So how have I been?
Very well, actually. And I am having a very relaxing New Years too.
The mom unit and I decided to take a vacation because, for obvious reasons, the construction in front of my window was driving me nuts and I had no plans in Atlanta. I spent one boring afternoon on Xmas Eve and then Christmas Day being bored out of my mind. Then, on the 26th I went to Spin Class and that was it, a whole day left to do nothing but obsess about what…could be between me and my chance meeting with some idiot, about my life, about everything. I had to get out of there!
So like ripping out a band-aid I made vacation plans to, not Miami (I don’t have that much money) not Tampa, either, I couldn’t drive that far but to Myrtle Beach. We got this great deal to a family friendly beach resort, hotel on the beach equipped with a kitchen in wonderful, quaint Myrtle Beach, in the Atlantic Palms Resort. I saw this hotel at first when I tried to book a hotel for myself, on hotels.com which is a great find, who knew…and I thought I might as well take her with me, so we decided to drive up there, two old women in a car driving down south. It was different. Without the kids, it was a lot different. We made no stops except to use the bathroom and that was for me, and there are no food breaks. We did it in one fell swoop.
South Carolina, at least the Myrtle Beach section, is a little different from Atlanta. For one, there is 1 black person for every 100. We do not dominate down here. Maybe we do in some areas…ahem… Atlantic Station, but not here. Ocean Boulevard is lovely, very quiet; you can hear the sound of the beach waves from your living room, very nice. If I didn’t know better I would try to make this an annual tradition, New Years at the beach, but we’ll see. The hotel rooms are cheap because it is off season, the weather is on average in the 60’s, who wants to go to the beach and feel the cold graze of the water over your skin. The only warm day was the day we arrived and that was about it. I imagine that living here might be great to take an afternoon off to go sit at the beach after a rough day of work but asides from that it is touristy, nothing revenue wise for the inhabitants, the people sound all "do-hickey," (that's southern twang with an extra twang) with a great quantity of retired folk too. You can tell they are not used to black people, especially the foreign black folk like me, I come up there whipping an accent and they get confused. We thought we had all these black folk down, and then you come mentioning that you are from straight up Africa, this is too confusing. There is no Macy’s. This is too confusing. They actually think Macy’s exists only in the north, and confused me for some New York gal. What flattery!
We, my mum and I, went out on New Years Eve to a bar that would ordinarily have an exorbitant cover in Atlanta, ahem... Gordon Biersch, to celebrate. She accompanied me for private reasons, and I went because I didn’t want to spend my New Years cooped up in a hotel room, so we went to a bar: very different set up from Atlanta. For one, we didn’t have to pay to park, we didn’t encounter a million and one cops on the road, and we didn’t get carded as we walked in. We just walked in, sat down and ordered our drinks, and everyone whispered casually because we were the only black people there.
At midnight, they all wished us Happy New Year like they forgot about the color of our skins and that was that. I even got a New Years kiss from a fellow singleton for the first time…pretty exciting. I don’t get that in Atlanta. You go into a white only joint and your fun is limited, you get at least one person to speak to you and that’s it, the rest of them wonder secretly inside them, “Didn’t they tell this chick this was an all-white party/event/bar?” And the women all cling onto their men like you would snatch them away just by staring at them. Oh, wait, that last line represents every woman in Atlanta.
In Atlanta, everyone is so hung over on being someone else, being someone that they may or may not be, hung over on being some pretentious prick. You come on to a guy and that’s no longer an attractive feature, what are we 12?
Needless to say when you get away you encounter the much different side of life that you may not have encountered and may never have if you hadn’t taken the chance to want to experience it. I am glad I did. I had been to South Carolina but the Hilton Head Island end of it, and that not as much fun. Myrtle Beach represents a whole new awakening for me and a lot of respect for the south. Things are different down here. Very new type of different. It’s a warmth I would like to experience and that I have mentioned several times over but with a little more doused in, maybe like financial security. I kept thinking, maybe this is the simple life that I have been seeking. Maybe it’s the simpler type of fun with no pretensions, no credit card bills and no pressure. Just I love you, you love me, let’s go live the simple life and raise our kids.
But there’s always the hope of Paris.
Peace, love, and much love…this New Year.
No comments:
Post a Comment