Went through a little place called Waverly not long ago. The peanut capitol of the world, or so they claimed. I had been dunking some bloodworms in the lower Chesapeake for croakers. Decided to come back the scenic route up Route 460 instead of fighting the US Navy getting off work on I-64 at Hampton.
I loaded up on the croakers, by the way. Had a cooler full. So, it was back to Charlottesville and the filet table. But then I saw a sign as I entered Waverly advertising “gourmet-salted peanuts”. If there is one thing I have a passion for, it’s peanuts. I enjoy regular, old-fashioned peanuts. They don’t have to be “gourmet-salted’s” or anything fancy. But why not? I pulled over, walked in the shop, and saw a whole rack of “gourmet-salted peanuts” in one-pound bags.
These would make nice gifts, I mused. Fresh from Virginia’s finest peanut fields, I’d get a bag for myself, three more bags for my best friends and an extra bag for “someone to be named later”. You never know when you might need a bag of gourmet-salted peanuts as a last-minute gift.
I looked around the store for a while. They had about every type of peanut food and candy you can imagine as well as lots of peanut knick-knacks. But I settled for the five bags and was on my way.
It was near lunchtime, and I had the munchies, so I opened my personal one-pound bag of gourmet-salted peanuts and popped a handful in my mouth.
Holy Moly! They were so good!
“Think I’ll have another handful,” I said to myself. And that led to another, and another.
With the window rolled down and some soul music on the radio, I ate peanuts and sang along with The Temptations and was having myself a heckuva day. Then I reached across the seat, dug my hand down to the bottom of what was once a one-pound bag of gourmet-salted peanuts, and they were all gone. Every last nut.
I drove on for a spell, eyeballing the remaining four bags of gourmet-salted peanuts.
Sure would like to have a few more – and I have an extra bag! “Someone to be named later” really shouldn’t be eating peanuts anyway. Might have some kind of peanut allergy and keel right over. I opened the extra bag.
I’ll just eat a few more, then put them away.
But now it was Sam Cooke on the radio, and you can’t really listen to Sam Cooke without lots of gourmet-salted peanuts. By the time I reached Petersburg, the second bag was also empty. It was then that I noticed my lips had swelled to approximately twice their normal size. I could barely move my mouth. My tongue also announced that it thought two pounds of gourmet-salted peanuts was way too much to eat without a single drop of liquid.
I pulled into Hardee’s, went through the drive-in lane and the voice on the box said something said, “Gorf day, wut you yike a dooby cheeseburfr meal?”
“Nor shanks,” I said. “Ah wert lyke a Coke. A beeg coke.”
Talking was something of a problem for both me and the guy in the little box. Maybe he had eaten two bags of gourmet salted peanuts as well.
For several minutes, we tried to communicate, me with my blanched lips and swollen tongue and the speaker box full of garbled static. Finally, the speaker box voice determined that I was in desperate need of a super-size soft drink of most any flavor he had.
I ended up with an 84-ounce cup of Diet Coke.
My mouth was in such pain, I pulled the top off the drink and just soaked my tongue, which was now beginning to swell at the same approximate rate as my lips, which had turned white by now and were the texture of fine-grained sandpaper.
Continuing the drive up Route 460, I alternated soaking my tongue and blowing bubbles in my 84-ounce Diet Coke with my lips. I could no longer sing when Otis Redding came on, but I hummed in my cup and blew bubbles in perfect rhythm.
The moral of this story is three-fold: Don’t ever catch and keep a whole cooler of croakers if you’ve got to clean them by yourself. Secondly, always order an 84-ounce Diet Coke before you decide to eat two pounds of gourmet-salted peanuts. And finally, to heck with “someone to be named later.” Let them buy their own peanuts.
