Sticks and the City: Gravy Train to Southland

I am a city girl through and through.

I’m all about bright lights and fast cars and late nights.  If I could have my way, there’d be a hot dog stand or a street musician on every corner, and there would be blocks of stores and racks of clothes for more miles than I could walk in heels.  As long as I can look up and feel dwarfed by skyscrapers, I’m good to go.

I am a city girl all the way. And you can take the girl out of the city, they say, but you can’t take the city out of the girl.

I should know. Because boy, have I been taken out of the city.

After growing up just a short train ride from a certain Magnificent Mile, I assumed that everyone had been exposed to plays and concerts in their youth, to countless museums and historical landmarks.  To me, it was not totally out of the ordinary to have a school field trip to an art museum, and the idea that someone could possibly have grown up a normal human being without seeing a dolphin show at least three times was far beyond my comprehension.

And then I came to college.  And everything changed.

Because anyone who tells you that the state of Missouri is not Southern has never been to Chicago.  Neither has anyone who calls Columbia, Mo. a city.  Because as much as I have come to love my college town and surrogate home, it is neither a city, nor does it qualify as Northern.

Want to know how I know for sure?

You can tell by the gravy.

Though I have heard cautionary tales about using food metaphors, I think there is no better way to prove my point than to relate my current change of location to food.  Unfortunately, I’m not talking about cake.  In my story, the metaphor is all about gravy.

Where I come from, our gravy is brown and it only comes out on Thanksgiving.  It goes only on turkey, stuffing and potato products.  Sometimes it is chunk, sometimes it is smooth, but it is always brown and never used on breakfast food.

I had heard of a mysterious white gravy before coming to Missouri, and I had even seen it once in person while visiting relatives in Colorado, but I had never experienced it in the sheer volume I have since beginning college.  There is gravy on everything here, even if that thing is chicken-fried.

And that is how I know I’m in the South — and certainly not in Kansas Chicago anymore.

But no one understands me.  Even some of my fellow Chicagoans have jumped on the white gravy train.  Though they dip, not douse, their biscuits in the creamy confusion, they are still traitors to the Northern way.  I’ve lost a lot of good men out there.

But I refuse to give in.  I will not cave to the ways of the South.  I put jelly — strawberry jelly — on my biscuits, and only that.  I have gravy once a year and I enjoy it thoroughly, thank you very much.  And do you know why I enjoy it so much?  Because it is brown.

Amen to that and to my sweet homeland.  I’ll be back to my mothership and its bright lights soon, and until then will remain a city girl through and through.

But for now, my adventures in the southland will continue — and while they do, I will continue to describe my accounts here, where all can judge my Yankee status to its full extent.  Judge away, as I continue to dream of taxis and high rises with longing.

And I will never have gravy for breakfast.

Tagged as: Biscuits, Chicago, Gravy, Missouri