by Jim Thomason

Created on: January 21, 2009

My dad's people are all Southern born and Southern bred. They are a self-sufficient lot, experienced in the rural arts of canning, farming, hunting, and making do with what is at hand. My mother's relatives are city dwellers, familiar with tenement living, bustling streets, and dealing with the dog what ate the other dog in their fast-paced, competitive world.

Theirs was a marriage of contradiction, a civil union amongst opposing cultures, and occasionally culture shock would electrify our family and zap a member like a wool blanket pulled from a dryer on a clear winter's day.

Johnny, my Dad's kid brother, was seventeen years old when he made the long trip North with my parents. They were going to New York, the shinning city of song and legend, to visit my mother's mom. It was my Uncles first trip to the Big Apple, and in fact, his first time north of the Mason Dixon line. He sat speechless, as the fields and macadam roads gave way to towns and interstate highways. The city was as foreign to him as the lunar surface that accepted John Glenn's first small step. Buildings towered above him, taller than the loblolly pines back home. People burst through revolving doors and joined the herds following concrete trails. Moving staircases toted folks up and down floors of stores inside stores.

Introductions were made and my uncle, to his great relief, found a soft chair in a quiet corner of the apartment where he could ponder the marvels of all he had witnessed. As northern grandma's and southern grandma's differ only by accent, mine immediately went about setting the table with food. She served up limburger, bratwurst, sauerkraut, spatzle, and Wiener schnitzel. The food confounded my uncle, especially the limburger, but he ate without protest and had several helpings of sausage.

Later that night my grandmother asked my uncle if he would take the garbage to the dumbwaiter. While he was gone, my parents and my grandma filled each other in on the latest news. A child was born to a cousin prematurely, or so they claimed, even though their first anniversary was four months away, and an elderly aunt with rheumatism was confined to bed when the bottle got low. Aunt Naomi's Hampshire hog took another blue ribbon at the state fair and her husband threatened to pop an apple in its mouth if it didnt stop rooting in his collard patch. The talk went on for an hour when my dad noticed his brother had not returned. Fearing he was lost in the big city, he headed for the door just as my uncle returned, still holding the trash.

My dad stared at the bag. "Why didn't you get rid of the trash?"

"Well," my uncle explained as he set the bag down, "I waited for an hour, but that dumb waiter never showed up."

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