Alone In My Kitchen With A Bag Of Rice

Not too far from here is a place with a name you won’t believe. It's not a city. I guess you call it a nickname? There's one highway, one traffic light, a church, a convenience store, horse doo-doo, kudzu and more armadillos than Texas has.

The place belongs to the people born there. Transplants don't count. The natives call the place 'Coonbottom'. Everyone else calls it 'Concord' in public but 'Coonbottom' amongst themselves. No, I don't know the origin of the name 'Coonbottom' but my imagination runs wild at the thought.

Every year at freezing-your-butt off North Florida time, aka November, the church folks throw a chicken pileau's cookout to earn funds to keep the grave yard clean. It draws more than 5,000 people, most of them politicians, to slop down with the 'common' folk. They sit at picnic tables and in homegrown chairs (cardboard boxes) next to a dozen iron washpots of steaming pileau stirred with boat paddles and nightbugs.

There'll be no more Coonbottom chicken pileau cookouts. Federal, state, county and local laws tied up and fought over licenses, liability, insurance, edible plates, Coonbottom tee-shirts, air pollution and ptomaine poison.

I always wanted to go and watch people choke on chicken fat. But I never did.

I am alone now in my kitchen with a chicken and a bag of rice working on a pot of pileau.