Louisiana Voice

There are slow news days and there are slow news days but the story that Associated Press moved this morning must be indicative of a really slow news day – maybe they ran out of stories to do about a certain delusional orange clown.

Regardless, the story was about how the conversion of COW MANURE, aka meadow muffins, aka barnyard frisbees (when allowed to first bake dry in the sun a few days) into fuel as a “growing climate solution.”

My first thought after spotting that headline in my daily morning feed was, I don’t know about the climate change part, but they’re just now discovering that about converting it to fuel?

That second part surely ain’t new. I grew up on a small farm and my grandfather used cow poop and chicken poop extensively as nature’s fertilizer (none of that chemical stuff for him) for our ‘maters, melons, okra, squash, peas, ‘taters and whatever else he was a mind to plant, which gave our vegetables all sorts of energy to grow and produce the biggest, healthiest, most delicious food imaginable – which, of course, was transferred to human energy at our dinner table (that’s lunch to you urbanites – you had lunch and dinner; we had dinner and supper. They’s a difference and they ain’t nothing subtle about it).

We even had a wild plum tree in our back yard where our chickens roosted each night. Best damn plums you ever popped in your mouth (but you had to be careful, Granddaddy didn’t use pesticides, either and the worst thing about finding a worm in your plum was bitin’ into one and seein’ half-a-worm).

I remember a game we used to play as kids called British Bulldog. It was kinda like football in that you had a field and two goal lines but that’s where the similarity ended. It didn’t matter how many kids you had playing; the more the better. The way it worked was one kid was picked to stand in the middle of the field and the others would line up on one of the goal lines. The kid in the middle would yell, “British Bulldog” and the others would run like hell to the other goal. The objective was for the kid in the middle of the field to tackle one of the runners. Then, the two of them would stand in the middle of the field and repeat the process going the other way. The game would continue that way with the number in the middle of the field growing as the number of runners dwindled. The winner would be the last one tackled (if you could call a kid being gang-tackled by about a dozen of his pals a “winner”).

Anyway, the thing I most remember about that game was this one time we were playing it in Allen “Watts” Carpenter’s cow pasture behind his house. We were just starting the game with one guy (who shall remain nameless) out in the middle. When he yelled, “British Bulldog,” we took off.

Now Watts was unquestionably the fastest one among us (he would later set a state record for the high hurdles while running track for Ruston High School). Anyway, as he sped past the unfortunate kid in the middle, the kid dove for Watts and, of course, missed. But he didn’t just miss. He landed a perfect face plant in a fresh pile of the aforementioned meadow muffin and came up dripping from his nose, ears and mouth. Unsurprisingly, the game was over at that point as the rest of us stood around laughing our butts off, as kids are prone to do at those less fortunate. Truth be told, we were laughing more out of relief that it had not happened to us than at his misfortune.

But talk about a conversion to energy! I’ve never seen a kid with such a burst of energy as he ran squalling for home with all that fresh natural fertilizer dripping from his face.

And then there’s that old joke about the bird flying south for the winter. Unfortunately, he started out too late in the season and soon was overcome by the cold and alit freezing to death in a cow pasture. A bull saw him shivering and felt sorry for the poor fellow and, standing over him, deposited a fresh load of natural fertilizer on him. Soon, he was feeling the warmth of the excrement and began to thaw out and feel better. So, he popped his little head out and started singing. A nearby fox heard him singing and came over, dug him out and ate him. The moral of the story is: Everyone who craps on you ain’t necessarily your enemy and everyone who digs you out ain’t necessarily your friend.

The second part of that Associated Press headline was that the conversion of cow flops to fuel may put communities at risk.

Our unfortunate friend in that abbreviated British Bulldog game would certainly agree.

And this was a slow news day for a post.