Fight Like a Girl

When we were kids my buddy Peanut Groves accused his cousin Pork Chop of fighting like a girl.


Pork Chop was smarting over an unfortunate encounter with the runt that lived down the street. Peanut was helping him evaluate his performance.

Turns out, telling another guy he fights like a girl isn’t appreciated.

Pork Chop was getting up to throw Peanut on the ground, but his sister, Bertha, took exception to the comment as well and beat her brother across the room.

I don’t think Peanut saw her foot move until it swept the back of his knee. As he landed on his backside, Bertha pounced on top of him, flipped him over, dug her knee into his back, and shoved his right arm up in a chicken wing before he could grunt twice.

Once he was helpless, Bertha gave him a little scratch on his neck, grabbed his hair and pulled it hard.

“Kick, scratch, claw, pull hair - you boys think you’re sissies if you fight that way,” Bertha said. “That’s how girl’s fight. If Pork Chop fought like a girl, he wouldn’t be licking his wounds now.”

Peanut yelled a few demeaning insults at Bertha and then said “uncle.”

After turning Peanut loose, Bertha glared over at me. I had always thought she was cute until that moment. For once, I was a smart boy and kept my mouth shut. The Groves family is a highly charged group.

Ever since then, when I hear the term “fight like a girl” I look over my shoulder for Bertha.

That term is posted underneath the email signature of one of my friends. She and her family have helped me a lot over the years. In fact, I never would have been elected to public office without them. I’m highly confident that I could stop her from putting me in a chicken wing, but I’ve never pushed it.

I got a call from her a while back. She wasn’t in much of a mood for our usual lively conversation about politics (she says Sarah Palin is great and I throw up).

“Listen,” she said. “I want you to hear it from me that I’ve got breast cancer.”

I hated hearing that almost as much as she hated saying it. This cancer stuff really ticks me off. It scares me too. I’ve had too many friends and family who’ve had their bodies ripped apart by it or worse.

The day before my friend had surgery to eradicate the cancer, her husband was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. The next day, he was at her side after her surgery both of them joking about losing their hair together.

After her successful surgery, she began chemotherapy. He started radiation and chemo treatment to shrink the tumor before they performed surgery on him.

I stopped in to see him a few weeks later after his successful surgery. He was asleep in the hospital bed. She was curled up under a blanket in the chair next to him. Neither had hair, his head shiny and reflecting the light, hers covered by a bandana. There are a lot of courageous acts in this world. A husband and wife fulfilling their vow of love in sickness and in health is one of them.

I wiped the tears welling up in my eyes before they woke up and saw me. Brave people those two. They’re gonna fight together. They’re gonna win.

When it comes to cancer we all have to kick, claw, scream, hit, and fight without giving up. The disease is a wretched, wicked beast. It effects one out of three people. You can list ten folks effected by cancer in sixty seconds or less. I know you can.

It takes great strength to beat this beast. A lot of these cancer surviving warriors will be on hand at Dellinger Park on September 11. That’s the day (and night) Relay for Life is holding a walkathon to raise money to fund cancer fighting research.

The goal is to raise $300,000. It hasn’t been reached yet so you have an opportunity to do something worthwhile and join the fight. There will be over 100 teams walking and having other fundraising activities going on to reach this goal. The cost for a team is only $100 and the more teams, the merrier the event. Find out more information at www.bartowrelayforlife.org.

Bring your wallet. Things really worth doing have a cost.

The folks you are helping are warriors using whatever means necessary to win their battle.

They fight like a girl.

It’s almost beach time.

When I was a kid and discovered that the place where land met the sea created the North America’s largest continuous sandbox. I’ve liked spending some time each summer at the surf ever since.

Of course some years later I noticed that cute girls wearing minimal clothing gathered at the edge of the surf in bunches. Such a sight was enough to peak the interest of any red-blooded boy. Being that my blood that ran red and my eyes opened as wide as their beady sockets allowed I found the beach a great place to be when summer rolled around.

That was back in the day when we called baby oil sunscreen. Sun Protection Factors maxed out at eight and Aloe plants were grown on the porch of every beach house because there were no condos and Panama Jack hadn’t started bottling burn soothing green gel. Needless to say my back took in more heat that my eyes and time spent in the Sun was usually limited by my somewhat fair complexion.

I lived an hour and fifteen minutes from two places where the ocean washed onto a shore. St. Simon’s Island and Fernandina were the locales. Many of you mistakenly call the latter Amelia Island because somebody built a plantation there. Rest assurded that it’s a plantation in name only as I have been to the end of the island a couple of dozen times and never have seen any cows or planted corn.

Amelia’s plantation does grow a lot of itsy bitsy yella polka dot bikinis. Beachwear companies have developed a number of other eye-catching designs as well. It’s amazing what the wonders a creative mind can work with a string of cloth.

Unfortunately, gates and guards protect the view of the plantation goods. My buddies and I grew adept and convincing the gatekeepers there that we had befriended half of the residents to the point that they thought we owned a few units ourselves.

In the end working was a major deterrent to combing beaches for bikinis so trips to the ocean dunes were too few but made a lasting impression.

Having children redirected the focus back to the sandbox experience. Little girls love digging in the sand and it turns out their daddies can grow fanatical about it as well. Dig up enough sand and creating arches, coliseums and lagoons complete with sand made monsters only take time and a little imagination.

People watching is, however, still a major past-time. I do limit it to periods while sitting under an umbrella next to my wife. Observations center more on spotting surgical body enhancements and alterations rather that on the latest bikini fashion. I probably shouldn’t admit to oogling female eye candy, but my blood is still red and my eyesight and appreciation for God’s diligent work remains intact.

Like I said though, my wife, who I find quite the eye candy herself, is at my side and I can’t even remember a pick-up line. That makes people watching strictly an observation sport.

Viewings at the beach aren’t always pleasant though and wardrobe fouls seem to be more common than twenty-five years ago. Wardrobe fouls are noted when the flesh to cloth ratio is deemed excessive. Even worse, there is the safety hazard of stretching Spandex beyond its practical application. Recoil when those suckers bust can be fatal.

I have lobbied officials to institute an overlap rule so that the beach patrol can require additional coverage on anyone whose belly laps over the top of their suit to the point that the waistband is no longer visible.

The worst violators are men in bikini suits, particularly those with hairy backs. That’s about as far from eye candy as you can get. Good taste and violation of the overlap rule preclude me from bikini shorts, but I do get a back waxing each year so no one winces when I walk past.

This year I sense that I’ll be leaving the sandbox stage and re-entering the bikini watching phase, only this time I will be watching the watchers instead of the bikinis. Having one teenage daughter and another a few years from that age will do that to you.

I guess that means making a wardrobe modification so I will have somewhere to strap in my gun. I know what those boys are thinking.