Southern Observation of the Day
This post is a mess, I promise to edit it soon. Meanwhile lots of ‘ and ” problems.
For all of ya’ll that don’t understand Southerners – when we meet you, no matter where you are from, we will be determined to find a link to you or your family or someone you knew. I’ve been thinking about this today. My current theory holds that everyone will link to Arkansas in some way. People think that whole 6 degrees of separation thing is some new idea (new in the sense of the last 10 years) and they’re so very very wrong. Southerners have been doing the degree of separation thing since before the Revolutionary War. [That’s right, Revolutionary War, not the other one.]
Everyone knows – folks from anywhere but here will ask a new acquaintance “What do you do for a living?”
Southerners will ask each other “Where are ya’ll from?”
When a southerner gets an answer, let’s say it’s Memphis, the response will be, “Frank’s cousin Lynette had a roommate at The University* from Blytheville and she married a Memphis boy, Elliot Spillway, his daddy’s an attorney and his mama is an English professor at Sewanee, did you know them? We met them at Billy’s wedding. They’re nice people. When Suze had an accident, in the parking lot at Mud Island after she’d been to a Allman Brothers concert, they came and got her and had her car towed and she stayed with them for three days while the car was repaired.”
*The University = whatever state one is in at the time, as in The University of Arkansas, The University of South Carolina, The University of North Carolina, etc.
If I’m in New York City or Pittsburgh (anywhere not southern) and I am introduced to someone, I pull the Southern Degrees of Separation thing on them:
“Valerie, I’d like to introduce you to Mark Blink.” We shake hands.
Mark asks, “What do you do?”
I respond, “I invented the snow man and I own my own think tank. Where are you from?”
“Chicago,” he answers.
“My nephew lives there. His name is Matt. Do you know him?”
I love watching someone’s face when I do that. Unless they’re southern. In that case, the conversation would be different, more like this…
“Valerie, here’s Mark, I’ve been telling ya’ll about him. He’s from Boone.” I would then give Mark a sideways hug (shoulder to shoulder) because he’s almost family, being that he’s with my friend Jennie and she’s half in love with him but he doesn’t know she’s been talking about him incessantly for a couple weeks.
“Boone, huh? I love Boone. My daughter’s best friend from high school is up there, runs a sporting goods store. His name’s Darryl.”
“Oh hell, that’s Village Sports, over by Nash St. Me and Darryl ski together. He dated Frannie, my sister’s roommate, for a couple months. Nice guy. I came to Washington with him about 2 months ago. Is your daughter Suze? Works for Spignoa Chemicals, has a little gray house? We went over there for dinner.”
I already know this because of Jennie’s infatuation with Mark and because I made the Tar Heel pie my daughter served at dinner that night because she had to work late and didn’t have time to make dessert. But Mark doesn’t need to know this … not yet.
“That’s my daughter. She told me Darryl was here but that he didn’t have time to come by and see me. How’s his grandmother doing?”
“She’s not doing very well. They had to put her in a nursing home.”
I wish someone would let me do a southern newscast. I’ll write one of those next …