Yeah, this is Arkansas

One of the stories that's swept our beloved Natural State this week is one of an escaped pig that wound up in a swimming pool.

Curious? Of course you are! None other than the mighty Arkansas Democrat-Gazette covered the story and took a ton of pictures. Frankly, I’m grateful for the pig as his exploits gave us a break from the usual news of shootings and mayhem in Little Rock.

Last week, a truck full of pigs was heading to a sausage factory. The truck overturned and a bunch of pigs escaped. One 800-pound hog eluded the authorities for awhile and finally turned up in a swimming pool owned by one LeAnn Baldy.

Baldy lives in a neighborhood near the I-40/I-430 intersection close to Little Rock. The authorities apprehended the pig, but the rascal gave them a good chase for a few days at least. Good for him.

Here in Arkansas, it seems that critters are routinely ending up in swimming pool. I well remember an incident at a country club in Marianna, Ark., when I was five-years-old.

My parents had just taken jobs with the school district over there. Mom was a district psychologist and dad was the superintendent of curriculum. They got paid very well to go to work in that town and one of the perks of the job was that they were members of the country club there.

We were in the pool at the country club one day when someone pulled up in his pickup truck, opened the tailgate and tossed his Labrador retriever in the pool.

Now, the strange thing about that was that this was the mid-1970s and Marianna is in the Delta. In other words, those folks didn’t fully grasp the fact that the War Between the States had ended and the South lost. They didn’t allow blacks in that country club, but they laughed it up when someone threw a dog in the pool?

Thank God that struck me as odd way on back in 1974.