I have hit upon this before, and am still a novice at this. I know that strong differences exist in other countries, also. I am not talking about the rural folks vs. the city guys. I am talking about the bigger stuff. In some countries, there are vestiges from tribal differences, of course. In many countries the geography and weather creates totally different civilizations. And we all know that national boundaries have often been imposed recently and arbitrarily by outside forces. Taking so many things into consideration and bringing it down to my personal experience and localities, I have a few stories.
I think my first big experience of this was when I went to Nantucket Island the summer after my senior year in high school. That was 1962. Nantucket still had great sprawling wooden hotels with rocking chairs on the ocean side. Whole families came for long stays and the hotels that year were mostly staffed by college kids from private colleges in the south. The staff all stayed in big dorms at the hotel.
I worked in a restaurant and rented a room in a woman's boarding house. The owners had inherited the house but were still in grad school so they rented rooms out for the summer. It cost me $12 a week. Can you believe it? You can't get a cocktail on Nantucket for $12 these days. The thing is the hotel kids threw massive all night beach parties inviting us all.
Even at boarding school I had never met a group like the southern women. At my school, students came from all over the world so they weren't like a cluster from one place. The girls that summer in Nantucket baffled me. They were so pretty and their clothes and makeup all matched and they had these darling drawls and they flirted with everything. Even a door nob wasn't immune. They acted as though the boys were all brilliant and desirable and special. I had never seen anything like it. We Yankees dressed conservatively or shabby. An old pair of cut off jeans had higher value than a cute outfit from a cute store. The boys were mostly behind us developmentally and certainly weren't all smart. Ugh.
I made the mistake of thinking the girls were collectively pretty dumb. It didn't turn out to be the case at all. My first glimpse of this was the way they talked when the men weren't around. They gossiped up a storm and trashed anyone who wasn't there, man or woman. The accents diminished. The brains showed and the calculating and manipulating was a shock to me. I am one of those people who says what I mean and mean what I say. We might have been speaking a different language.
But my respect for the southern girls grew as I saw their preternatural skills at organizing parties and getting away with murder. (Not really) But those big eyes and syrupy voices went a long was towards smoothing things off with the local police when the parties got too wild. A long way. I did have the feeling that I could learn from them, but I definitely concluded that for me, it all seemed like too much work for too little benefit. They made me realize that I would never join a sorority, ever.
A more recent eye opener has been the East Coast thing I grew up with that you down play you efforts and achievements and the Boston tradition of teasing everyone pretty much all of the time. People out on the other coast don't 'get' us in this regard. I can tell a fellow Yankee instantly by making an off the cuff remark and watching how it is taken. We never grew up admitting that we studied hard for a test or practiced hard for a tennis match. "I puttered a bit yesterday." was pretty much as far as we would go. Out here that doesn't fly.
I had a friend who learned this the hard way in an important job interview. "I mess around a bit with computers." was his approach. The Washington man who was hiring didn't 'get' that he was saying he had a big personal resume of achievements in programing. Oops.
My father had two attitudes that never changed. He didn't like show offs and he didn't like braggers. If he had played and won the fabulous men's finals at Wimbledon this morning, he might have said, "I had a pretty good game of tennis today."
Sometimes it amazes me that we even have a country that more or less holds together. Don't get me started on Texas.
No comments:
Post a Comment