A Southern stampede of work boots, blue-jeans, sweatshirts, and baseball caps promoting fertilizer to concrete to local high schools, for sausage and gravy biscuit breakfasts with coffee as I make my rounds between Mickey D’s and the big H each morning between 6:30 and 8:00.
While this group of typically male workers, file in and out, another group (also males) congregate in the back of each one of these establishments, also on their theoretical way to work, to share tales of what it was like to work for a variety of different employers for 30 to 40 years. With their wrinkled friends they drink free coffee refills, passing along a better part of their mornings each day with nothing better to do.
The next onslaught (not so ferocious), are the working class females, prim and proper, ordering coffees and teas and an occasional frappe or two, along with their sausage biscuits and hash browns. Those that aren’t working are next with their casual appearance attitudes wearing tennis shoes and nicely combed hair and always carrying folded newspapers, as if to say “this is my time today.” Intermixed are the high school students, both males and females, white collar workers, and secretaries sent by their bosses to pick up orders for the “soon to be starting” meetings.
Good morning America, this is how we do it in the South; this is our ritual, a Southern tradition, a slow start to the day and a slow start for work to begin, but a gentle pace that all (even the carpetbaggers) can easily follow and have learned to follow quite well as they have infiltrated our neighborhoods, schools, and local businesses.
But, this is not about Northern migration to the South but about starting the morning.
How do you start your morning?
How do you begin the day?
Are you thankful for another day above ground, like you should be; or, do you take these days that you and the rest of us have been give for granted? Perhaps, this is just the wisdom of age or a survivor of serious health concerns . . . who knows? But, each day should be a special day, a day where we must learn to give and not simply take or receive.
While we mourn the loss of our jobs and income and in some cases, the loss of our homes and self-esteem, we have brothers and sisters in other parts of the world who are much, much poorer than we are, who begin each day with the need to share what little they have with those who have even less than they do.
What illness posses them that would cause they to feel that way, I wonder?
And yes, even though we live in different countries, speak different languages, and have ideologies in which we believe and under which we live, we are all cut from the same cloth: the human race.
In a way, I wish I could be like Forrest Gump and say, “and that is all I want to say about that!” But, that is not my nature, as my wife will attest. I want to go on and on and on about something in which I believe strongly, as is the case here.
Do we hate each other so much that we would want to kill ourselves off so that the only thing left to hate is life itself?
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OR, is it just my imagination because I have not
had my second cup of coffee yet . . . I wonder? |
Let us know how you spend your mornings . . .
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