Confessions of a True Southerner: What bless your heart really means
We’ve all heard it, and most of us have said it, but what does it really mean? Now, before all of you dyed-in-the-wool Southerners get your drawers in a wad and start hollering that I’m preaching to the choir, let me continue. “Bless your heart” is not something that you have to explain to Southerners. We all understand it because it’s our language. We all know that “bless your heart” has many meanings, kind of like how the word aloha means hello, goodbye, and I love you in Hawaiian. It all depends on how you use it. Like I said earlier, I used to think that everybody knew what “bless your heart” meant, and it wasn’t until a friend of mine from out West started complaining about it that I realized that the term could be confusing to foreigners. So, here are a few simple definitions you can use the next time a Yankee or Westerner starts carrying on about the way we talk.
1.“Bless your heart” is a form of empathy. It’s like giving someone a great, big hug. When a friend starts complaining about her rotten boss, her no count husband, and how the kids are driving her crazy, we just shake our heads and look her in the eye and give her a heartfelt “bless your heart.” It’s our way of saying “Honey, I’m so sorry. I know just how you feel, and I’m glad that today it’s you and not me.”
2.When your cousin Susie does something just plain dumb, and your aunt Margaret calls you up to tell you about it, you just listen real close and utter a few “bless her hearts” when she pauses long enough to draw in a breath. That way you’ll both know that even though Susie doesn’t have enough sense to blow up a pea, she’s still family after all, and we love her anyway.
3.In the South, we believe in being polite even if it kills us. So, when we just can’t fight the urge to say something nasty, we follow it up with a “bless her heart” just to make us feel better. “Look at that poor woman trying to jog around that track. Her rear-end is dragging a trail, bless her heart.”
4.Probably the most important way we use “bless your heart” is so we can identify each other. When I’m far from home and feeling all alone, I just throw out a few “bless your hearts” into the conversation and see what happens. If the person I’m talking to gets this confused look like I’ve just sprouted another head , then I just go on to the next person and do the same thing until finally I hear that familiar twang that’s sweeter than a melody and then come those beautiful words “Well, bless your heart.” That’s when I know I’m home— even though I’m a thousand miles away.
So the next time someone comes up and puts an arm around you and offers a heart-felt “bless your heart,” you’d better count your lucky stars that you’re in a place where people still care enough to say it. Yes, indeed. Bless your heart, and God bless the hearts of all Southerners!
Confessions of a true Southerner: Why my mother spent the night before my wedding teaching me how to make cornbread
(A true experience told about the day before Jennifer's wedding)
Sometime between shopping for a last minute pair of shoes for my honeymoon and stopping by the jewelry store to pick up earrings, the topic came up that I didn’t know how to make cornbread. Now the first thing you have to know is that in the South, it’s just understood that every woman knows how to make a piping, hot skillet of cornbread. It’s a right of passage that’s so expected that it’s seldom, if ever, discussed. But don’t let that fool you. Its importance ranks right up there with football and whistling Dixie. In fact, cornbread is the great dividing factor. Let me explain. If you put ten people in a room together and divide them up between the ones that know how to make cornbread and the ones that don’t, you’ll find that the “I don’t know hows” would be from up North or out West—guaranteed! Now they might tell you that they make cornbread, but rest assured, it’s some sugary concoction that’s still trying to decide if it’s cake or cornbread. They just can’t get the formula right! That’s because it’s a well-guarded secret that’s never written down.
After my mother picked her jaw off the floor that fateful day, we went straight home where she proceeded to show me how to make cornbread. “No daughter of mine is going to get married without knowing how to make cornbread,” she said. Then she threw in a little of this and a little of that and started mixing. Just when I thought I had it down, she threw in a little more of this and a lot more of that. Needless to say, when I presented my first skillet of cornbread (that sacred creation that gave me claim to my heritage) to my newly married husband, it was drier than a piece of cardboard and tougher than wood. He was a trooper though, trying to choke it down with a big glass of milk. Finally, he just crumbled it all up and drank it like a slushy. For several years after that, he claimed that he “just didn’t care much for cornbread.”
Not like cornbread? Ridiculous! My husband was born and raised in Georgia and has a father who can give a year-long dissertation on the War Between the States, or the War of Southern Independence, or (his personal favorite) the War of Northern Aggression. How could my husband not like cornbread? He’d been raised on it, probably slurping down cornbread crumbs in his bottle before he had any teeth. It took me years to figure out that he just didn’t like my cornbread.
Now after almost twenty years of marriage, he’s starting to come around—or maybe I’ve finally found my way around the Southern kitchen. One thing’s for sure: when I get a craving for pinto beans, fresh collard greens, and (you guessed it) a piping, hot skillet of cornbread, I go into the kitchen and start adding a little bit of this and a whole lot of that, and before you know it…voila! The South is reborn.
Confessions of a true Southerner: If you don’t have time to talk, you’d better just keep on walking
Anyone who has grown up in the South, around the South, or within a hundred miles of the South knows that there’s no such thing as a short conversation with a Southerner. We stop to say hello, and two hours later we’re still going at it. We talk till our tongues are tuckered out and our kids start squalling. Then we say goodbye and talk another twenty minutes or so—just for good measure.
And we don’t just talk to the people we know. We talk to everyone: the girl at the drive-thru, the man behind the meat counter, the woman standing behind us at the post office. In fact, a friend of mine recently told me that by the time she got up to the front of the line to purchase her stamps, she knew all about the lady behind her—her kids, grandkids, how the daughter’s ex-husband was up for parole in a month, and why her new boyfriend wasn’t worth a Saltine cracker.
We southerners get to know our neighbors—intimately. We know where they’re going, when they leave in the morning, and what time they come home. And if a neighbor leaves in the middle of the night, well, you’d better believe we find out why—as soon as it gets light enough outside to trot across the street and ask.
I remember the time when my husband and I decided to splurge on some new wooden blinds for the entire front of our home. A day later, my neighbor marched over and told me that she had a bone to pick with me. “Ever since ya’ll got those new blinds, I can’t see a thing that’s going in your house,” she said.
Now it ain’t that we’re nosy—just curious is all. We still believe that neighbors ought to share one another’s lives. We laugh together, cry together, and yes, sometimes we even fight together. But the point is that we care. So many people in other parts of the world have isolated lives and absolutely no interaction with their neighbors. How sad is that? My aunt Lucille would roll over in her grave at the thought. She didn’t need a TV. Her front porch was enough entertainment to keep her busy all summer long, sitting out there in her metal rocker with a big, tall glass of sweet tea, waving at the neighbors as they went by. How I cherish those long afternoons when the sun crept down behind the mountain and the katydids would start their sing-song chant to the rhythm of the flickering lightning bugs. Oh, the stories those folks could tell.
Maybe we Southerners understand a great truth—that the destination isn’t nearly as important as the journey. The friendships we build make up the fabric of our lives…one conversation at a time.
So the next time you’re in the South, take my advice. If you don’t have time to talk, you’d better just keep on walking.
Confessions of a True Southerner: Our Dogs Wear Clothes Too
I was at a friend’s house, and we were watching one of those Hollywood glitz segments where Paris Hilton was parading around Beverly Hills with her miniature dog happily stuffed in a Gucci bag. I turned to Sharon and said, “Well, our dogs wear clothes too.”
“What?”
“In the South, our dogs wear clothes too.”
At that, she burst out laughing.
“It’s true,” I told her.
She raised her eyebrows and gave me the look. You know the look I’m talking about—the one that says you must’ve just fallen off the turnip truck and hit your head one too many times on the way down. “I don’t know what part of the South you’re from,” she said, “but it certainly ain’t where I come from.”
Sharon did have a point. Once when I went with my boys to spend the weekend with my parents, I couldn’t find anyone to take care of our family dog, Patty. Now, you have to understand that Patty wasn’t a cute, little, designer dog. Half yellow lab and half American Eskimo, she was mid-sized but had the energy of ten Greyhounds…on steroids! I knew I couldn’t handle Patty hanging over the hatch-back, slobbering on the boys, and annoying the heck out of them the whole trip. So, I went and bought one of those portable pet carriers that zips into a mini tent. There was only one problem—the trip was three hours long! And there was no way Patty could go three hours without doing her business.
We decided to stop at a park located in my Alabama hometown to give Patty a chance to walk around. I even called an old friend and asked her to meet us there with her children so we could catch up. All the way to the park, I lectured my boys about the importance of keeping Patty on her leash, and then the rest of the conversation was spent arguing over who had to walk Patty first.
We put the leash on Patty before letting her out of the carrier so she couldn’t run wild and get into trouble. Then, each of my boys begrudgingly took a turn walking her. Then something amazing happened. All of the other kids in the park started gathering around to get a look at the city boys who were walking their dog on a leash. Then they started asking if they could take a turn at it. My oldest son had the funniest look on his face, and I knew he was wondering what kind of kids would actually want to walk around a dog so she could “do her business.” I gave him the nod, and the kids spent the next thirty minutes or so walking Patty around that park.
So, Sharon’s reaction to my statement was right on target. The notion that a group of people who wouldn’t dream of putting their dogs on a leash certainly wouldn’t dress them up… would they?
I grew up way out in the country. We had a male Labrador named Hunter and a female mutt named Fussy. One afternoon, my little sister and I caught them carrying on in our backyard. We were appalled. There was only one solution. They had to get married. So we draped our dad’s tie around Hunter’s neck and our mom’s black slip around Fussy, and we herded them to the side of the house near the rose bushes and married them.
Of course, Hunter had that tie off before we could utter Amen, but Fussy didn’t seem to mind being dressed up. She wore that slip around all day until my mom came home and pitched a fit when she saw her good slip on the dog.
After that, we’d dress Fussy up, and she’d wear the clothes for days. Now, to give you a full picture—Fussy had curly, black hair and was about five times fatter than a full bred poodle. We’d put her in baby shirts that our little brothers had outgrown and then had to stretch them over her pudgy rolls. She was quite the sight, dragging those ratty shirts through the mud and who knows what else.
Fussy loved to lie in the middle of the dirt road that ran in front our house. One evening around dusk, we heard the awful racket of a blaring horn and screeching tires and ran outside to find a car in the ditch. A man and woman, from out of town, were driving down the dirt road when he saw what he thought was an abandoned baby in the road. He swerved to miss it. My mom gave us a good scolding, but there was laughter in her eyes. I’ll never forget the bewildered look on that poor man’s face when he realized that the baby he saved was a portly, Poodle mutt stuffed into a shirt that was two sizes too small.
So, if you ever find yourself driving down a dirt road, way out in the sticks of a small Southern town, you’d better pay close to attention to what’s lying in the road because our dogs wear clothes too.