Tipping Cows

Since I spent most of my childhood growing up in Garden City, Kansas, the Boy figured I must have been quite the country bumpkin. So he asked me if I had ever gone cow tipping. My first thought was "cow what?" The Boy explained that since cows sleep standing up, if two people went up to the sleeping cow and pushed it over to its side, the cow would fall over and continue sleeping.

Now, I spent fourteen years in Kansas. We lived in a trailer park (hardee har har) and sometimes raised chickens in the backyard. We had a garden of all kinds of veggies in the back yard, and I even had a slight southern accent (which I was able to lose during my years in Boston). I mowed lawns as a kid, went fishing at the lake, walked three miles to and from school (sometimes in three feet of snow), both my parents worked at a beef factory where they killed cows and processed the meat for the supermarkets, and yet I have never heard of cow tipping.

My own brother, a born Jayhawker, has never heard of cow tipping either. I totally thought the Boy was making it all up. That was until I heard Carrie Underwood singing about cow tipping on her new CD (let's just ignore the fact that I am even listening to the music of the latest American Idol winner okay?):

My hotel in Manhattan

Holds more people than our town

And what I just paid for dinner

Would be a down payment on a house

I'd rather be tippin' cows in Tulsa

Than hailin' cabs here in New York

But I ain't in Checotah anymore

This is from her song "I Ain't in Checotah Anymore"

I have to call up all my Kansan friends and ask them why I never heard of cow tipping. Maybe Kansas was too "centralized" for cow tipping to become popular. Now I really have the urge to go push a cow over while it's sleeping.