Monday, July 23, 2012

COUNTRY COUSINS AND ALL THAT JAZZ

COUNTRY COUSINS AND ALL THAT JAZZ
T. Wieland Allen
I am Texas born and Texas bred. My hubby and I moved to Oklahoma fifty years ago. That's not far from our roots, although when we moved here the Texans told us nobody moves to Oklahoma, everybody moves away from Oklahoma.
Let's face it, we moved to southeastern Oklahoma because of the trees. The tallest trees in the towns we left in Texas are considered bushes in the rest of the world. When we saw the huge trees lining the streets of the towns in southeastern Oklahoma, we fell in love with them. They actually gave a person shade, something we didn't know anything about.
Grass is green here, too, something we knew very little about from experience. All we knew about in Texas was lawns with stickers which a person would pick up every time bare feet tried to walk across the yard from one house to another.
Although growing up in Texas, my family traveled occasionally to California where our relatives moved after the depression. Those trips were like going to another part of the planet. It would take days for the slow living lifestyle of us Texans to adjust to the hurried up lifestyle of the West Coast.
One area of interest was the vocabulary and the rate of speed with which the California relatives talked. They spoke in lightning speed sentences, barely pausing for a breath. The words they used were confusing to us Texans. We were used to Southern talk, not the crisp, staccato pronunciation of words. We were occasionally laughed at by the Californians for our southern drawl but we never thought we were so very different in our speaking.
It all came back to roost fifty years later. Two of our children moved to California after college, quickly becoming West Coast talkers. After a few years we had to listen to them intently in order to understand their comments, as well as their crisp. rapid pronunciation of words. I'll have to admit, they only changed in their speaking, not in their sweet personalities.
They married and had children in California. Several years ago the grandsons from California asked us one day if their Oklahoma cousins still sounded like Deputy Dog. Huge laughs were generated by that comment. When we thought about it, we had to admit that yes, we had noticed the difference in the Oklahoma grandchildren's manners of speaking from the California grandsons.
I'll have to admit that years ago I wanted to tell my California cousins, "Slow down," when they talked. Then, years later, I wanted to tell my own children to slow down when their speaking began to evolve, changing from Okie talk to California talk.
Our six year old grand daughter from California solved the questioning in my mind that had been there for years relating to the difference in the speaking. She told me on her last visit to Oklahoma, "Meme, sometimes you sound like a cowgirl."
Now, really, I still can't figure out how to interpret that comment. Was it a compliment or was it a criticism? I'm sure it was a compliment, coming from the sweet grand daughter who wouldn't criticize me at all.
Later she told me, "Meme, sometimes you talk like you speak English."
Maybe I'm mixing the Okie and the California manners of speaking. It has to be confusing to her.
My daughter told me that the only exposure the grand daughter has had to cowgirls is in the Toy Story movies. Jessie is the name of a cowgirl in the movies, so she thinks I sound like the cowgirl Jessie.
I like that. That assures me that she thinks I'm a cool grandma and that her first remark to me was a compliment. She did say that she likes to hear me talk. I thought she was commenting on my wisdom, never thinking she was talking about my cowgirl manner of speaking.
Maybe you can never take the Texas out of a Texan, like the saying goes.
I'll settle for our grand daughter believing that she has a grandma who's a cowgirl. Maybe I'll sing Home on the Range to her at the next visit. That will certainly confirm her thinking that I'm a cowgirl grandma.
I particularly like the part where the song says, "Never is heard a discouraging word." That will make me proud to be a cowgirl grandma if she never hears a discouraging word from me or from her Deputy Dog talking Oklahoma cousins.