Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, December 5, 2019, 5:30 p.m.

The week has been exhausting. I’ve worked late the last three nights, twice till 1 in the morning. It’s not just the number of tales to tell. Several stories have required that I bear down because they were worth it. A long City Council meeting. The death of a man who was coroner for 37 years. A lovely, inspirational speech by a man who has fought for his life the last three years. A visit with a man who is closing down his family’s business after 50 years in operation on the city square.

In a country divided against itself, this mostly rural county has provided a refuge from the larger world.

The man who was youth director at church when I was a teen-ager died in hospice care. I talked to him for 10 minutes or so at the Chamber of Commerce Oyster Roast a few weeks ago. Life is fleeting.

Part of every day is consumed in menial, but important tasks. I edit the obituaries, catching typos. The family will be at their respective, not respected, homes. The man was a widower, not a widow. She and her late husband enjoyed touring the country, not the county, in their motor home. I could be wrong. Maybe the motor home didn’t run well.

It’s not that I love this place. I know it. It’s etched in my soul, for better and worse. I’ve concluded I’m not fit to live anywhere else.

After I left the paint shop that opened in 1969 but is closing when this year changes to the next, I drove the eight miles from Laurens to Clinton and stopped by Steamers Cafe for breakfast. As long as I eat there once or twice a week, I’ll never order anything but the “meaty breakfast.” Most days I fix breakfast at home, but what I get at Steamers is the weekly fix of grits. Two weeks ago, I had grits twice in the same day. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Last night I watched a man who had a heart transplant three years ago and is now being treated for cancer give a speech better than Knute Rockne ever mustered to a room full of football players, coaches, and fans. Sam Wyche might have more years left in him than I do. When I first met Wyche, he co-owned a sporting goods store. At that time, he had played in a Super Bowl. Since then, he has been an assistant coach and a head coach in Super Bowls. The only others who have ever done that are Mike Ditka, Dan Reeves and Tom Flores.

Most of Wyche’s time as a quarterback was spent on the sidelines with a clipboard and holding for field goals and extra points. Once he rode from training camp to Cincinnati in a car with the legendary Paul Brown, who was so great the team in Cleveland is named after him. He’d just made the roster. They stopped for gas, and an old man Wyche compared to Tim Conway on the Carol Burnett Show trudged out to pump the gas, clean the windshield, and check the oil. That was before time and modernity removed the service from service stations.

Brown asked him if he knew the president of Shell Oil Company. Wyche said no. Brown said, “That man there is Shell Oil to you.”

That was how Wyche illustrated, as Brown once illustrated to him, that the worst player on a team is as important as the best. One doesn’t hear that a lot nowadays.

Three times I watched the Bengals play while Wyche was head coach, twice in Cincinnati and once in Washington. I was there because one of the players, Stanford Jennings, was, like Wyche and me, a Furman graduate. Jennings was my friend back in the 1980s, and I went to the games with other friends. Now I’m old, Wyche is older, and Jennings looks about the same.

Occasionally, even here in Laurens County, I get a glimpse of the world beyond.

 

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