Two stories of the South (well...sort of)

Yesterday we biked into an oasis on the corner of town, an area so absolutely green and with such little traffic that you would think you were in the mountains of West Virginia. We went down the bike path, full of tiny hills and overlooking a picturesque river, until we came to a restaurant you could swear was right out of a movie about the Old South: a free-standing block with large windows, white, peeling columns and spacious porches on the first and second floor. Young men in white jackets were setting up for dinner, lazily putting knives and forks out on white clothed tables, and I had to think, if you walked inside the house, you're sure to see some woman in a flowing, light-pink cotton dress, nursing a jack daniels, pushing her hair out of her eyes, fanning herself and defending her father's honor with a proud, haughty chin and a milky drawl that would make you swoon with thoughts of dead worlds. It had a slowness, and a sweetness to it, that you don't find much while living in the city, and that was really pleasant.

I rarely meet people from the South, but I was recently in Florida - I swam in the Gulf on a pretty, warm evening, the only one out in the sea for a few minutes, before one man, beer-gutted and carrying a plastic pepsi bottle with some kind of neon yellow liquid in it, came out to my area. He was followed by a buddy, and they talked to me for awhile. They were from Mississippi, had taken up jobs as roadies to get out of their hometown. They liked Florida, and they laughed hysterically when I told them I was in town for a conference. As I was leaving the water, one called back that he would come around and find me in my part of the world when they visited.

I've traveled a lot of places in the U.S., but I've never really been to the deep south, besides Florida (which doesn't count as 'deep south', does it??). Its history is fascinating at times, grotesque at times, it seems to me. But for me, and maybe partly because I really have never been there, the real South, outside of the swarming cities, will always be heavy with the majesty and tragedy of families, fictitious or not, that once clung to haunted space. And I wonder now whether the Mississippi boys, Mountain Dew guzzling, tattooed and friendly as all get-out (to white women, at least), would agree. Who knows. Maybe they'll find me someday, out of the blue, and I can pose the question to them properly.