When God Made Me Born a Yankee...

...He Was Teasing...

I've made a vow...a resolution...a...a...promise to myself. This promise involves me not turning my television on for a month. I don't actually WATCH TV...I think commercials are ridiculous and far too obvious to lend any sort of grace to the world, so I avoid them by only downloading shows or movies from iTunes and then watching them on my Apple TV. BUT! I've decided to not turn on the television in October. And so...I'm reading...I'm walking...I'm talking (to just about anyone who'll listen, including the lesbian couple who live in front of me who claim to be sisters), and I'm sitting. Quietly. Pensively. Purposely.

Powerful stuff, this sitting quietly business...thoughts littered my brain like so many toys scattered around a play room floor...and until I started to pick each one up and turn them this way and that...examining them and judging them upon their merits, I didn't realize just how distracting all those shiny little things were. And then I started to put them away...in the places where they belonged...until there was nothing but silence in my mind.

So tonight, I sat in my living room and watched the curtain chase itself in the breeze...watched the sky streak from dusky rose to a fiery orange, the rays streaming through the leaves on the tree-I-refuse-to-trim in the backyard...the shadows dancing on the lawn and stalking the fire pit as the sun bid farewell for a few hours. I did all of this...and thought of nothing. I turned off the phone...sat with Ruckus sighing her little puppy sighs while her head rested in my lap, and was quiet.

I decided to add some music to the night and turned on an old Indigo Girls mix that a dear friend (thank you, Homes) sent me once...eventually my thoughts wandered back in, and they circled 'round to a notion I've had nearly all my life. I'm a Southerner. Oh, yes, I am. There was a moment when I stepped off the plane in New Orleans for the first time when I could swear I had smelt that salty, heavy, heady air...laced as it was with the sweet, luscious smell of magnolia...so many many times before. Sometimes we just know things...and I knew then. There is so much of the Southern gentleman in this woman...a hand under the elbow of the woman I'm escorting across the street...taking special care to be sure I'm on the side that the traffic is coming to. The soft, clean handkerchief offered when a tear rolls down a rosy cheek. A tip of the hat...an insistence of not allowing a woman to walk home alone at night...car doors opened...standing when she rises to leave the table, and then again when she returns...a quiet sense of "I'll take care of it for you, my love," and then doing just that...whether it's mending a fence or shaving a quarter inch off her son's door so that it will close without friction, there's a sense of...chivalry...that lives in me.

Some people would describe it as "butchly," or as the way a man used to treat a woman...and I suppose that used to be true, and not just in the South. But here's the thing...those things still LIVE in the South. And yes, I know...they are accompanied by a great many things I'm vehemently opposed to; but the values I'm talking about...well...they're from a different time and place...grace and honor were not just words, they lived and breathed because the people believed in them just as much as they believed in their Momma's peach pie being the magic elixir that would make life right itself when wrong. It was just simply how things were done...and they refused to give it up. I refuse to give it up.

And so...as I was sitting there tonight, I thought about all the creaking old porches I had probably set on for a spell...sipping sweet tea and talking about nothing in particular with my family and friends while we waited for the heat to be chased off by the nippy, jasmine-scented breeze.

When I tuned back into the world...this line was playing..."when God made me born a Yankee, he was teasing."

Oh yes, he was.