You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning Read Online Free

first date with her fiancé was memorable because he arrived to pick her up in a red pickup with full camouflage interior and then drove her deep into the woods where he pointed, with tears in his eyes, to a nondescript patch of dirt and said, “That’s where I shot my first deer.” The gravity of the moment wasn’t lost on Sarah who, having older brothers, understood that you wouldn’t share such a special moment with a woman unless you were planning to marry her.
    In the South, we have more critters than elsewhere and we mingle with them fairly easily.
    Most Southern children can recite at least one story involving the witnessing of a frog being swallowed whole by a passing water snake. And if they can’t, their ancestry is questioned and possibly ridiculed.
    When a Southern child grows up and ventures out into the world, he or she may be puzzled to learn that, in other parts of the country, people usually just have one name and, what’s more, might not even have a proper nickname!
    Reading an obit the other day in a Mississippi newspaper, I was impressed at how every male family member had anickname listed. The deceased was “Gobbler”; and his brothers and assorted kin were “Spike,” “Hun,” “Doots,” and “Tiny.”
    Speaking of obituaries, some newcomers to the South don’t understand that when we say we’re going to go see so-and-so “up at the funeral home” it means that so-and-so is, well, dead.
    My friend Natalie, who is as Southern as hoppin’ John with Texas Pete sprinkled all over it, was mortified to realize that she didn’t understand that for the longest time.
    “Granddaddy would say, ‘Well, I’m going to go see Bobby. He’s up at the funeral home.’ ”
    It took her years to understand that Bobby, or whomever, was in a pine box up at the funeral home and respects were being paid.
    OK, one more thing that all Southern children know, and this may be the single most important advice I can ever give a non-Southern male marrying into a Southern family: Never, ever wash your wife’s cast-iron skillet.
    Perhaps the saddest note that I have received over the years came from Julie Ann, who married a Yankee man a few years ago.
    “On Mother’s Day, I got to sleep late, which meant about ten ’til eight,” she wrote. “While I was sleeping, just my Mother’s Day luck, my husband, who never does any domestic chores whatsoever, decided to get all aim-high and decided to clean the cast-iron skillet I’d left on top of the stove.”
    Hons, when I read those words, I had to sit down. Because I knew what was coming.
    “This was the cast-iron skillet that I got from my great-aunt Connie Jo for my wedding shower ten years ago. It has been lovingly seasoned over the past ten years, having fried enough bacon to clog the arteries of the entire state of Texas. It has made hundreds of servings of fried okra, cornbread for countless holiday meals, gravies too numerous to mention, and our daughter and I made her very first blackberry cobbler together in this pan. It was seasoned to perfection, a gleaming black bottom that I could see my reflection in.”
    I poured myself a glass of wine to steady my nerves as I continued reading.
    “Do you know what my boneheaded Yankee husband did? He came to me, all proud, saying he ‘got my old skillet clean, you know, the one with all the crap on it.’ ”
    Julie Ann said she got a little dizzy at this point.
    “You mean my
cast-iron
skillet? The one I got for our shower? That one?”
    Her duh-hubby just grinned, stupid and proud. “That’s the one! It took more than an hour, but I got it clean!”
    He had assaulted her skillet with a Chore Boy scrubbing pad, stripping off nearly ten years of perfect seasoning.
    Julie Ann began to cry, the great heaving sobs of a Southern woman who has married an ignoramus. He brightened and offered to buy her a new skillet.
    And that sums up how Southerners view life and love, y’all. New is not better. Shiny is