Today's column contains several different ideas, sort of like a Thanksgiving buffet you can read. Minus the giblets. And hopefully the heartburn.
It all started a few weeks ago. I went to a football game and a rock concert broke out.
It was the perfect Saturday afternoon for UTC Mocs football at Finley Stadium. My son was on my left, my father on my right, some peanut shells at our feet, and somewhere, in the Great Beyond Where There Are No Fumbles or Fourth Downs, the ghost of Scrappy Moore was smiling.
Then Ozzy Osbourne showed up.
Like the early scene out of "Back to the Future" when Marty McFly blows out the stereo speakers, someone in the control booth cranks up the stadium sound system. Between plays on the field and during timeouts, all any of us can hear is the heavy metal anthem "Crazy Train."
I look to my left. My son's got his fingers in his ears. I turn to talk to my dad. I have to yell. He's two feet away.
"What?!!?" he hollers.
I look around for a mosh pit to form. What happened to marching bands, tubas and drum majorettes?
"What happened to Martha Reeves?" my dad asks. "Why don't they play her music?"
"Who?!?!" my son yells. (Yeah. Good question. Who?)
Minus the heavy metal, we love going to Mocs football games. So let me shout this louder than a crazy train: Thank you, B.J. Coleman and Joel Bradford for helping restore the glory to Mocs football.
Not long ago, there was considerable conversation about scrapping Mocs football altogether. Now it's common for Finley Stadium to pack in more than 10,000 fans on a Saturday afternoon.
Few reasons are as influential as Coleman transferring back from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to play alongside his old bud Bradford. As the two pair - along with Ryan Consiglio and the other seniors - exited the field for the last time Saturday, I hope they heard the applause.
Thanks for bringing football back to Cahttanooga.
A five-minute walk away from the stadium is a gravel parking lot that hosts the Main Street Farmers Market. Normally on Wednesdays (this week it's Tuesday), the Main Street Market farmers sell vegetables, fruit, breads, eggs, meat and cheese.
And mushrooms.
For most of my life, mushrooms have been a fungus-among-us, the cardboard-tasting inconvenience that gets between the honey mustard and croutons on my salad fork.
Until I tried an oyster mushroom from farmer Ryan Welch of Walden Peak Farms.
Stale mushrooms suddenly tasted about as good as, say, chewing on some mulch from the neighbor's backyard. Welch's mushrooms so intoxicated my taste buds, I made a promise:
From Halloween to Thanksgiving Day, I'd eat totally local food for two out of my three daily meals. Breakfast and dinner would come only from foods grown within 100 miles of Chattanooga.
I thought it'd be tough. It's become one of the best things I've ever done.
"Turnips and kale, collards, chard and pumpkins. All the things that make you healthy for winter. Like beets, which are good for your blood," said Suzanna Alexander of Alexandra Farms and the only person I've ever met who actually got me excited about eating beets.
Each afternoon, I started looking forward to dinner: baked beets and diced-up sweet potatoes topped off with honey from Sale Creek Honey. Add Williams Island kale and some of Welch's mushrooms. And a little butter from a cow named Eileen.
My local-food experiment transformed the way I see food and affected me spiritually, physically and politically. Eating local is an exercise in honesty, and I felt connected to Creation as eating became more than just choosing something off the pantry shelf in a box with dozens of ingredients with names that belong more on a chemistry test than in food.
My grocery bill was a little more than $100. Gaining Ground, a local endeavor to promote local food, estimates that more than $100 million could be generated into our local economy if we just purchased 5 percent more of our food from local farmers.
Such good food and good news makes me want to scream: "All aboard!"
Wait, that's Ozzy's line.
David Cook can be reached at davidcook@blumail.org.