The SEC’s decision to pursue a 10-game, conference-only schedule has sent shockwaves through college football, uprooting longtime rivalries and upending a season that some are skeptical will happen anyway.

Nowhere is this disruption being felt more deeply than in South Carolina as the Clemson-South Carolina game, after more than 100 years of continuous play, will be canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It’s why South Carolina was the only SEC institution to vote against the conference-only plan in hopes of preserving what is affectionately known as “The Palmetto Bowl.”

Family recipe

My favorite books are scattered about my house.

I’m prone to re-reading, so they’re kept within a not-so-metaphorical arm’s length of my grasp.

When winter rolls around and the wind’s cold breath chills our house in a way that makes our heater work extra hard, I reach for the worn copy of Ethan Frome in my bedside table. I first read it in high school, initially thinking I’d hate this literary assignment from Mr. Barnwell.

I devoured it in less than two days.

The same goes for Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, minus the aforementioned initial apprehension. It’s spooky and creepy and weird and, yes, distinctly Maine in some places, and I just adore it. If I need a bit of a fright as we near Halloween, I’ll just flip through its pages until we get to Danny Glick hovering outside the second-story window, tapping at the glass, asking to be let in the house.

Let’s start with an exercise.

Hold out your thumb and observe how large it is.

It’s likely no taller than two nickels stacked on top of each other with the thickness of a couple of pencils. The variation of size might vary from person to person, but the general sentiment remains the same.

Hold up your thumb in the room you’re in. How much space does it take up now? 

Step outside to your patio or your yard, and repeat the exercise. The ratio has gotten increasingly smaller.

Keep that perspective in your mind because that thumb — that imminently crucial yet disproportionately small portion of your body — is roughly the same size as a cultivar of grass. This might not mean a lot at first, but hold that image for a bit and you start to understand how much influence these tiny tangles of blades and roots possess.

I had no good reason to check into a king suite at the Hampton Inn in Tupelo, Mississippi the evening of Friday, Sept. 23, 2011 — well, the morning of Sept. 24. I still had tickets in my pocket to the Florida-Kentucky football game in Lexington scheduled for that evening. I didn’t even have a change of clothes. 

Nevertheless, I slid in the room key, used the complimentary toothbrush and toothpaste to scrub away the lingering taste of fried chicken and beer, and slid into the king-sized bed. I looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was way too late. 

But as my head hit one of the five pillows on the bed, I was entirely too awake.

Huh, so that’s what Adderall does.