Up On Blocks

I am now a Son of the South. I do not hunt. I do not fish. I do not even play golf. I am an English professor for Pete's sake which means that I fit a certain stereotype.  I like to read a lot.  I write novels.  I have weird neckties that I sometimes wear.  None of these things qualifies me to consider myself now a bona fide, yet transplanted, Son of the South. So what does qualify me?  This:  I have an old pickup truck on blocks!  My Lord, I feel so accepted now, after decades of living in Dixie, I have come of age.  It didn't take a dog fight, moonshine (no comment), or even my own special road kill barbecue recipe.

It was having that truck up on blocks.

I came out one morning and the truck was leaning a tad to port, so took a look and there it was - a flat tire.  I needed to fix it, but the jack I had to use was for our Altima, and it didn't lift the truck high enough for me to take off the tire.  So, I got a big block of wood and put the jack on top of that and jacked that old pickup higher and higher until I could remove the tire.  then I took the tire in and picked it up two days later and put it back on the truck.

My old pickup was up on the block only a couple of days, but I'm counting it, even though it wasn't on cinderblocks, or even in the front yard.  Son of the South? That's me!

Manly Mucus

I was brought up to believe that spitting, even if I called it “expectorating," was vile. I was led to believe that spitters were corrupt, nasty, icky, disgusting, and had communistic tendencies. So I didn’t spit. I took on the unified and consistent teachings of my parents and elementary school teachers. Since I’ve lived in the South a long time now, and never learned to spit, I feel as if my manhood has somehow been eroded. Even though, in my dark and sordid past, I hunted and fished and even played golf, I don’t do those things any more. I don’t have a pickup truck. I don’t hang around WalMart in a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off revealing my barbed wire tattooed biceps. All because I never learned to spit.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try. I did. I failed. The best I could do was blow out a kind of spray with no direction, power, or concentrated warhead. I could expectorate a watermelon seed a little ways, controlling its direction, but that’s not the same as spitting, um, well, you know - SPIT. I have given up, which is a sign of a failure.

Someone suggested I get a little dab of Chattanooga Chew and practice spittin’ brown juice. I drew a line on that one. I do not want to emulate grasshoppers.

Still, somehow, men in the South just know how. As I look out my office window I see college students spitting, demonstrating that spitters can’t be profiled only as illiterate rednecks from deep in the piney forests, although I have had a few freshmen that were those things. The art of spitting spreads across generations, races, ethnic groups, and just about any religious belief. And so, to me, the evidence is clear that if I’m to be a real man, I need to learn how to spit.

On the other hand, I just remembered that I have a chainsaw and know how to wield it. Without spitting. There. My voice is getting deeper already.