December 4, 2006

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 3 2006

Lucky me.

Tuesday morning, at the crack of dawn, I'll board a plane bound for Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. There, I'll have less than two hours to find my pal Liz and dash to our connecting flight to Honolulu. She's flying in from Columbia, South Carolina. We're going to Hawaii for a U2 concert. The other six days of our trip will be spent wandering around Waikiki, drinking, sleeping late, getting too much sun and pretending, at least for a few short days, that we're not in our forties, stressed to the max and being dragged through the holidays like tin cans tethered to the back of a speeding truck.
With Tom in CR and me biding my time in Miami, trying to sell our home, it's been a tough year. I'm exhausted. Coming into the holidays, despite the usual pressure to participate that I feel every year, this year I feel as if I'm coming into the home stretch. I feel like if I can just get past December, I'll be back into a part of the year where people start thinking of buying a home instead of a ham and icicle lights and maybe I can go back to having a hope in Hell of selling my house.
Liz has had her own stress this past year and this little vacation may help us both to recover a bit. Even when a lot of other things suck, I've got a great family and terrific friends. Hell, if it wasn't for Liz, I might have completely lost my marbles when I was living in SC.
My daughter was born in Columbia, SC less than 4 weeks after my arrival there and, other than that joyous event, meeting Liz was the only other good thing to come out of my 2 years, 8 months and 3 days of incarceration in that southern equivalent of a Siberian gulag. ...sigh... that's probably an unfair comparison. Had I really been in a prison in Siberia, I would have eaten better food and had nicer neighbors.
We had been living here in South Florida, in the Redland south of Miami, when my husband got a position in South Carolina setting up the new Lottery. I thought this would be a great change - a permanent move from loud, rude, frantic Miami to the quiet, serene, genteel South. Boy, was I clueless. If I'd had any sense at all and hadn't been very pregnant and therefore out of my mind, I would have seen the signs during my first trip up and stayed put in So. FL. Instead, I chalked up the dreary brown scenery to winter in that part of the country, the boring food to poor choices of restaurants and the drone-like, Village-of-the-Damned citizenry to a need on my part to 'adjust' to a slower pace and easier lifestyle.
A few days after the move up, I met my neighbor, Betty, who informed me, during an impromptu monotone speech about "..how things work around here.", that her daughter had an adopted, bi-racial child and that they hadn't realized the child wasn't white until he was a few months old and hadn't "colored out" (no, I'm not making this up) and that she thought I should know the child was adopted "just in case you see that sort of thing around here.". If your jaw is in your lap right now, that's okay. I don't think I closed my mouth until I got back inside the house.
I had my daughter a few days later and a week after we brought her home, I was outside on my porch enjoying a nice, cool March morning, looking out at the little forest that surrounded our home when another neighbor parked near the end of our driveway and, waving and smiling, introduced herself as she tip-toed her way through the pine straw. As with my other neighbor, I got a brief bio of her and her family and then she asked a question that I would be asked dozens of times again, each time I'd be met with the same reaction to my answer and each time making me angrier and more resentful of the South: "What church do go to?" Um, we don't. "Oh? Oh, you mean you haven't found one you like yet. Well, you should visit ours." Um, well, we don't go to church. At all. (stunned pause) "Oh, my...are you...are you...Jewish?" No...my husband and I lean toward Buddhism, but in general, we just aren't religious. "Oh. Well. You know you're going to Hell don't you?"
I'm still not sure what chapped my ass more, the sugary Southern-belle drawl or the absolute certainty of my fate.
Each time I endured one of these exchanges, I got a bit more hostile and defensive. As if that wasn't bad enough, we were ostracized for simply being "not from around here". I got nasty looks and comments when I was overheard speaking Spanish on my cell phone in Wal-mart. While teaching my then 18 month old daughter to say "agua" and "por favor" in line at the grocery store one morning, the woman behind me blurted out that I ought to teach my daughter English FIRST. While I knew that not everyone in the South could possibly be so narrow, the number of bitchy, mean, holier-than-thou types I encountered far outnumbered the pleasant and well informed.
Liz was my little patch of hope and sanity in SC. She managed to be intelligent, kind, funny and well-read. She also was a glowing example of what a good Christian looked like. Like my other pal, Ana, she is usually more inclined than I to be 'nice'. I need friends like these. They make me slightly better behaved.
When we finally left SC, I made of list of the things I would miss, just to convince myself that the experience wasn't a total disaster. At the top was Liz...followed closely by Maurice's yellow mustard BBQ sauce and hot biscuits and sweet tea from Chick-Fil-A.
Here's to eight glorious days of giggling like morons and just fooling around. I'm so lucky.