"Finding my R's"

This creative writing piece deals with my transition moving from the northeastern United States down to South Carolina. I wanted to capture the cultural differences of both places.

Finding My R's

                        "Richhiddd!"  yelled my mom from the kitchen.  "Richhiddd it’s time to go.  We gotta get in the cahh, we’re already way behind schedule I knew I shouldn’t ahf let youah fahthah (father) do the lahst check!”

            My twelve year old self hurried down the stairs of our sky blue Victorian for the last time.  Our family had been packing up the house for our move to South Carolina for a little over a week.  Little by little, what had been our home for 11 years was stripped clean of all its garnishing’s right down to the last tooth pick.  My Dad, ever-so careful, took extra precaution to pack everything up just right.  A lot of people would confuse my Dad’s attention to detail with being anal.  Everything that he did in preparation for our big move was so precise and orderly that every box packed was both labeled and lined with bubble wrap.  Dad even bubble wrapped the inside of the boxes that contained nothing but books, that’s just the way he did things.  I attribute his orderly agenda to the fact that his father was a drill sergeant on Paris Island for 20 years. 

   When the movers arrived, Dad greeted them with a barrage of instructions regarding how everything was to be moved.  I could tell just by the way he talked to the men that would be in charge of taking care of our possessions that he didn’t trust them at all.

I think one of the things he said right before we hit the road was "I sweah to Gahd if these movahs break anything I'm gonna have some f****n wahds (words) for 'em."                      

Most South Carolinians would consider my parents to be your prototypical Yankees.  They're loud, they speak their mind, and they chew up the English language so hard you'd think they'd come right out of an apartment in South Boston.  Their issues with the English language stem from the fact that my Mom was raised on Long Island, and my Dad in Rhode Island.  My mom is predominately German and Austrian, easy to tell since she has long blonde hair, fair skin, and bright blue eyes.  My dad is half Italian and half Armenian, which is where I get my thick eyebrows and hair.  I should also give him credit for passing down my athleticism because I got absolutely none of it from my Mom.  Dad stands at 6’2” and has fair skin and jet black hair; he looks like a stereotypical Italian greaser and has a persona that I can only compare to Robert De Niro.  I say this because he’s always very organized, serious, and he likes to be in control.  He has a very unique Yankee accent.  To describe it I’d say it’s a mix between Ben Affleck and De Niro.  Growing up in Rhode Island being raised by my parents, combined with being surrounded by people who spoke just like them resulted in my inheritance of a pretty thick northern accent.

            "Mahm wheh's my Gameboy?” I asked my Mom.  “I'm not gonna sit 13 houhas in the cahh without my Gameboy." I said as we walked out the door of 25 Buxton Drive for the last time.

            "I put it in the cahh like you asked me to do earliah" she responded with her classic you’re-getting-on-my-nerves tone.

            My dad was the last person to come out of the house as usual, probably making sure every door was locked before we left.  Nick, my younger brother, Mom and I were standing out on the perfectly green grass where my dad had spent countless hours and springs busting his a*s to make it look nice for the summer.  After his final check of the empty house was complete, Dad joined us on the grass.  I remember the four of us just staring at the house in silence for a few seconds, reminiscing on all the memories that we had shared inside.  Being a twelve year old adolescent at the time, I wasn't really big on thinking critically, but at that moment I recognized that this was the house I spent my childhood in, and were leaving it behind us forever.

            Thirteen hours and several sets of AA batteries for my Gameboy later, we arrived in our new home state.  It was dark as we drove into the quiet little town of Lake Wylie, South Carolina for the first time.  The small town didn’t have any street lights back then and that made it tough to recognize the the surroundings of my new town.  My parents had come down months before to scout out an apartment complex that we would live in for a little over a year while our new house was being built, finally settling on a place called "The Village at Lake Wylie." The Village was a large apartment complex less than a mile from the neighborhood that we would eventually move into.  They decided on The Village when they were driving down the road and saw a blue street sign that read Cranston Way, Cranston being the name of the town we were from in Rhode Island.  When my parents asked why the street was named Cranston, the manager told them that the founder of the apartment complex was from Rhode Island.  Hearing this probably made their decision to sign the lease much easier.  After unpacking our car and getting into our apartment, the four of us blew up our air mattresses and fell into a deep sleep, wondering what the following days would bring.

            "Ricchiddd, Riccchidddd, wake ahp (up) we have a long day ahead!” yelled Mom in my ear for the second day in a row.  I slept like a baby on the air mattress in the living room of our apartment, something that would only happen if I was dead tired.  After taking a shower in the new apartment for the first time and putting so much gel in my hair that it looked as rigid as a doll, I was ready for the day.  First, the movers came and unloaded some of our stuff from the moving truck, Dad inspecting every box trying desprately to find an excuse to have some "wahds" for them.  Our temporary apartment was too small to fit everything we brought from home so we all piled back into the car and followed the moving truck a few miles down the road to our storage site in North Carolina.

            We got on the road to the storage site, and against Mom's better judgment Dad decided to follow behind the giant moving truck.  I'll never forget the smell that it sent through the A/C vents:  I thought we were going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.  There were many foreign sites to look at from the windows of our 2002 Ford Taurus.  Compared to our town in Rhode Island, Lake Wylie was clean and seemed to be uninhabited by any of the stereotypical southerners that I thought I’d see.  As a twelve year old boy from Rhode Island, I had imagined the south as an alien world full of trailer parks and toothless rednecks that were living years behind the rest of the country.  On that first drive through our new town I realized that I had a lot to learn about what the south was really all about.  I was mostly surprised to find that the people I saw walking the streets didn’t wear overalls or had missing teeth, nor did they sport confederate flags in front of their houses; they were normal people dressed in normal clothes not unlike that of the dress up north.  My parents were surprised by things on the way to the storage site as well, but didn’t particularly share the same concerns as their son

"Wow Grahnt, look at those gas prices!"  My mom said. 

"Yeah, thahts why we moved down heah.  A dollah thirty two, that’s fifty cents cheapah than up Nawth right now," Dad said with a look of satisfaction I couldn’t explain.  I honestly didn’t understand or care about the difference in gas prices; I was too preoccupied taking in the sites of my new home.

In order to get to North Carolina from The Village, we had to cross over the newly constructed Buster Boyd Bridge which went across Lake Wylie.  This was the first time Nick or I had seen the lake which we would be living on during the day.  Being from Rhode Island where everything is a little smaller, I thought that Lake Wylie was enormous.  I saw at least three dozen boats as we passed over the bridge; fishing boats, cigarette boats, inboards, outboards, sail boats, jet skis, and probably more.  Seeing all the activity on the lake that first day helped me to get over any homesickness I had been feeling. 

"Nyce view huh boys?"  Mom asked us as we got onto the Buster Boyd. 

"Yeah it’s a wicked cool view, but it's so brown," I said, taking in the view.

             I quickly found out that the lake being brown was a running joke around town.  On our first few nights in town we went out to eat almost every night because my parents were too busy setting up the apartment to bother cooking or even to go grocery shopping.  On one of our nights going out, we decided to try out the local hibachi grill “Sasaki” right down the road from our apartment complex.  The place is small but it has a lot of character.  The chef who was serving us gave each of us two sauces, one brown and one tan.

“Here you go, some Lake Wylie wahtah,” he said with some kind of Asian accent as he placed the brown sauce in front of me.

            That was the first time that I heard someone poke fun at the brownness of the lake and it certainly wasn’t the last.  ESPN commentators that covered the Bass Masters tournament for the years that they held it on the lake wasted no time commenting on the lakes brown tint.  Family members from up north that would visit often asked if the lake was safe to swim in, or if they would get sick from it.  I used to laugh at people that would come down and refuse to swim in the lake because it looked “dirty.”  After a few years living on the lake, its brownness would become as normal to me as saying ya’ll.

            "I sweah I'm gonna geht skin cancah in one houah in this heat," my dad said to my mom as he and one of the movers moved a bed frame into the storage unit.  "Maria! boys!  Put ohn some sunscreen, all this sun isn't good for you!"  He continued, tucking the bed frame away. 

My dad is a walking cancer prevention guide, always throwing out random facts about what causes it and how we can “easily prevent it” if we live smart. The man always makes my mom carry sunscreen in her bag just to be safe.  I always got kind of embarrassed when he asked me "Richidd, you got yah sunscreen ohn?  You don't want to get Skin cancah do you?"  I would always put up some kind of a fight when he’d do things like this, but as hard as I tried (and trust me I did) I couldn't get mad at my Dad for doing his job as a father.

            "You guiys want ah sowda (soda)?" My Mom asked as we got in the car to go to our next stop.  Nick and I both nod while Dad shook his head, buried in the morning paper.  He was probably reading about the war in Iraq, as he had almost every day since it had started back in March.  Being a firm republican, he would always hope to find an article saying that we found W.M.D's (weapons of mass destruction), which would have justified the presence of our troops being over there.  Mom returned to the car and handed Nick and me…. not two sodas.  Rather than sodas, she handed us two cups filled with ice and some foreign brown liquid.  Nick and I both gave each other a what-the-f**k-is-this look, and then stared from each other back to the foreign liquid that was in our cups. 

"Um, Mahm can you tell me what this is?  I don't think this is soda," I said. 

"It’s all they had inside the stawrage office; the man told me its tea.  You boys like tea," she said reassuringly with a fake smile. 

Normally I would've told my Mom I didn't want it, but it was pushing 100 degrees outside, leaving this strange new drink as my only option.  So with one more shaky look at my brother, I raised the cup to my mouth.  Slowly, I tilted it back and let the tea into my mouth.  The liquid washed over my taste buds and caressed them with the sweetness I would come to know and love.  Life would never be the same.  From that point onward, I immersed myself in southern culture and welcomed the changes that were to come.

In the coming months, I learned how to successfully live in the south.  Things were a lot different down here than they were up north.  I learned how to be patient, things moved a lot slower down here than up north.  Whether it was in line at the gas station, at the bank, or the lunch line at school, I had to be patient.  Even the slow manner in which people down here talked required patience.  While in the car with my Mom on the way to school one day, she subtly helped me to realize that people even drove slower in the south.

“Ahh you kiddin me people, the light is green, stahmp yah foot ohn the gahs and go!”  She yelled as she beeped the horn at some old looking truck.

            My mother was the slowest of our family to integrate into southern society.  She is a one speed kind of person and operates on a much higher frequency than most.  While the rest of the family was learning how to adapt to the slower speed of southern life Mom spent her time trying to teach southern people how to operate on her level.  The first time we went grocery shopping she tried to ring up her own groceries because she thought the cashier was going to slow. 

            For the most part, I didn’t have any trouble making friends at school and was pleasantly surprised as how quickly I made them.  But in saying that, I have to say that the first week of school was no picnic.  Right from the first attendance check, I was labeled as a Yankee by my classmates.  I had to go through the same questions for the first few days of school:  where are you from?  Why do you talk so funny?  Do you like living down here?  What’s the deal with your hair?  I didn’t mind answering the questions, but having to answer them over and over again grew tiresome.  After a few days I started to wish that I had a southern accent so I wouldn’t be labeled a Yankee and tried to talk like my classmates.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was no way to hide my accent, no matter how hard I tried.   I wasn’t too sad about that because I actually learned that the southern girls liked my accent, and I definitely used that to my advantage. 

“Hey youah’ll lets play soume footbauhll,” I said to my classmates with a terrible imitation of a southern accent.

“Listen ta Yankee over here tryin’ ah say ya’ll,” laughed my homegrown southern classmate Zach.  “Richidd, how many time do I have ta tell you, don’t try tou imitate us.  Now go sit in the cahh,” Zach said, pretty accurately mocking my accent.

            This was, in a nutshell, my relationship with many of my classmates in seventh grade.  I would pick on them over the Civil War (which for some reason they actually got offended by), and they’d pick on me for being a “Damn Yankee.”  Zach was one of my first friends when I moved down, and he’s still one of my friends today.  Zach’s the kind of guy that doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of him and I think that’s why we became such close friends.  During the first few months of my “Southern Education,” Zach taught me a lot about the way things in the south worked and how to fit in.  He introduced me to a lot of his friends, who in-turn became my friends.  Being around all of these new southern people actually made me proud to be from up north because it helped me to stand out from everyone else.  I didn’t try to fake a southern accent anymore because it was pointless.  I was a Yankee, and I didn’t try to deny what I was.

            In truth, it only took me until the middle of my second year in the south to start losing my northern accent and start developing a southern one.  It came naturally since all the people I spent time with were now southern.  My friends were southern, their parents were southern, my teachers were southern; everyone and everything around me being southern gradually made me into one of them. 

            After a year of living in South Carolina, my cousin Alex and his family flew down for a visit from Rhode Island.  By this time we had moved into our new house and were settled in nicely.  The visitors arrived and to my surprise I thought that they talked with funny accents.  I mean, I still lived with my parents who still had their accents turned all the way up but it had been a while since I had heard anyone else talk who had a northern accent.  It didn’t take long for my cousin Alex to pick up on my southern accent.

“So, Richidd, been down heah too long?” He asked.

“What do you mean?” I ask even though I know exactly what he’s talking about.

“Yah goht a nice drawl goin ohn is what he’s sayin Richidd,” answered Alex’s brother Tom, who has one of the thickest northern accents I’ve ever heard.

            After the nice little discussion about my accent, we proceeded to play some pool in the basement.  Not too long after we started playing Zach showed up and joined in on the fun. 

“Richard, did you see the new Larry the Cable Guy standup last night?  It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen!” Zach said, drawing smirks from Alex and Tom.

“Richidd youh don’t really wahtch thaht s**t do youh?” Asked Tom laughing.  By this point Tom had downed a few beers, and when this happens his already overwhelming northern accent turns into an almost unrecognizable form of English.

“What the hell’d he just say?” Zach sarcastically asked me, pretending to not understand Tom’s question.

“Youh bettah watch it kid,” Said Tom, “I down’t cahah (care) whoh you ahh, down’t disrespect mahy accent.”

“Well you’re in the Bible Belt now sonny so don’t you go disrespecting Larry the Cable Guy.  That man is funnier than any damn Yankee comedian.” Zach fired back.

            The argument continued and escalated over the course of about 20 minutes to the point that I thought the second Civil War was going to break out.  I decided that it was in everyone’s best interest to separate my northern cousins from my southern friend, so I made Zach go home.  Zach wasn’t the only friend that my cousins would have problems with.  Over the course of a few years, my cousins, particularly Alex, successfully got most of my friends to dislike them and in turn initially dislike most of my other friend from up north that I introduced them to.

                        Eight years after we left Rhode Island for South Carolina, nothing had changed, but so had everything.  Eight years of exploring Lake Wylie.  Eight years of sweet tea.  Seven years of living in our house on 936 Thorn Ridge Lane.  Six years since the rest of the family started following our example to make the move down South.  Five years of driving my 2001 silver Pontiac Grand Prix.  Five years since I got peer pressured by my new group of friends to quit swimming and join the football team.  Four year since I won the starting tight end job and helped the Clover High School varsity football team win its first state championship.  Three years since I started at the University of South Carolina.  And finally, zero years have passed since my parents lost their Yankee accent.

                        My parents lived up North for 35 years before moving down here, so their accents stuck with them like gum on a shoe.  On the other hand, being so young when we moved down here in 2003, it took Nick and me a little over a year to lose our accents.  I would say that I picked up southern lingo pretty quickly but that was because of my failed attempt to hide my Yankee accent.  After realizing that I couldn’t hide my accent I decided that the best thing to do would be to embrace the culture that I came from while learning the southern culture.  My favorite thing about the move my family made from Rhode Island was being made fun of.  At first I obviously didn’t like it; they would say things like “damn Yankee,” and “go back to Yankee town.”  It was only after I decided to embrace where I came from that I enjoyed the attempted insults.  The reason I found it amusing was because no matter what they would say to me, I would just retort with “scawhbaud” (scoreboard.  I said this referring to the North winning the Civil war).  I really enjoyed that fact that it made my southern classmates and new friends upset.  It only took a few months before the insults about my accent faded and I made some great friends that I still keep in touch with today. 

When my parents decided that we were moving to South Carolina, I didn’t know what to think.  My perception of the South was that it consisted of a bunch of trailer parks inhabited by a bunch of sunburnt people, and that’s the honest truth.  Having lived in the South for eight years and experienced southern culture in almost every possible way, I can’t imagine my life in any other way.  Had we not moved, my R’s would’ve probably been lost forever.

Reviews

[casadejones]

I enjoyed reading your short story. I could relate to moving cross country, moving to a southern state, and having close ones (in my case, a husband) with the famous Boston accent. No R's, indeed!

I found the story was a little long/repetitive at the end (maybe the last couple of paragraphs). I wonder if you could eventually flesh those paragraphs out into a chapter if you ever make this into a book or collection of short stories?

Thanks for sharing this story! Good fun.

[Peter Regal Whittam]

An enjoyable story, and the accented dialogues were fun to read. A couple of typos and spelling errors here and there, nothing too major.

There's one thing, though. "A lot of people would confuse my Dad’s attention to detail with being anal." Being anal? Forgive me if I'm being thick, but are you sure that's what it's supposed to be? If so, what exactly does that mean?