Is there something to an Arkansas summer, all thick and humid, that makes good conditions for a bacterial plague? A summer here can be like a petri dish served with a glass of sweet tea. Streptococcus--strep throat for those unacquainted with biological Greek--has brought me, at 23 years of age, to the mercy of an ailment that primarily afflicts first-graders.

The penicillin will do what it does and all will be happy-go-lucky in a couple of days, the doctor of medicine tells me. He is wearing a Razorbacks jersey with a stethoscope around his neck. This is apparently normal. He's a big fan, he says. He is excited about the new guy--Silverbells or something. I think I need a second opinion.

Strep throat has taken me outside my regularly scheduled programming. I have whole days where people--not that they were clamoring--won't come within a football field of me. Time to sit alone with my thoughts.

The thoughts have loitered near this Arkansas thing that often screams when someone tries to fit it into standard categories of political and cultural analysis. See Governors Faubus to Rockefeller to Beebe, War Memorial Stadium, and Hot Springs as examples of this stubbornness.

I discovered we Arkansawyers are strange--different--when I left five years ago to go to college in New York City and learned there was a fellow Arkansawyer in my midst. Upon meeting in that metropolis, we didn't shake hands but instinctively launched into a hog call that deeply unsettled onlooking locals--though much was explained afterwards, and some witnesses even learned to perform this exotic native ritual (for anthropological purposes, I think). As John Brummett has written in these pages, "woo pig sooie" means "I am somebody" in Arkansas.........

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