It's easy for me to lose track of my roots after living in the North for the past nine years. It reminds me of a Jimmy Buffet song that a friend had posted up on their Facebook page the other day, quoting from "Changes in Latitudes," and makes me think of a saying my mother use to tell me when I was younger, "You can take a boy out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the boy."
Of course, I'd like to think that's referring to the finer values that I gained growing upoutside of Atlanta and spending my summers in the swamps of South Georgia, where the sight of seeing Gators wasn't anything special.
I keep falling back to those values this evening after having dinner saddled up to the hotel bar here where I'm staying in Denver. the bar was more locals than hotel guests, and was a spitting image of "Joe Six Pack," an expression that I hear many coining when trying to find ways to speak to the common man. country music played loudly from the juke box, with modern day cowboys (real cowboys) danced to songs about working the late night shift, how every hour is 5 o'clock somewhere, and how one of these days they're gonna get out of that small town, while others sang about how their small town is all they're ever gonna need.
In New York, the conversation at bars seems to evolve around probing others on what they do for a living. Where as here, work was the last thing anyone wanted to talk about. They'd rather sing along to songs of hope and opportunity, of greener grass on the other side of the mesa.
It's easy for people to look down at the rural South. I, myself, have fallen victim of it on occasion, thinking back to the more sobering moments of my childhood when I was confronted by the ignorance and hate that tried to stoke the lingering ambers of a South that was divided along racial and ethnic lines. But I've seen that divide now in places far from the South. What I've also seen in the South is community, something I try to write fondly of here in this blog, and something that kept washing over me tonight while listening to country catch-phrases.
In New York, it's easy to feel like you're left out, like you're all alone in a city of nine million. You don't feel that in Ft. Mudge, GA, or Top Sail, NC. Of course, sometimes people like to know a litle more about you than you wish to share. But you have to take the good and the bad with community. Take Plains, GA, where Jimmy Carter grew up. It's a small town in Southwest Georgia, probably as many people in it that live on my block in Manhattan. It's a town where service is branded on the bright yellow vests of Lions members who stand out in the hot summer sun collecting money to send blind children to camp. It's a town where Wednesday nights get pretty quiet except in the churches. And, it's a town that shows up in full force whenever there's a birth, marriage, or death, probably the three most important moments where we're reminded that we can't do everything on our own. New parents need help learning how to care for a newborn. Newlyweds need help learning how to step out into the world as one. And, at times when death comes knocking, families need the help of those around them as much as those who have passed need helpbeing laid to rest. Even after death, we're faced with the one simple fact that we can't do it alone.
You see that in small towns so much easier than big cities, where we put on our tough faces and try to show the world that we can make it all on our own. It seems that where you do find real community in big cities is in neighborhoods where the rural rules of life have somehow anchored themselves beneath the concrete and iron. The services attached to our local Catholic parish, in a heavily Dominican neighborhood, is filled with people who knew small villages in the Tropics long before they knew 207th Street. And outside the harmonic walls of Riverside church are families coming together who remember the stories of their grandmother talking about how her hands would bleed pickin' cotton under the hot Alabama sun that would make your eyes burn with sweat.
Despite the prods and jabs that are made at me after people learn of my southern roots--some in jest, some as real jabs--I'm drawn to the realness that is found in rural America, particularly in the South. Even though I was a New Yorker who worked for a liberal think tank, the fact that I was willing to sit next beside them and enjoy a beer while they talked about anything but work showed me a welcomeness that I hadn't experienced in some time. For a few minutes, I became Joe Six Pack. The only difference was that I had five more to go.,
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