didja spaik?
A few weeks ago, I went with my wife and the rest of my family up to visit my sister at her new home. She finally got herself situated, after a series of chaotic bad luck and bad decisions that followed a difficult divorce. I was sitting in the kitchen, when I noticed she had put up a sign that read “Cowgirls are like barbed wire, handle with care.” I wanted to laugh out loud as enthusiastically as I could at that one. That girl is no more a cowgirl than I am a Tibetan monk. Apparently hanging out in country music joints and listening to that pseudo-pop with a bad accent now qualifies one as a cowboy or cowgirl. We live in a culture where redneck is the new desired status, which makes me weep for both present and future. Hey, I went to the ocean a week ago, maybe I should start telling people I’m a marine biologist.
My sister thinks country is anywhere that doesn’t have an Aveda store nearby.
In 1992, the year I graduated from high school, the culture in this country underwent a seismic change. Jeff Foxworthy began making his dopey albums, and Garth Brooks released the song “Friends in Low Places”, which was the first country song I had ever heard played on mainstream radio. I thought it was god-awful. Although most of the people close to me could be considered a bit country, and I love them, I have always disliked redneck culture. My sister, always eager to be trendy, began drawing out her words more and hanging out in bars that frequented to wanna-be country boys and girls with their cowboy hats. It is hilarious to me that people are wearing cowboy hats in metro Atlanta. It makes about as much sense as me wearing a Viking helmet.
Southern culture has always been a strange thing for me to relate to anyway, and after 1992, it became more so. People would be aghast when I told them I didn’t like country music, or listening to idiots end every sentence with “you might be a redneck.” My musical taste, never well received by my fellow Southerners in the first place, became an even bigger target for ridicule.
Speaking of Southern culture, one thing about living in a small Southern town is that if you see someone you know, you are apparently bound by honor to go over to them and make a big deal out of the minor coincidence that you both happen to be in the same place at the same time.
This phenomenon I have labeled “Didja spaik?” For those of you who don’t understand the pronunciation here in the deep South, it translates in English to “Did you speak?”
My mom and dad (not my biological father, but more of a dad than he ever was) will absolutely light up upon seeing someone they know even in the most remote sense. My mom has a tough time getting around because she has MS, but she will work her way through a crowded room to “spaik” to someone she hardly knows. If they don’t see someone they know, they latch their eyes onto the door of wherever we are, eager to recognize someone who walks through. Upon arriving back at home or work or wherever, the Southern NT thing to do as part of didja spaik is to place a call to another Southern NT and discuss the day’s sightings and conversations.
Yes, I know I have thought about this an awful lot. I have to do something while everyone in my family leaves me at the table while they roam a restaraunt fulfilling their didja spaik obligations.
Another thing that is frustrating for a Southern small town Asperger dude is that if you do go out to eat, you can bet some NT, practicing didja spaik ettiquette, will work his or her way to where you are. They will then stand right over you as you try to enjoy your lunch and proceed to tell you the migraine-inducing details of the lives of the NT’s they know well. Small town Southerners have little sense of physical boundaries, and they will interrupt someone’s meal for quite a long time.
An importat part of the didja spaik phenomenon is that it seems NT’s feel that must end their didja spaik sessions with the phrase “y’all cumseeus.” (translation: you all come see us). The interesting thing is that the NT’s seem to assume this does not constitute an actual invitation to show up at one another’s house. Words are so beautiful in the hands of the right person, but the didja spaik culture reduces them to empty invitations, insincere compliments, and gossip.
My mom butted heads with me over my utter resistance to didja spaik for decades. Now that we have the Asperger diagnosis, she has finally stopped giving me dirty looks when I don’t want to get up from my lunch to go say hello to the woman who was my substitute teacher for three days in fourth grade. Thanks, mom. You have no idea how much exasperation it caused me growing up to be forced to do something I found so staggeringly tedious, and I appreciate you no longer expecting it out of me.
I have talked to several people from north of the Mason Dixon line, and most of them have remarked how blown away they are by the amount of food Southerners bring to one another’s homes when family members pass away. I have to agree that the whole thing seems a bit odd to me too. I understand that grieving people don’t feel like cooking, and they just paid for a funeral so they don’t want to spend money for pizza delivery, but unless you have lived in a small Southern town, you cannot comprehend the amount of food I’m talking about here. Casseroles, sandwiches, and mashed potatoes as far as the distant horizon. I have never been to someone’s home after they lost a loved one and thought “these people might actually eat all of this stuff”. I’m talking quantities that would sustain a small Central American country’s armed services for weeks.
Southern women take a lot of pride (and frequently, vanity) in how people respond to what they cook. At every family reunion or holiday gathering I have been to, every woman who prepared something keeps an anxious eye on how big a hit her wares are. My grandmother gets quite irritated if her fruit salad is not consumed with the fervent enthusiasm of a pissed-off wolverine. My wife always makes baked goodies for the Eastern Star’s bake sale fundraisers, and when her items sell early, I can count on her being in a good mood the rest of the weekend.
Southern men tend to be quite caught up in proving how manly they are. The fact that I do not like guns has been drawing rolled eyes and scowls all my life. Men who do not hunt are generally assumed to be sissies. I find that incredibly sad. I often marvel at the number of men who carry around poloroids of the last deer they slaughtered but have no pictures of their wife in their wallet.
My grandfather, meaning well I am sure, decided when I was very young I would learn to shoot a rifle and hunt like a proper Southern man. I hated the loud noise, and the heavy smell that filled the air after the thunderclap. Granddad set up some empty soda cans, and showed me how to use the sight and switch off the safety. He explained everything except that I needed to keep the butt of the rifle flush against my shoulder. Everything I had learned about holding a gun I had learned from watching movie trailers for Rambo, and so I held the gun away from my body and pulled the trigger. It kicked violently back into my left shoulder, and instantly my whole left arm burned and ached. I screamed and ran in the house, saying I never wanted to shoot a gun again.
But gosh dang it, the boy needs to learn to be a real man, so it was decided I would go along and “help” my grandfather as he went dove hunting. By “help” I really mean to be a retrieval dog with two legs instead of four. I did this on several occassions, dutifully running across the field to retrieve my grandfather’s latest feathered victim. As I grew older, I began to tire of the redneck hunters and the stench and the bugs, and even of my grandfather’s orders. I decided hunting was not for me. I don’t like feeling as though I’m picking on animals. I don’t look down on people who hunt, as long as they eat what they shoot and as long as they don’t prolong an animal’s suffering willingly for their own sadistic pleasure, but it is not for me.
When I was in fifth grade, my mother and father decided that I would take Cotillion. This consisted of learning basic ballroom dancing, how to go through a receiving line, how to ask a lady to dance, and preparing young people for a fulfilling life in the didja spaik society. I don’t know if they would’ve made me go anyway even if Asperger’s was a diagnosis then and they knew it would freak me out. I tend to think they would have. But when I found out I would have to wear a sportcoat, dress shirt, tie, and my old nemesis, the tacky khakis, I went berzerk. I tried screaming, I tried pouting, I even tried begging, but my parents meant that by God I would go learn these important things so maybe one day I could grow up and be a well-paid buttkisser and public drunk like my father.
“You have to do it for one year. I promise that after that you’ll be having such a good time dancing with all those girls and making new friends that you’ll beg us to let you go another year,” my mother told me.
Try to look at this through the yes of a fifth grader with Asperger’s syndrome. I was fully clothed in things I found hot, itchy, stiff, and generally uncomfortable and goofy looking. I was being forced to perform dance steps I had never heard of while dozens of eyes, many unfamiliar, were trained on my every move. I was repeatedly told in the receiving line that I looked like I was hiding something because I didn’t like looking people in the eye. I was instructed over and over as to how important it is to be able to make small talk and climb social ladders, activities I had already begun to suspect were pointless. And to top it off, I had to answer my mother’s endless questions about who was in my class, who their parents were, and what I had learned about making friends when I got home from the classes.
To put it mildly, I absolutely hated it, fully and completely. The Cottillion classes were at night, and the entire school day before them, I would be antsy and unable to focus on school. Worse was the disturbing realization that my parents were not making me do this just for what they perceived to be my own good. I had come to realize that the main reason I was there was that all of the parents in their social circle had enrolled their kids, and so they enrolled me so they wouldn’t stick out. Keeping up appearances.
About halfway through the year, I started to do the ballroom dancing equivalent of tanking a heavyweight boxing match. I would find ways to get in trouble, so I would be separated from the group and finally able to have some space to myself. I stopped listening to the instructors, because they would get so mad when I would take them literally when they told me to shake a leg or put a bounce in my step.. So, I did the only thing that makes sense to an Asperger when socially overwhelmed, I rebelled and shut myself off. I didn’t understand why my parents wanted me to have so many friends. I had as many friends as I felt I needed. I didn’t understand why they were so determined I would dance with girls. I liked girls just fine, and I didn’t think I needed to fox trot with them to prove that I was heterosexual. Mostly I didn’t understand why they cared if their friends made their kids do it. I was the lone Asperger, and the one thing that Cottillion did prepare me for was for the inevitability that I would always be the lone Asperger.
After the last meeting, my father came to pick me up. I sat in silence on the ride home. Upon arriving at our house, I yanked off my tie, marched to where my mother was sitting reading a book, and declared, “That’s a year. I quit.”
It is still one of the moments I am most proud of.
Tags: asperger, asperger's, i hate country music, mason dixon, neurotypicals, small town, southerners
