Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, March 6, 2019, 12:15 p.m.

Treatment is going well.

Not rehab for any addiction. Not radiation or chemo or anything like that. No shrink.

The wound on my leg is almost healed. Soon I won’t have to surround it in clear plastic every time I take a shower. A man reaches a certain age where, at any time, he is one germ away from disaster. He doesn’t just shake it off by putting iodine and a bandage over it. He finds out that the treatments of youth don’t work anymore and, according to online accounts, didn’t work in the first place.

Imagine abandoning the lessons of youth: Mercurochrome doesn’t burn. Iodine burns a little. Merthiolate burns like hell. That was all a kid needed to know. I spent the majority of my raising with skint elbows and knees. Now it’s a medical emergency.

Learning that I don’t have to go back to the Wound Center on Friday meant that Tuesday was going to be a fine day no matter what else happened. Now it’s an ointment world, a -sporin world. Neosporin. Polysporin. Otisporin. Neomycin. Polymyxin. Cortisporin. Bacitracin.

Whatever happened to Bactine? I miss Aspergum.

I drove up to Laurens to see what happened in the county’s municipal elections early so that I could go by the Coffee Roost and have Peg Cwiakala fix me up whatever she wanted me to sip and just chat amiably with the other people there. Then I walked down the street to Roma’s, where the lasagna special hit the spot.

I’m going to miss John Stankus, who failed to win reelection as mayor of Laurens. He’s a straight-up guy. I like Nathan Senn, the young attorney who defeated him, but I’m accustomed to Stankus.

“All in favor, say aye. All opposed, like sign.” Seldom was anyone opposed. I always wondered if “like sign” meant those opposed should say “aye,” too. The councilors who were opposed were seldom adamant enough to say it loudly enough for me to tell whether, they voted “aye” or “nay.” I’d have enjoyed the occasional “in the name of God, no.”

Stankus-led meetings were seldom long, and the issues were seldom difficult to understand.

I’ve also enjoyed my monthly assignments at the Commission of Public Works. Commissioner Gerald Abercrombie and I talk stock car racing. General manager John Young couldn’t be more helpful.

As I tell people often, I know Clinton. I’m learning Laurens.

The school boards are a little more complicated. There’s a lot of song and dance, and it’s difficult to separate the school wheat from the school chaff. I grew up with the Clinton (District 56) superintendent, David O’Shields. I often talk everything but school business with the District 55 superintendent, Stephen Peters, particularly when I see him away from the board meetings. I’ve taken notes at Raider basketball games sitting next to three different board members at various times.

The 19 percent of the registered voters who chose to do so unseated Stankus and the eight-term incumbent of Gray Court, John Carter.

One Clinton councilman I’ve known most of my life, Jimmy Young, lost, and a councilwoman I’ve known that long, Shirley Jenkins, won. Shirley used to work with my mother. She’s a nice lady, and it’s reassuring to know this is why she got 57 percent of the vote in a field of five.

This beat – all the news and sports, or as much as I can get around to, in Laurens County – isn’t different from two decades of stock car racing in all ways. Most of the people I like, and the few I don’t like, I have no animosity toward. I just don’t like them. I don’t dislike them, either.

Familiarity may breed contempt in a failing marriage but not in this job.

Or, at least, that’s the way I see it today.

My wound’s almost healed.

 

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