Humor

Morgan Murphy Southern Journal for Southern Living on New York 2001

Southern Journal

Humor, Southern Living /

I grew to love it, though. City time is like dog years: A year in New York equals 7 in Alabama. So when I moved home last April, I had some reentry problems after spending 42 years as a New Yorker. All my black New York clothing had to be discarded. Driving home from the Empire State, I pulled in a rest stop in South Carolina and overheard an old lady ask her friend, “Since when do the Amish drive Cadillacs?” Driving is a big change. Manhattanites use their horns like breathing—it is a natural and constant function, vital to sustaining life. In Birmingham, a horn is a device used as a sort of automotive wave, often blown to get a friend out of his house. My city friends are amazed that in rural areas, one is supposed to raise a two-fingered salute to all passing cars and people. Anything less is rude.

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Oh Christmas Tree

Humor, Southern Living /

Not for amateurs, this business of picking the perfect Christmas tree. A real tree just makes Christmas—pine in the air, sap on the furniture, needles in the carpet, the whole bit. You can’t fake that. No petroleum-based, mold-formed, insert-figure-A-into-stalk-B imitation can take the place of a real tree. That pine-scented spray you’ve got isn’t fooling anybody. Your house smells like a cab.

Let’s begin with the size of the tree. Don’t give me some sad shrub, some Charlie Brown Christmas weed, barely able to hold up the 4-round dough ornament Aunt Helen baked and shellacked in 1978. No, give me a towering Fraser fir or Scotch pine. “I want big, son, big,” I tell the cadet. Every year I buy a tree that far exceeds the house. What caused that gougé down the center of the living room ceiling? The 15-footer of 1998. Those scratches on the side of the front door? That was one fat Fraser.

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Putting on the Squeeze

Humor, Southern Living /

Sure, there are some rules. (As a former youth counselor advised, keeping the Holy Spirit between hugging and dancing young folk is probably a good idea although there seems to be some debate over the Spirit’s waistline.) Yet when it comes time to greet an old friend, to welcome a soldier or sailor home, to squeeze out sadness, to convey sheer joy, to comfort a hurt child or simply to say, “I love you,” nothing beats the humble Southern hug.

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Space Invader

Garden Design, Humor /

Sometimes, strolling over kudzu-covered hill and dale,I’m comforted by the thought that when the
Souths’ last barbecue smolders and dies, when the last pickup truck sputters to a stop, when the last column falls off the last plantation house, when diners in Yazoo, Mississippi, and Eufaula, Alabama, succumb to mocha-decaf-cappuccino-skim lattes, kudzu will still be there, creeping at a rate of 12 inches per day, tucking every vestige of our glorious region under a thick green quilt.

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