Daily Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas

Opinion

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Squarely
Pegged

By Peggy McCracken

Walking, picking up

trash does Pecos good

Walk Texas and Keep Texas Beautiful are symbiotic programs that could be combined to keep Texas healthy and beautiful at the same time.

Michael Benavides already has Keep Pecos (Texas) Beautiful in operation, and I would like to start a Walk Pecos (Texas) group to help him keep the city trash free. With a citywide cleanup planned for Saturday, now is a good time to start.

For the past two months, I have walked around my block and around my neighborhood picking up beer bottles, cans, soft-drink cups, soiled diapers, plastic sacks, dirty rags, candy wrappers, newspapers, cardboard boxes and assorted pieces of debris.

I figure I'm killing three birds with one stone: getting aerobic and bending exercise while cleaning up the streets and right-of-way. The early-morning walk gets my blood circulating and my mind ready for work. In the evening, a walk relieves the day's stress and puts me in the sleep mode.

The downside to this is that I want to pick up every piece of trash I see along the route to work, to the grocery store, the pharmacy, to church and along Lincoln Street on the shortcut to Wal-Mart.

That's where you come in. If just one person in each neighborhood would take that morning or evening walk with plastic grocery sack in hand, we would soon have a clean city. and healthier citizens.

Walking is one of the safest and most natural forms of exercise, the Texas Diabetes Council declares. They teamed up with The University of Texas to devise a program that would encourage Texans, especially adults age 50 and older who are at risk for Type 2 diabetes, to spend at least 30 minutes a day walking.

The TDC program challenges all Texans to walk regularly, keep track of their progress and accumulate miles equal to walking across the state. It would take a lot of steps to go from El Paso to Texarkana, but think of the pile of trash you could accumulate if you picked up all the debris along the way!!

I usually walk alone, but it does help to have a partner who expects to rendezvous with you at a certain time. That makes it harder to "just say no" to getting up out of that easy chair and out the door.

How about it? Want to join me? I would like to hear from you if you walk or want to walk, and especially if you pick up trash along the way. Clarence and Robbie Cox are my role models. They walked down Lincoln Street and picked up trash before either walking or picking up trash was cool. Clarence doesn't have the lung power to walk now, but Robbie still makes the rounds each morning with her plastic sack, hoarding those aluminum cans.

Call me at 445-5475 or email peg2@pecos.net. If you don't want your name in the paper, say so.

"As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." Proverbs 27:17, NIV

EDITOR'S NOTE: Peggy McCracken is Enterprise business manager and webmaster. Contact her at peg2@pecos.net

Return to top

Pecos Enterprise
York M. "Smokey" Briggs, Publisher
Division of Buckner News Alliance, Inc.
324 S. Cedar St., Pecos, TX 79772
Phone 915-445-5475, FAX 915-445-4321
e-mail news@pecos.net

Associated Press text, photo, graphic, audio and/or video material shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium.
We support Newspapers in Education
Copyright 2002 by Pecos Enterprise