That's what I like about: The south

 

 1. Hush puppies.

Those fried, doughy thingamajigs that magically appear in a basket on the table along with sweet tea just as soon you sit down at any self-respecting, Nuevo-my butt, separate checks, ten finger-licking good, down-home, eating establishments across the south. 

Still around, because they went to the dogs, hush puppies got their name because they were extra dough trimmings that were thrown to the dogs to hush them up while the cook was cooking the collard greens.

2. Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte.

3. Collard greens, the word is nutritious, good for you, makes you smack your lips. Collards as a word has it all over spinach

4. Garden and Gun Magazine.  Reads like talking about the weather with Harper Lee on a front porch on a Sunday afternoon.

5. The front porch.  Not because they look good but because it was too hot to be inside.

6. The Crooked Road. A 250-mile path of musical venues along the Blue Ridge in Virginia. 

7. Floyd’s Country Store along the Crooked Road where, since the nineteen thirties, people still gather every Friday night. Sit on folding chairs, drink soda pop and listen to bluegrass.  

8. Bluegrass.

8. Tall, thin, beautiful people who don’t model and are referred to as “A long tall drink of water”.

9. Storytellers.  I guess that was the entertainment on the front porch.  It’s in the DNA.

10. Tin roofs.  As in...

11. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 

12. Tennessee Williams, author, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

13.  The Gallagher family. Three generations of guitar-makers. Best of all their poster: Made by southern hands since 1963.

14. Wide plank floors in the old tobacco warehouses you can live in right now.  With history still scribbled in purchase orders, X’s, and dates, on the same brick wall where, now, my HD TV hangs.

15.  The idea that people still believe someone other than Washington is all-powerful and watching over them.

16.  Red eye gravy and Eye contact.  A word about eye contact:

I walk along the Dan River in southern Virginia most mornings.  That means grass, trees, ducks, geese and eye contact. Hell. Quaintness interruptus.

 

Hi.                       

Hello.             

‘Morning. 

Sure is.

Hello. 

Hello.

What’s with these people?  They act like a car horn is only for honking hello.  What are they, hillbillies?  I should move here. 

But, I’ve been told,  “Where you going to get Cantonese at 11pm?”

True, true. 

But I can get an intelligent conversation about Bruce Catton’s Pulitzer Prize winning Stillness at Appomattox delivered any time day or night.

That’s what I like about the south.

Please don’t change -though I know you must. 

Baby boomers, like myself, will sell their houses when the housing market gets better and resume the migration Southbound as Doc and Merle Watson used to say.  They'll pump money into the tributaries of the Dan River and, hopefully, not ruin everything.  

It's too precious.  And that’s what I like about the south.

That’s what I like about: will be an ongoing feature at bistrochairs. There are a lot of things to like.