Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Wow, you're from the south...

After reading Merlin's post about smalltowning, I guess he invented a word, for some reason it reminded me about an incident my dad told us about when he and mom went to Florida one year.

Merlin mentioned Florida and I think I know the reason why Merlin has discovered that it is indeed a small world and that kind of sparked this memory.

The reason is because like himself, none of the doctors he's meeting right now probably didn't get their number one choice of places to spend their residency time. They ended up in South Carolina. So his little psychiatric coffee clatch he's visiting is kind of like 90% of the population of Florida. None of them are actually from South Carolina, they migrated there for some reason or another.

Having said that, a few years ago my mother and father went to Florida on business. Not dad's business, but mom's business. He just goes to see the pelicans. Anyway, he told a story one time about going into a convenient store one time to pick up a drink or something.

He gets what he needs and I guess he probably asked the clerk for a pack of cigarettes and showed off his glowing Kentucky accent. Now I realize that we all have a southern accent because that's just how it is. I can even tell when mine is getting a little out of hand sometimes. It also kind of depends on the company I'm around.

The southern accent can be really fun to use sometimes too. Especially when you are up north and people automatically assume that you dropped out of high school and thought you would head to the big city and ended up at the Pizza Hut in Utica, New York.

So following dad's sparkling audition of his southern accent the clerk looks at him and says, "Wow, your from the south."

So dad looks back at the convenient store clerk, in Orlando, Florida mind you, and says, "Where do you think you are?" You can get much more "south" than Florida. Any further south is a totally different accent all together.

But then again, like all of Merlin's shrinking buddies, no one you see in Florida is actually from Florida.

1 comment:

my_merlin77 said...

There is indeed something to the Florida moving to South Carolina. My group of six people are all little different than the norm. Three are from SC, I am from KY, one guy went to med school in KY but is from Pittsburgh, and the last one is originally from India and is changing from something else to psychiatry.