How dog poop led to love for Paula Deen

In his book “My Delicious Life With Paula Deen,” Michael Groover, the famous Southern chef’s husband, shares the dirt on what brought the two of them together. An excerpt.

Chapter two: So, this wild, white-haired gal comes rushin’ into my backyard
What do y’all call a cow with three legs? Lean beef What do y’all call a cow with no legs? Ground beef What do y’all call a bull playin’ with himself? Beef stroganoff

When I first met Paula, I wasn’t thinkin’ of marriage. I’d recently come off a long and tough marriage, and I felt like I’d been rode hard and put up wet. I’d just given up on anything serious with any woman on the planet. I’d pretty much made a vow, matter of fact, that I didn’t want to marry again and I’d be happy to live the rest of my life alone with my children.

Actually, I was just standin’ around outside, mindin’ my own damn business, in my own damn backyard. Fact is I’d been banned from smokin’ in the house by my daughter, Michelle, and she’d made me go outside whenever tobacco was involved. Paula likes to tell this story a different way. She says that I was just hangin’ out doin’ nothin’ like a crazy, old vagrant, but I was actually smokin’ and talkin’ on my cell phone. Then I noticed these two tiny, sorry-lookin’ black-and-white dogs who were mighty busy poopin’ all over my lawn.

Lessee, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. You know, I was definitely interested in meetin’ different people, and I sure hadn’t given up on the women part of people, but as I mentioned, gettin’ serious with a woman and certainly marriage was out of the question.

When I had a woman friend over to my house, I didn’t even like to see an overnight bag. No one was gonna stay there that long. My idea of a long-term relationship was about an hour. Actually that might be stretchin’ it a little.

I particularly liked women over forty. As one poet pal put it, “They don’t swell, they don’t tell, and they’re grateful as hell.” Actually, I liked all women, but the ones who were older seemed to like me more.

So when I met this white-haired gal who come galomphin’ onto my property yellin’ her dogs had gotten loose, I got interested. Probably the initial thing that really had me excited about Paula — the first thing that caught my attention anyway — was her eyes. God, they were this gorgeous, deep, early mornin,’ sparklin’ sea blue eyes — I’d never seen anyone with eyes like that. And her enthusiasm and energy were contagious. She didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, but she was talkin’ fast and grinnin’ and apologizin’ for the dogs — and, well, I could hardly catch my breath: She was so all woman.

Where had she come from? Unfortunately, I knew. They’d built some pretty fancy condos right next to my house, the one in which I’d raised my kids, and Paula lived in those condos I call the Projects. When they started buildin’ them, my brother Nick and I had hired a lawyer to try to stop the Projects, or at least to make ’em less obnoxious. They’d already had to stop at my house because I wouldn’t sell ’em my lot. So we compromised: The builders put up fewer units and they built an eight-foot-tall stucco fence so I wouldn’t have to look at the buildings. That was where Paula had chased her runaway dogs — around the condo wall to my house.

I’d never seen Paula before in person, but I remembered where I’d seen her picture: I recognized her from her photograph in the cookbooks she’d written. I’d even given one of them as a gift; we are all into Southern cookin’ around here in Savannah.

Years later, Paula told me that if I’d continued to look as scraggly as I did that first day, with my beard long and unkempt, she probably woulda never married me. I told her that if she really looked like Aunt Bee from Mayberry like she did on the cover of The Lady & Sons, Too!, her second cookbook, there’s a good chance I woulda never married her either.

Anyway, so I’m in the backyard, and these two little dogs come up to me. I’m a huge animal lover — me and the dogs hit it off right away, way before Paula came around. So I was pettin’ the dogs, playin’ with ’em, and Paula ran up and said, “I’m so sorry.”

She was wearin’ jeans, an apron, and a baseball cap over her gray hair and was screamin’ “Stop! Sit! Stop!” to the dogs, who paid not a bit of attention to her. I noticed her accent. I really liked it; it was an interesting accent, a little more Southern than most. You don’t have to go too far out of Savannah and you’ll get a little more of a twang, and when you go to southwest Georgia, it’s even more pronounced. Or unpronounced. Or somethin’. They add more syllables. She looked me right in my eyes with those incredible piercing blue eyes and said she was sorry that the dogs were poopin’ in the yard and she would clean it up. I remember she mentioned she was writin’ a new cookbook and didn’t get out much because she was so busy. To be neighborly, I said, “Well, maybe you ought to take a break one day and we could go out for a drink or somethin’.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. She didn’t seem too enthusiastic and apologized again for the poopin’ dogs.

I said, “That’s okay, I like dogs. It’s people I’m not sure about.” What I meant by that is in two minutes you can mainly tell whether you can trust a dog or not, whether they’ll bite you or not. And sometimes, with people, it’ll take a lifetime and you still don’t know if they’ll bite you.

Naturally, Paula didn’t understand where I was comin’ from with that brilliant pickup line, so she grabbed the dogs and took off runnin’, thinkin’ I was a nut. And since I wasn’t, I was a little disappointed she’d left.

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I thought I’d never see her again, so I didn’t give it another minute’s thought and went back to my smokin’. Later on in the week, I happened to mention to my brother Nick that this zany woman who I thought lived over in the Projects and was writin’ a cookbook had popped onto my land. He said he thought a lady from town who owned a restaurant — he’d eaten there and liked it — lived next door to me. I told him I thought that might be the woman with the incontinent dogs, but I wasn’t sure.

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