I do not think we are in Kalifornistan any more…
Better Half and I spent most of the day today rearranging our new apartment, and then heading out to the local Sam’s Club to pick up our brand-spanking-new queen mattress set. Not a bad price for not a bad mattress… granted, it does not really have anything on the Vera Wang line that Serta has now (why on God’s Green Earth would I give a flying squirrel’s left nut if a designer’s name was on my mattress?), but I think we will be able to manage sleeping on them.
At any rate, we were in the Sam’s Club, trying to wrangle the mattresses through the exit door – we had them oriented vertically, when they needed to be horizontal to fit through the door. Dumb door. Anywise, while Better Half and I were wrangling with the mattress and box springs, a random lady, a complete stranger, asked her husband to help us out. Not only did he help us out rearranging the unwieldy beasts (queen mattresses are large) on our cart, but he and his son also helped us get them into our rented U-Haul truck as well. Then, once we got the truck home and started unloading, another complete stranger (who eventually turned out to be one of our new next-door neighbors) just randomly volunteered to help us get the mattresses up the flight of stairs between the truck and our apartment.
“Volunteer State” indeed! These kinds of random acts of kindness certainly never would have transpired on the left coast, that is for certain… at least not from complete and utter strangers.
Whoever those three people were who helped us today, thank you – we do appreciate it. And, either way, the more time I spend in this state, the more I like Tennessee.
I think things like that are pretty much a common occurrence all across the South. Just the way we were raised.
Or did you encounter it much in Mississippi?
Honestly, I spent all of five months in Mississippi before Katrina forcibly removed me, and most of those five months was spent underway, sorty-ing away from her little brothers. So… dunno
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I encountered things like this in Florida, but it is hard to qualify that as the “South” these days. Regardless, there is no doubt that things like this probably do happen all over the South on a relatively frequent basis – this was just our first encounter with it.