When I Lived in the Real South

I grew up many, many yarns ago in a small town south of Richmond, Virginia – the very same Richmond that was the capital of the Confederacy. I lived less than a mile from Petersburg, where a famous Civil War battle took place. Many Confederate soldiers lie buried in Petersburg's Blandford Cemetary ... as are some of my family.

The day came that I graduated college and went to work for a company in Burlington, North Carolina. One morning I went to a diner and sat down at the lunch counter. There was a short-order cook on the other side of the counter and behind him, a grill. I ordered an omelet. The conversation went like this:

Me: "I'd like an omelet."

Cook: "You want scrambled eggs?"

Me:  "I'd like an omelet."

Cook: "You want scrambled eggs?"

Me: "I'd prefer an omelet."

Cook: "You want scrambled eggs?"

Me:  "Yeah, scrambled eggs."

Cook: "I know where you're from."

Me: "Where's that."

Cook: "Up north."

The cook then turned around and prepared my scrambled eggs.

When I was a kid, my dad would occasionally take me to a deli in Richmond called the New York Deli. The deli made great tasting hot pastrami sandwiches and I always ordered one when we went there. So the day came in Burlington when I had a taste for a hot pastrami sandwich. But there were no delis in Burlington. So I went to a grocery store to buy the ingredients to make a pastrami sandwich at home. It was a large store, maybe a Kroger. I looked for pastrami and couldn't find it. So I asked an employee where the pastrami was kept. He didn't know. So I asked to speak with the store manager. The manager came out and asked me what I wanted. The conversation was short:

Me: "I want to buy some pastrami but I can't find it. Where is it?"

Manager: "What's pastrami?"

That really happened. That's when I knew, "I only thought I was living in the South. Welcome to the real South."

I imagined that somewhere, in some grocery chain’s head office, an executive was telling a meat company salesman, “You can keep your fancy pastrami, sonny boy. Here in the South, we eat scrambled eggs and grits, and we eat ‘em with country ham, not pastrami. What the hell is pastrami, anyway?”

Today, of course, it’s modern times and you can probably buy pastrami anywhere – even in the South. Probably. Although, I’m not sure you can find anyone there who can make you an omelet.