By Lanny Morgnanesi
Outside Philadelphia, I’m driving 65 mph in pouring rain on a four-lane highway. My thoughts turn to North Florida, where I lived for several years. Here are some of those thoughts:
- It’s understandable that light snow paralyzes traffic in The South. What’s hard to understand is why rain slows it down considerably.
- In The South, iced tea is always refilled.
- Fried chicken is good – everywhere.
- If a restaurant does not have a huge chimney billowing waves of gray-black smoke, it is not and cannot be a barbeque restaurant.
- Natives of Florida try to frighten newcomers with exaggerated stories of gators, snakes, and man-eating fire ants.
- When a newcomer complains about the heat, native Floridians say, “Wait a month or two. Your blood will thin and you’ll be fine.”
- Some plants do not grow in the sandy, acidic soil, but those that do really grow.
- You fertilize a plant in its first year and cut it back every year after.
- Ocean water can get uncomfortably warm.
- Social activity slows during July, August, and even September. It bounces back around mid-October.
- In the summer, you take a jacket to the movie theater and put it on inside.
- If you go on vacation and turn off the air conditioner, the leather jacket and leather shoes in your closet turn green.
- Strict Baptist do not drink coffee because it is a stimulant.
- In North Florida, people go to church twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays. This prevents backsliding.
- College football is more popular than pro football, and everyone has “a team.”
- Generally, a man will not marry a woman with a different team.
- The easiest cars to sell in The South are the color of the most popular football teams.
- I thought the colors of The Florida State Seminoles were maroon and yellow. I was mistaken. The colors are garnet and gold. Until moving to Florida, I didn’t know garnet was a color.
- Florida State fans have great respect for the tribe of Seminole Indians and never caricature them.
- The Seminole Indians avoided capture and enslavement by fleeing into the Florida swamp. They were never conquered and never signed a treaty.
- One of the biggest sports stories of the year in The South is on signing day, when the top high school football players commit to a college team. I had not known there was such a thing.
- The South tends to be more gentile and discreet than The North, but at a college football game it is not uncommon to see a poster of the home team mascot sodomizing the mascot of the visiting team.
- There is NASCAR. Enough said.
- The former “colored only” bathrooms still exist, although they are now for everyone. Some younger generation blacks avoid them.
- Although it is not common, talk not heard up North since the 1950s is used, like, “Hey, why are you walking in this neighborhood? You don’t live here.”
- One sort of gets used to cockroaches, hush puppies, and always letting women enter and exit the elevator first.
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