My husband, Doc, the original Bredneck*, does not want me to write about his having been circumcised by an 85-year-old pediatrician with Parkinson’s disease, so I won’t. But, he’d be honored if I told you about his recent hog hunting trip with best buddy, Cabin Glen. Doc popped and dropped a 300-pounder – enough pork barbecue to cater every formal wedding buffet that all the folding bridge tables in East Dublin, Ga., can handle. Cabin Glen was very proud of Doc, which is saying a lot more than you can imagine if you haven’t seen what Glen can do with a pocketknife in under one minute flat.

I can understand the phenomena of how a mother can single-handedly lift the weight of a car in order to free her child trapped beneath it. An enormous rush of adrenalin, combined with the fierce maternal instinct to protect her young, can temporarily give a woman supernatural strength. It has been documented time and time again. What I can’t understand is how Doc, with the help of little more than a golf cart painted in camouflage motif, could have dragged a 300-pound wild hog back to Cabin Glen’s cabin, all by himself. On weekends during football and baseball season – pretty much all year round – Doc doesn’t lift anything heavier than a beer bottle. He’s afraid his heart might give out. But hog hunting season? Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, combined, would be no match for Doc, the Romanian Hercules of Atlanta.

Somewhere around the year 450 B.C., Plato said, “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.” He was right. After a Jewish man named Doc drags 300 pounds worth of non-kosher sin back to camp, only to shockingly realize that he drove his darling little red and white BMW Mini-Cooper – and not the forest green, monstrosity of an Avalanche truck - to his hunting trip at Cabin Glen’s cabin, death may rightfully feel merciful.

Having to tell your disgruntled, Yankee wife from New York City, who has never gotten over the shock of her own by having to live in the South, where her beloved Bloomingdale’s Department Store carries Christmas sweaters with clown hemorrhoids pretending to be ornaments dangling from the yarn … death is a really, really plausible alternative. But, in our family history, B.C. has been replaced in historical significance by whatever happened B. H.: “Before Hunting.” And I don’t mean Good Will Hunting. Such a thing does not exist.

A.D., “Anno Domini,” defines an epoch based on the traditionally reckoned year of the conception or birth of Jesus. A.H., “After Hunting,” defines an epoch based upon the most unreasonable year on the face of the Earth, when Doc took up whacking wild-life. Give some people a finger, they’ll take a hand. Give some people a hand, and they’ll manipulate it into the Constitutional right to bear arms. If only Doc’s fingers would have completely closed the freezer door in our garage. Then, we might not have needed a few brave hands from the sanitation department. The right to bear arms does not give a hog-popping Hercules the right to insist, “Something stinks in here. The cats must have brought a chipmunk into the house.” The inadvertent and unknowing defrosting of rotten hog, wild turkey and duck, a trio that smells like the colonoscopy ward at the Veterinary Hospital for Zoo Animals with Dysentery, makes the scent of decomposing chipmunk give Chanel No. 5 a run for its money.

I wish Doc would have let me tell you about the Parkinson’s-plagued pediatrician with a penchant for circumcision. It might not have impressed Cabin Glen as much as popping, dropping and dragging a 300 pound slab of non-kosher, would-be pork barbecue, but it would definitely have been more amusing than waiting in the buffet line at an itchy, starchy, formal, Redneck wedding. (Without exception, Rednecks live in tank-tops. They would never suffer in the stuffed shirt territory of Brednecks without having a burp and a Budweiser Light to go home to).
Shalom, “Y’all!”
*Bredneck: A well-bred Redneck