Be careful as you drive or fly out of town today now that the excitement at the golf course has subsided. It was a fun week, but those of you who were visiting must now return to reality – unless you can call your boss or your spouse or your teacher and give the somewhat plausible excuse that you were bitten by a Titleist fly and developed A Few More Days flu.
We don’t want you to go, understand, and when I say you’re leaving “town,” don’t hold me to that, because even though Augusta is the second- or third-largest city in Georgia – depending on whom you ask, and when, and even where – the actual city part of it is fairly small, and only because the city and county consolidated decades ago is it near the top.
Because of that consolidation, we sometimes don’t know what political entity we’re dealing with. For instance, we have the Augusta Fire Department, but the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, and so many offices that begin with “Augusta-Richmond County” that, if we could still look numbers up in a phone book, we wouldn’t know where to let our fingers start walking.
Next door, in the county I live in, there are several communities the post office recognizes, but only a couple of cities proper, and the county seat isn’t in either of them. Despite being in a different county from Augusta and in no incorporated area, I often get mail addressed to Augusta. That shows how close we all are down here.
Not all of the time, mind you. For example, I long hoped the post office would send our bills to more deserving people, but when that actually occurred and I eventually found bills marked “final notice” in my mailbox, I didn’t think it was so wonderful. I considered moving across town, well, across county, to give our bills a fresh start, but I figured I couldn’t run and hide.
But I digress. We want you to enjoy your stay here. One thing you will like if you hang around is the price of gasoline. It’s usually among the lowest in the state and the country, and if you drive across the Savannah River, you’ll find it even cheaper. That will leave you more money for lottery tickets.
P.S.: Maybe you can help me understand why the price at the pump jumps overnight when someone frowns at someone else in the Middle East, but then takes months to slowly settle back down. I didn’t major in finance, and for that reason I keep getting bills that generally belong to me.
But I digress again. Where was I? Oh, yes, you’ll find the locals here easy to deal with, all the more so if you’re one of the few stragglers left and the traffic has returned to normal. Our residents have a rough road getting to work and home each day because of construction, and they relish a return to “normal,” if there is such a word in their highway vocabularies.
Someday, if you stay with us long enough, you will find all the construction has been constructed.
But I digress.
Reach Glynn Moore at glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.
