I do love the South.
Since my return from a one-semester exchange to Cal State, Chico and after various other trips outside Dixieland, I’ve had some time to relfect on my Southern heritage.
Actually, I should come right out and say it: I’ve reflected on why I just can’t be a Yankee.
I know a red flag just went up in your mind: California isn’t really in the North. It’s on the West Coast.
This is a true and legitimate concern. But for my purposes, Louisiana is on the extreme western edge of the South and Kentucky is the northern border.
Everywhere else in the United States should be labeled Yankeeland.
Texas may have seceeded from the Union along with the Southern states, but I assure you ladies and gentlemen it is not Southern. It is simply Texan.
In Cali, I was sure to let them know I did not mind their snide remarks about our bird-sized bugs and drawls when we talk.
Yanks just aren’t as openly friendly as we are.
For example, here in Dixie, perfect strangers will at least give greetings to each other as they pass on a sidewalk. It might be in the form of cordial knod, a casual wave or a verbal “Hello!”
I am from the tiny town of Doyline -metropolitan population around 1,000 – between Shreveport and Ruston, so that makes me even more prone to give that wave.
We wave to everyone we pass on the street as we drive.
I tried that in California without much success.
As I drove down a dusty road to a swimming hole, I smiled and waved to the West Coast Yankees who were on their way out.
They wouldn’t wave back.
With each sucessive car that passed, my waves progressed. Originally it was simply the lifting of a single finger. (No, not the MIDDLE one.)
By the fifth or sixth car I was taking both hands off the wheel and shaking them like tamborines.
“Stop it! We don’t do that here!” my passenger explained.
“What?” I asked in astonishment and aggravation.
“We don’t do what you people do,” she said. “We’re just not nice.”
Touche, my dear.
Then there are those Yankee political parties.
Don’t get me wrong. I do love to be in the Great Outdoors. I think everyone should see the Grand Canyon and go camping as often as possible
But can you really expect me to choose my political affiliation with an overgrown pine tree or some roadside flowers as its basis?
Then, there’s just the existence of state pride.
A friend from New York once told me the government should do away with all state boundaries, because state pride doesn’t exist anymore.
“My friend, you certainly haven’t been down to the Dirty South, now have you?” I asked him.
As I told friends in California about our great food and Saturday nights in Tiger Stadium, one of them posed a smart-mouthed quesiton.
“Well if YOU GUYS have such a great thing going down there, why don’t you just become and independent nation?” he said in his hoighty toightiest tone.
“Uhm, actually we already tried that about 140 years ago,” I said. “Didn’t work out too well for us, if I recall.”
Don’t take Adam too seriously and contact him at [email protected]