Here’s something fun for us to noodle on over the weekend. Go to the Where I’d Live website and rate the states. Above, my own results. I’ve lived in New York, DC, Pennsylvania, and loved my time there. As a young man, I would have been open to living in most states. But at this point in my life, pushing 60, I only really want to be in the South, which is my culture.
Funny how that works. I do love Southern culture, and hate parts of it too; this is normal for anybody. But for me, it’s mostly about feeling at home in a place. I went to the Publix a couple of days ago, and as I was looking over products on one aisle, I overheard two adults talking to a teenage girl. The girl was polite and respectful, and said, “Yes sir” and “No sir” to her interlocutor. It’s a tiny thing, I know, but to native Southerners, it conveys an entire worldview — a hierarchy of respect for elders.
This is NOT a class thing. When I was growing up, you could be a kid from a rich family, but if you did not observe the “sir/ma’am” convention, you were harshly judged (though only behind your back). It was worse if you came from a middle class or well-to-do family, because it was assumed that you had no excuse. A poor or working-class kid who did that — and these were very rare — would get a pitying, “Bless her heart, she wasn’t taught any better.”
Living in the South is loving it when the dear old thing behind the cash register mixes talk of “the good Lord” into her customer banter. It’s loving it when the sassy black lady at the register calls you “baby” and cracks you up with her flirty lines. It’s feeling that all is right with the world when people pull over on the side of the road out of respect when a funeral caravan is passing in the other lane. If I sat at a table with two or three other Southerners, we would have a list of hundreds of these little things by the end of an hour.
I didn’t care as much about this stuff when I was younger, but now that I’m on the downside of one’s life, gliding into vulnerability, I cherish it. I can well imagine that people who grew up in every other part of America feel the same way about their home.
For me, though, I only want to be in a part of the South where there’s some lively town or city life. I said “Maybe” for Mississippi, because Oxford is the only place I could imagine living there, though if Mississippi native Harrison Scott Key were my neighbor, I guess I could live just about anywhere in that state. I gave “Arkansas” a maybe, because I just don’t know enough about the town-and-country possibilities there. Florida got a “maybe” because I lived in south Florida from 1995-98, and while it had its charms (Cuban food! Cuban music!), it’s not the South, at all. (For me, the ratio of titty bars to bookstores in South Florida was not to my taste.) I understand that the Panhandle is very much the South, culturally speaking, but I don’t really know enough about it to be sure.
West Virginia got a “probably not” because it’s likely too rural for my tastes, and I need a good airport nearby for the travel I do. And Maryland? Far western Maryland, possibly, but not Baltimore or the DC suburbs, which is what “Maryland” is in my imagination. Enlighten me, Marylanders.
To me, the Rocky Mountains and northern California are far more beautiful than anywhere in the South … but no Southerners live there, so I’d miss the culture. The climate is glorious in southern California, but I am a total alien there.
I have no interest at all in any desert region. Some people find the starkness of the landscape beautiful, but not me. Funny thing: my ex-wife grew up in Dallas, and was accustomed to big horizons. We moved to NYC shortly after we were married, and for the first few months, she would have to walk to the end of our street (E. 58th) to the bank of the East River, to re-orient herself; feeling enclosed by skyscrapers made her feel sick.
We moved from NYC to Dallas in 2003, and lived there until early 2010. When we would drive down to Louisiana to visit my family, I felt that I could breathe once we reached the Piney Woods of East Texas, because I felt safe within the enclosure of trees, like I had grown up with in Louisiana. Conversely, on the way back, she would have the same sense of relaxation once we left the Piney Woods, headed west, and she was back on the plains.
“I hate the plains,” I would say. “There’s nowhere to hide when the tornado comes.”
“But,” she would reply, “you can see the tornado coming a long way off.”
There are entire worldviews hidden inside those replies.
My five years in New York City was probably the happiest time in my life. It’s a great place to be young, childless, and newly married — especially with Rudy Giuliani running things. But we knew it couldn’t last. We wanted kids, and there was no way we would ever be able to afford them, and to live in the neighborhoods we loved. Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was still affordable back then on a journalist’s salary. I’m sure that hasn’t been the case for many years now. I used to think NYC is a great place for people young enough to absorb the stress of living there, and therefore to be able to enjoy its bounties, or old people with enough money to insulate themselves from the stresses, and dwell on the good parts.
I am neither young nor rich, and the Golden Years of Giuliani are long past. But I’m so grateful I had NYC when I did.
DC was also a great place for a young journalist interested in politics to land in the 1990s, despite its grotesque murder rate. Things got much better there during the 2000s on that front. I only liked the older neighborhoods — Capitol Hill, Georgetown — and found the cityscape as a whole utterly charmless. Today, though, when I visit the nation’s capital, it feels sinister and soulless, and I can’t wait to leave.
I’ve driven through parts of New England, and find them so beautiful. But I don’t think I could bear to live with the flintiness of New Englanders. An editor of mine who grew up in New Hampshire told me once that when, as a child, her family would drive down to visit kinfolks in Georgia, it was a stressful occasion for both her and her cousins. Neither could understand the other — not in terms of accent, but just in terms of basic orientation towards the world.
I kind of feel that way about Scandinavian countries. I really have enjoyed my visits there, and Norway has some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen. I’ve had nothing but friendly encounters with Scandinavians. Still, I’m just too culturally Southern — even in a European sense (Latin-oriented) — to fit in permanently. I’d rather live in a Fellini film than a Bergman one.
In truth, the American city where I would probably fit in the most is New Orleans. So why didn’t I settle there when I returned from Europe? The main answer is crime. At my age, I’m just much less willing to tolerate living in a high-crime locale for the sake of the good things it has to offer. And yeah, the climate is awful, but that’s the South for you. Sacrifices must be made. It will be interesting to live through fall and winter here in Birmingham, the upper South, to see what it’s like.
Oh, and I put “absolutely” for Louisiana, but if only north Louisiana was possible, then that would be a hard no. I lived there (Natchitoches) for my last two years of high school, and the people were really lovely. But it’s culturally quite Baptist, which … ain’t my way. Funny, so is Alabama … yet it’s different, in ways I can feel, but can’t yet articulate. Maybe it’s just that I live in a big city. Shreveport, the only city of size in north Louisiana, is not my groove.
I’ve been to Boston a few times, and one of the things I love about it is that one has a strong sense of place there. I love Yankees being Yankees (I’m serious! Be proud of where you’re from!) — but I’m not a Yankee, and would not fit in there in the slightest. But a great food town!
The Midwest holds no appeal to me. I can’t think of a single bad thing to say about it, but having grown up in south Louisiana, it all seems so … dull. Most Midwesterners I’ve met have sterling character, but there’s nothing rascally about them (well, Jerry Lundegaard, but he’s an aberration). I can’t imagine that region producing Elvis Presley or Louis Armstrong, or food that tastes like much of anything. Sorry, y’all — but then, you Midwestern tourists think our food is way too spicy.
The Pacific Northwest? Well, aside from the ever-present Sasquatch Menace, it’s just way, way too progressive for me, there’s not much Christianity afoot, and the informality of people from that region is disconcerting to this Southerner. I’d love to visit, but couldn’t live there.
What about you? I wish you could post images in the comments section, because I would love to see y’all’s maps. If you do the test, though, please write about your results, and any commentary you care to add.
I emphasize that my “never” list above — which takes in most states — is not a general judgment on those states, but rather a judgment on where I, a 59-year-old Southern man, would not be interested in living these days. I won’t be in the least offended by anybody who chooses “never” for the Southern states. They aren’t for everybody, and that’s fine! I almost always love being with people who are great partisans of where they live (I say “almost,” because I am not fond of people whose love of their own place manifests as boasting, and putting down others). Texans, for example, can be almost comic in their state pride, but I find it pleasing, because they have such a strong sense of place — and they are welcoming.
In his great history of how the 1927 flood changed America, John Barry writes that the discovery of oil in the Gulf of Mexico made New Orleans — then one of America’s leading cities — a headquarters for the new oil companies. But the closed, aristocratic attitudes of New Orleans high society would not allow oil executives and their wives into their circles. So they all decamped for Houston, which had none of the charm and culture of New Orleans, but it was not snobby, and welcomed newcomers. Barry says New Orleans went into permanent decline after that, while Houston boomed.
The thing is, what draws tourists to New Orleans are the cultural products of its aristocratic past (some of which still lingers). But, per Barry, it’s also what doomed the city to genteel poverty, at least compared to Houston. I would not want New Orleans to be Houston, heaven knows, but there was a very big economic cost to New Orleans maintaining its particularity.
I love talking about this stuff. I’m eager to read the comments thread. For me, taking the test was a surprising thing, because it forced me to recognize how much less open I am in terms of places I’d be open to living in than I was as a young man. It’s probably the most obvious thing in the world, but it was news to me.
