“What’s it like to live your whole life in the south and move to the north?” I keep getting this question and I have been afraid to blog about it because I just have this feeling that someone will get offended or get their feelings hurt. If I say I love living up here everyone at home will go off and if I say I want to go home everyone around here will go off. Then I decided people are people and they want to go off anyway over anything, so I would just go ahead and do it. How The Mommy Quack went from North Carolina to the north. I have thought about this long and hard, and it will be divided into three separate posts, parts 1, 2, and 3. Today, you get part 1. Enjoy!
Part 1: My roots and my early images of the north, Birth-1997
I grew up in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina. It is the third largest city in the state. It is famous for the February 1st Woolworth sit-ins, and probably other things I don’t have time to Google. I was obsessed with Study abroad when I got to college, but I never once thought about leaving the south other than that. I wanted to get to Raleigh, the capital. I knew I would go to school there and I planned to stay there. Don’t know why now, but I did. I moved to Greensboro in the second grade and I stayed, my parents were from the area and all my grandparents were there. I grew up with the same kids from second grade until we graduated. There were very few changes in the group. Everybody knew somebody else somehow, that’s the way I remember it anyway. I knew very few people from “The north.” If they were from the north, they had been in the south a long time.
When I thought of the north, my first vision was Gone with the Wind. I have only seen it once and that was when I was in Kindergarten and I remember Scarlet, I think it was Scarlet, throwing dirt in a “Yankees” face. That must have meant they weren’t nice people. I have not seen that movie since, and I probably should. I also thought, as a five year old, that “Yankees” were going to burn my house down. My parents should have explained that one, but then again, they also let me stay up for Dallas, so what would be wrong with Gone with the Wind?
I went to high school with a girl who told me that John Irving was the only contemporary author worth anything. I naturally had to keep up with her and read all of his books. These gave me my second round of northern images. The boys were on the wrestling teams. The characters were funny, but it wasn’t slapstick, ha ha funny. It was dry, ironic humor. They were opened minded and they explained that there was more than one way to view a problem. Garp’s mom was a single working mom and her best friend was a transsexual. That didn’t happen in Greensboro. In the north they had granite quarries and orchards for cider houses. They never seemed to complain about the heat and they were always jumping into bed with each other. It was always cold and everybody could drive in the snow. To this day, almost twenty years later, I still remember reading The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving made me want to go to a prep school in Massachusetts. I would have cut my tongue out for Ellen James. Well no, probably not.
In college, the next “Yankee” I was introduced to was Kevin Smith. I love that man. I really, really love his work. I will even admit to a giggle during Mallrats, OK? I’m surprised I wasn’t kicked out of the theater for laughing so hard during Clerks. So everyone in New Jersey smokes, cusses, and watches hockey. Got it. And again, the humor was more my speed. Chasing Amy defines our generation in a lot of different ways, but I digress.
I made real northern friends the two times I studied abroad. The first time in Ecuador, I was taking this class, and I met Ecuadorians absolutely, but there were two girls from Brooklyn that were there too, Lisa and Michelle. I don’t think at the time I knew Brooklyn was a borough of New York. Michelle lived in the apartment above the laundry mat/dry cleaners her parents owned, in the “neighborhood.” After we got back from Ecuador I was in Greensboro for Christmas and my phone rang. It was Michelle from Brooklyn calling to wish me a Merry Christmas, but then she went off on me because she called directory assistance at my college and they gave her my mom’s address and phone number. She ranted and raved for five minutes, “I could have been anybody! I could have been a stalker! She just handed over your information young lady!” It never occurred to me to be more cautious. Of course, why did she call and ask for it? So I took this to mean they didn’t give out important information so freely in the north.
My second two friends from the north were Jeannie from Boston and Kysa from New Jersey. I met them on the airplane to Madrid. I also met a really cool girl who went to Bates in Maine, and all I could think was Maine? Wow! All the way up in Maine? Where is Bates? I had never been past New York, New England sounded so beautiful. Kysa attended a women’s college very different from the one I attended. At Meredith you had to jump through a lot of hoops to start “alternative” clubs back then. At Barnard the only club not allowed to have a charter had something to do with girls interested in, um, better not say here, email me if you have to know. Jeannie used to save my phone messages and play them for her friends so they could hear my “cute accent” for themselves. Good times.
This was my exposure to the north during the educational phase of my life in North Carolina: reading John Irving, watching Kevin Smith, and studying abroad with others from the north. I wasn’t even in the States with them. I know the rules to the Southern Belle Primer. I might not always follow every single one of them, but I know them. I don’t wear white shoes after Labor Day. All three of my children have good, solid family names. I ate my grits and drank my iced tea and loved barbecue. I was living the southern way.
And then I got my first teaching job in Cary…..
(End of Part 1)
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