on the screen porch and play the guitar.

Once we get to South Carolina, our first stop is Edmund’s Bar-B-Que joint, on Edgefield Road. We don’t call it Edmund’s, we just call it “Pig.” Once we get south of Atlanta, most of our conversation goes like this: “How far to Pig? What’s our ETA on Pig? Will Pig be open when we get there?”

Usually, we pull into the Pig parking lot just before the proprietors lock the doors. Every year, we can see that the building is a little more troubled. The porch and the front wall are cracked, the floor has more humps and dips than a funhouse. The door to the men’s room is devilishly hard to open and the door to the ladies’ room won’t quite close. But Pig serves up the best pulled-pork Bar-B-Que and the best pork hash on the planet.

We Jowerses order the smallest servings, lest our arteries clog up and kill us right then and there.I know, Nashville folk are not familiar with South Carolina-style hash on rice, which almost got daughter Jess in trouble a few years back. When Jess was in the ninth grade, she found herself dozing in a class about drug awareness, because she isn’t at all interested in drugs. But just as she started to drool on her desk, she heard her teacher utter the word “hash.”Jess jerked her head up from the desk and announced to the class, “I love hash! Every time my mom and dad and I go to South Carolina, we go straight to the Pig and load up on hash. Mom buys enough hash to fill up a giant cooler. We bring the stuff home and enjoy it all summer long. You people need to try some hash sometime. It’s excellent.”

This spring, after we finished up our yearly Pig feast, we drove down to the graveyard where my sister Ann was buried some weeks back. We found her grave, lingered a little while and brightened up a bit when we saw that nobody had brought Ann any blue flowers. Last time we brought up the color blue in front of Ann, she erupted, “Everything I got’s blue! I don’t want any more blue anything!” Ann’s flowers are red, yellow and white.

On the way to the beach house, I drove to Burnettown and down Carline Road, the street where I lived from the day I was born until I was 27 years old. I showed Jess my old house and the old burned-out house beside it. “I don’t see much house,” Jess said. “I mostly see vines.”“There’s a house in there,” I said. “It’s just that the swamp has consumed it.”“Looks like a set for a horror movie,” Jess responded.

I drove on to the beach house, where we spent six warm and delightful days. There was something new in this year’s vacation though. This time, Brenda rented a pet-friendly house so we could take our dogfriend Rufus to the beach. Lucky for us, Rufus likes to ride, he likes to walk and he can hold his pee, poop and puke.Every day, we took Rufus for walks on the sandbed roads and along the beach. There, on the sands of island, we learned something: Rufus is irresistible.

When we walked Rufus on the roads, people would stop their cars, get out and beg to pet Rufus. When we walked him on the beach, great numbers of people would gather ’round and rub Rufus’ ears. Every morning, Rufus was the first Jowers up, and he couldn’t wait to go outside and get some stranger petting.This turned into great luck for us, because on the way back to Nashville, the alternator and the battery in the Jowers van gave out in the parking lot of the Pink Dipper ice cream store. It was 110 degrees in that parking lot. The three Jowers humans might’ve died from heat exhaustion but for the fact that no South Carolinian would let Rufus get overheated or underwatered. People fetched Rufus water bowls and cold water from drinking fountains. Once folks were satisfied that Rufus was OK, they gave Brenda, Jess and me some cold water and ice cream. After an extended debacle created by a moron who answered the phone at AAA (a moron who couldn’t keep it in her head that we were in South Carolina, not Tennessee),  we had the van towed to a nearby Tires Plus store, where the men inside insisted that Rufus come in, lie down on the cool tile floor and have a slice of pizza.