Crazy busy week at work. Trying hard to finish a project that is actually growing more interesting the linger i work on it.. Thankful for that at least. That kept me so busy today that i barely stood up from my chair..In fact that was the case for the last 4 days.

One funny thing happened  yesterday.. I’m working with a new assistant  , U, at work. Great guy.. though I’ve never met him. He sits down in Raleigh. Hope to get to meet him some day. We’ve been working together on some coming business travel. he’s whip smart and very organized which must make it hard for him to talk to me 🙂   The one thing that trips me up is hat he sometimes slips and  calls me ‘Sir’.. Every time he does that I feel a little bit older..Same thing happens when someone calls me sir in a restaurant or something.. Unless I look in a mirror. I certainly don’t feel like a ‘sir’.  I finally asked U about it and asked him to call me ‘John’ .  He apologized and pointed out that he grew up in the South.. (as did I).. where we had to call men Sir and women Ma’am. ..  That explained it and we laughed about it..

But it reminded me..   I remember so well in school as a little kid that we had to call our teachers  “Ma’am” .. (pronounced may-yem.. .. more like mayhem !).. If they asked you a question and you said “Yes”.. they’d snap back.. “Yes-what ?!”.. you had to say “Yes-May’am””.. Or “Yes-sir”.. or actually “Yes suh”, Many of my friends had to do that to answer their parents. I was thinking about that tonight when we saw our friend E, a southern Belle form Virginia.. we laughed about “Yes what ?!!”  she reminded me of another great Southernism I grew up with .. “Well bless your heart”.. or “bless her ( or his) heart” .. It was a euphemism for ‘I can’t  believe what a (crazy, stupid, pitiful,  ridiculous, lamentable, idiotic) thing you  (or he/she)  did..

I’ve long lost these patterns of speech .. and kind of miss them.. that was untill I asked  folks on a phone call today ‘how are all y’all doin; ?”.. Now  “all y’all”… ?! i could go off on that for hours…  but not today

nite all ya’ll, nite sam

-me