Welcome Back to Pennsylvania! Or Not.

  

I thought I missed the bay in Fairhope, Alabama. 

Turns out, I missed something much bigger.

I mean, I do miss the bay. I miss waking up early and walking along Mobile Bay while the sun came up. I miss the pelicans dive bombing the water, the enormous live oak trees, the beautiful cottage homes lovingly cared for. 

But mostly, I miss people saying good morning.

People walking toward me said it. People walking their dogs said it. People riding bicycles said it. Sometimes the bicycle people would come up behind me, where I couldn't even see them, and still call out, “Morning!” as they passed.

This fascinated me.

There was absolutely no social obligation to greet me. We hadn't made eye contact. I wasn't blocking the bike path. They didn't need directions. I posed no immediate threat to their safety.

And yet: “Morning!”

It was as if the mere fact that we were both awake, outdoors and participating in Tuesday was sufficient reason to acknowledge one another.

I loved it.

Then I came home to Pennsylvania.

I should probably mention that I hadn't particularly wanted to come home. For family, yes! But I'd spent several weeks traveling through the South, and somewhere along the way I had become annoyingly happy. I had energy. I was writing. I was talking to strangers. Strangers were talking to me. I was taking long walks every morning and looking forward to them.

Frankly, I was becoming unbearable.

Then I came home.

Almost immediately, I decided to look for a little part-time job. Nothing terribly ambitious. Just something to get me out of the house, around people and making a little money while I worked on my writing.

A local restaurant was hiring. Perfect! I like the restaurant. I have front-of-house experience. I applied.

The woman wrote back and explained that you had to be at least 16 to host and 18 to serve. Was I within those age requirements?

I laughed.

Oh, honey!

I wrote back enthusiastically that yes, I qualified. In fact, I had been qualifying for quite some time. A few decades, give or take. I told her I had front-of-house experience and explained that I'd been out of work for the past year because my husband had cancer, but thankfully he'd beaten it and was doing great.

And then...

She didn't write me back.

She ghosted me.

Rude!

At first I assumed she'd gotten busy. It's a restaurant. People need ketchup. Things happen.

Then I noticed they were still advertising that they were hiring.

So I sent another email. Very pleasant. Very normal. Very much Hello, fellow reasonable adult, perhaps my previous email wandered into cyberspace.

Were they still hiring? Had the positions been filled?

Nothing.

Ghosted twice. 

Rude! Rude!

At my age, I didn't expect to be ghosted by a restaurant. I thought I had aged out of this sort of thing along with tube tops and waiting three days for a man to call.

Then, because I happen to be on the restaurant's customer email list, an announcement arrived in my inbox.

They were hiring!

Well, apparently they just weren't hiring me.

The email went on to talk about how they hire high-school students and give young people their first work experience.

And that's when something clicked.

I'd been going to this restaurant for years. I'd noticed that the staff was young, but I'd never really thought about it. The owner works there, along with his sister and her husband. Other than those three adults, everyone I've ever seen working there has been a kid.

It never bothered me. Why would it? Teenagers need jobs. Somebody has to teach them how to carry six glasses without requiring an insurance adjuster.

But suddenly I wondered.

Had I enthusiastically aged myself right out of a job interview?

I don't know.

Maybe my age had absolutely nothing to do with it. Maybe both of my emails were accidentally swallowed by the same unusually selective spam filter. Maybe there was another perfectly reasonable explanation.

But the timing was certainly interesting.

And standing there, freshly returned from weeks in the South, reading yet another announcement that this restaurant was hiring, I felt my optimism deflate just a little.

Welcome back to Pennsylvania. 

The bay isn’t the only thing I miss about Fairhope. 

I missed being welcomed.

Not in some grand way. Nobody in Alabama was waiting at the city limits with a sash and a fruit basket.

It was tiny things.

“Welcome in!”

“Morning!”

“How are you today?”

A wave.

A cashier who talked to you.

A stranger who acted as though noticing another human being wasn't an unreasonable demand on her afternoon.

Those things seem ridiculously small until you spend several weeks receiving them all day long. Then you go somewhere they happen less frequently and realize you've been living on tiny doses of human connection without even knowing it.

Three seconds here. Five seconds there.

Little droplets of belonging.

We spend an enormous amount of time deciding where to live based on property taxes, home prices, school districts, commute times and whether there's a Costco within twenty minutes. We discuss climate in terms of average rainfall and January temperatures.

But I'm beginning to think places have another kind of climate.

An emotional one.

Do people look at each other? Do strangers talk? Does someone hold the door? Does the cashier chat with you? Does a person riding a bicycle bother saying good morning to a woman who can't even see her?

Does ordinary life feel warm?

I've always believed belonging is one of our basic human drives. What I hadn't realized was how much belonging can be delivered in three-second increments.

I still live in Pennsylvania.

For now.

And I suppose I have two choices. I can spend my time complaining that people here don't say good morning enough, which would make me delightful company, or I can start saying it myself.

So I will.

I'll say good morning. I'll compliment somebody's flowers. I'll talk to the cashier. I'll wave at strangers.

Some Pennsylvanian may eventually report me to the township.

That's a risk I'm willing to take.

Because maybe I brought something home from Alabama besides photographs, an alarming credit-card bill and an unhealthy obsession with Fairhope real estate.

Maybe I learned that until I can live in the kind of place I want to live, I can at least be the kind of person I loved encountering there.

So tomorrow morning, I'll go for a walk.

If I pass you, don't panic.

I'm probably just going to say good morning.

The Truth About Belonging

 

We say we love truth tellers. We don't. Not really.

We love the movie version — the whistleblower who wins in the end, vindicated, applauded, everyone suddenly pretending they were on her side all along. But the real truth tellers? The ones who spoke up and lost friends, lost jobs, lost their place at the table? We look away. Not because we don’t believe them, but because the media or the people who are “in charge” do not want the real truth out there. The truth tellers are painted as difficult. A little crazy. A tinge unhinged.  

I know this story. I've been living it since I was a freshman in a very small Midwestern Catholic school. My best friend was having an affair with a teacher — a married man with children, a family friend of their family. When her parents found the letters, they came to me. They already knew. They just needed me to say it out loud. So I did. They cried. I cried. 

Mr. Zick was made to resign. Quietly. He moved not too far away and became a basketball coach and teacher at another school. No charges. No consequences. Just a fresh start down the road. I told the truth and the whole institution turned on me. Not so much my best friend, because she did not squeal on him, I did. Students were mad at me. The gym teacher/football coach was mad at me, and even called me into his office to tell me that she wasn’t his first affair and named girls I knew who had graduated. 

The lesson was clear: belonging has a price, and the price is silence. 

And here's the thing…I want to belong. Most of us do. Belonging isn't weakness. It's human. It's wired into us from the days when being cast out of the tribe meant you didn't survive. We want to be liked. We want to fit in. We want someone to save us a seat.

But what happens when fitting in means shutting up? When belonging has a price tag and the price is your silence?

I've wrestled with that my whole life. The truth-teller part of me — the part I think I was just born with — keeps opening my mouth. And the belonging part of me tells me to be silent. 

Up North — and I say this having lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania since the 1900’s (haha, late 1900’s) — people want to figure you out immediately. What's your politics? What's your stance? Which team are you on? They sniff around for your tribal affiliation before they decide whether to let you in. It's exhausting. It's cold. If you don’t check this box, and this box, and the people claiming to be the most tolerant were the least.

Then I came on this seeking Southern Charm book tour. 

Down here, something different happens. People have manners. They take pride in themselves — not in a fussy way, but in a "I'm going to change out of my pajamas into real clothes before I  leave the house" way. They look you in the eye. They smile. They say hello. They ask how you’re day is going, and they wait for an answer. 

And they don't lead with politics. They don't open with ideology. The old adage still holds in the places

I've visited — you don't talk politics, sex, or religion at the dinner table. Not because people don't have opinions. Because hospitality comes first. Because making someone feel welcome matters more than winning an argument.

Sure, they might ask what church you go to. But as it was explained to me by a gentleman in the Book Cellar in Fairhope (which is a little bar attached to the Page and Palette bookstore) it's not about judging you. It's about making you comfortable. It's about saying, "If church is your thing, here's a good one nearby. We want you to feel at home."

And if you say your church is the moon and the stars, the Pelicans and the sea or if you say you're still figuring it out? They don't flinch. They don't recoil. They open their arms anyway.

That's the difference. That's what my life in Pennsylvania didn't give me and one month in visiting the South did. 

On history tours in Charleston and Beaufort, I was reminded of the history I’d learned but have forgotten…especially in the divisiveness of modern day; the Founders who signed the Declaration of Independence— they lost everything. Their wealth. Their friends. Their safety. They weren't celebrated. They were called traitors. And they signed anyway.

Aristotle said virtue isn't a single brave moment. It's a habit. A lifelong practice. It's never easy. No journey worth taking ever is.

But here's what I'm learning, slowly, in the southern heat and humidity and beauty of Fairhope, Alabama; maybe you don't have to choose between telling the truth and belonging. Maybe you just haven't found your people yet. Maybe they're down here, on a porch somewhere, saving you a seat. Not asking you to be quiet. Not demanding you pick a team. Just glad you showed up.

I'm still on the road. Still telling the truth. Still figuring out where I belong. But for the first time in a long time, I don't feel like I have to apologize for either one.

Yours from the front porch,  

Birdie Jane Lane