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News Satire and Funny Photos.
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What We're Doing Right Now ...
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Written by Ross Cavins
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Friday, 30 January 2009 |
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  In the South, we do things a little bit differently. We move at a slower pace, for sure, but only because we choose to do so. We talk slower but we leave out unneeded syllables so we actually say things in the same amount of time. (It's true, I've actually measured it.)
Visiting folks is Southern pastime. Like baseball and fishing and chasing fireflies. It's encoded into our genetics. It's part of what makes us Southern.
We love fried chicken and sweet tea and banana pudding. We crave the first sweet watermelon of the season and can't wait to shuck that first stalk of silver queen corn.
We can sit outside on a warm summer night and listen to the crickets chirp and be perfectly at peace with the world.
Southerners aren't that hard to figure out.
But that waving-at-strangers thing; that one's always had me puzzled.
When I was little, I remember being in the car with my dad. We were driving down the road on a nice sunny day and we passed by a man in a pickup truck. He threw his index finger up off the steering wheel and my dad did the same.
I looked over at my dad and said, "Who was he?"
He shrugged. "I don't know."
"Then why did you just wave at him?"
My dad didn't lose a beat. "Because he waved at me first."
This answer befuddled me. It made no sense. To my young unmolded brain at the time, it fell in the "if your best friend jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?" category.
I was taught that you didn't do something just because someone else did it. And my dad was the one that taught me that little gem.
But he just admitted he waved at a complete stranger only because the stranger waved first.
This was my first introduction to the complexities of the real world.
After that conversation, I noticed that the stranger-waving phenomenon happened more and more. I guess it had been happening all along but I'd never paid attention. Now, it seemed like every time I was in the car, my dad was waving at total strangers.
And I noticed that sometimes, he was the one waving first.
"Did you know that guy?"
"Nope."
"But you just waved at him, and you waved first." I had him now.
My dad shrugged and said, "So?"
So? I was maybe seven at the time and was struggling hard to apply logic to the world. I needed to figure out how everything worked and now, my dad had become an enigma. How could I be expected to figure out things like Calculus and Women if I couldn't grasp this stranger-waving thing?
Why was all this surreptitious waving going on? What did it really mean?
Later in life, when I got my license and began driving, I found myself waving at strangers. Just like my dad. I didn't know why, but I did it. Sometimes I even waved first. It made no sense but I still waved. I couldn't help it.
Why do we wave at strangers? Why do they wave back?
And then the other day I finally figured out the answer. Because we're Southern. |
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Ross Cavins
