SassyBlonde

As The Muse said upon moving back to Birmingham, I'm now experiencing Deja Vulcan. Today I flew back home to visit everybody and do all the things I love to do and see when I'm in the South for a week, and had the pleasure of getting picked up at the airport by The Muse herself and being whisked off to Tuscaloosa for a little stroll down memory lane.

We drove directly to one of the favorite lunchtime haunts of my college days, the City Cafe, and it struck me as to exactly how much parts of the South function like time capsules. When you walk in the door at the City Cafe, you turn immediately to the left and look for a table in one of the two rooms. If there's no table immediately available, then you wait there in the doorway until some group gets up from one and sit down at the dirty table, whereupon one of the waitresses immediately shows up and cleans it and takes your drink and/or food order. Now, most places this would be odd, but if you take a look at the menu you'll start to understand why this is: you can get an enormous plate of food for under five dollars, including your sweet tea. Almost every time I've been there, there's been a line out the door and down the sidewalk, because this is Southern food at it's finest-- inexpensive, homemade, and served with a sweet, willing, and efficient attitude that a lot of people who aren't from here tend to miss in their "need for speed".

City Cafe is a great illustration of Southern culture in a nutshell. Sitting down at a dirty table is no big deal because it doesn't inconvenience you and you know your waitress will be around in under a minute to take care of you-- this is the sort of general faith in your fellow man that I took for granted growing up. It's part of the Southern attitude to assume the best of someone in front of you until you're presented with another option. This is not so much taught as simply absorbed from watching everyone around you as a kid, and this is not to say that it's a bone-deep assumption-- much of behavior in the South is about appearances, and this is no exception. You'd never want that other person to think of you as rude, because that's the kiss of death, so you're courteous and respectful, and try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Not only that, but it's a generally accepted fact that you're not too good to sit down and wait for your table to be cleaned. You're just folks like everybody else there, whether you're a first-string football player or a a janitor. That's something I definitely don't miss about living in D.C. when I'm down here-- everybody in D.C. is the emotional equivalent of a fifteen-year-old boy trying to prove his importance and the size of his Johnson by sheer rudeness and inflated ego.Here? Sure, it's everywhere I guess, but at least the manners are a little better and the egos are a lot more manageable.


Once your table's clean and you're ready to order, your food is brought to you in good time-- as soon as it can be put together. One thing The Muse and I marveled at is the waitresses' ability to differentiate between sweet and unsweet tea on the tables: there's no markers, and they look the same, yet I've almost never had a waitress there get it wrong, no matter how many tables she's juggling and how many quick-changes those tables are making. I think a lot of people who aren't from the Deep South mistake our casual manner for slowness, which is a mistake in a lot of cases. Most of the time it has a more zen-like reason: people down here know that it takes time to get things done and there's no use freaking out about the time it takes when you can't do anything about it. I think that attitude has a lot to do with what people see as Southern hospitality-- the general level of stress is just a lot lower because people don't sweat the small stuff.

When you're done with your meal, you don't sit around socializing, you get up and out and let somebody else sit down. It's the Golden Rule at play-- the people there did the same for you, and you want to do the same for everybody else. One crazy thing I noticed yesterday is that no matter how many people are waiting to sit, you never get that feeling of "restaurant rage" you get other places. There are no glares or frowns from waiting parties, they just socialize with their friends or people waiting around until it's their turn and wait good-naturedly for their table. Quite a different feel from DC restaurants where you have to wade through the miasma of stress to get to the hostess and claim your table while removing imaginary knives from your back brought on by glares from the other people waiting.

Anyway, fun was had by all and we left feeling completely stuffed and happy and promptly scurried over to the Krispy Kreme on MacFarland hoping for a Hot Now doughnut, which we were denied, so we got our otherwise fresh but cool confections and drove on to other venues for pictures and fun, which I'll share shortly. Wishing you all in DC tolerable temperatures, and I'll send some of this Southern hospitality your way until I can bring it home myself in a week.