Scottish born brown guy who loves America. Still explaining the accent. Came here for intelligent conversation, stayed for the dumpster fires
Orange, CA
Joined October 2016
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The first time I ordered biscuits and gravy at Cracker Barrel , I thought there had been a small but serious misunderstanding in the kitchen.
In Scotland, a biscuit belongs beside your tea. Occasionally you dunk it, if you’re prepared to lose it.
This one arrived buried beneath something that appeared to have been invented to help farmers survive February.
“You ever had these before?” the waitress asked.
“Not in this condition.”
She laughed, then stayed beside the table for my first bite.
“Well?”
I took another bite. Partly to consider my answer.
She nodded and went to refill someone’s coffee.
When she came back, the plate was empty.
“Guess we’ll be seeing you again.”
I’d spent years wondering how Americans could eat biscuits for breakfast.
Now I was wondering what time they opened.
I asked a stranger to take our picture. He turned out to be considerably more invested in it than we were.
“Sure,” he said, handing his shopping bag to his wife.
We stood beside the fountain.
“No, you’re looking into the sun. Come over here.”
We moved.
He crouched down.
Took three photographs.
Stood up and frowned at the screen.
“Let’s get one without that trash can.”
By now, his wife had joined the production.
“Your collar,” she said, pointing at me.
I fixed it.
“There you go.”
He took another six.
When he handed the phone back, I said, “Would you like me to take one of you two?”
His wife immediately put down the shopping bag and stood beside him.
“Finally,” she said. “He’s never in any of them.”
He started explaining where I should stand.
She took his arm.
“Let the man take the picture, David.”
When our washing machine broke in Scotland, my mother’s first concern was what the repairman would think of us.
She cleaned the kitchen.
Then the hallway.
“What if he needs the bathroom?”
This opened up a second area of operations.
By the time he arrived, we were ready to receive a small royal delegation.
He pulled the machine away from the wall.
Behind it were a sock, two coins, and enough dust to undo an entire morning’s work.
My mother looked stricken.
“Always like that behind these,” he said.
I thought this was a generous thing to say to a woman he’d only just met.
She offered him tea.
“Two sugars, please.”
She brought out the good biscuits.
He’d been in the house four minutes and already knew how to handle both emergencies.
I asked a coworker for her potato salad recipe and ended up on the phone with her mother in Iowa.
“Mom, the Scottish guy wants to know how you make it.”
She handed me the phone before I could explain that a list would have been fine.
“Have you got something to write on, honey?”
I found the back of an envelope.
She began with the potatoes. We were getting along well until we reached the mayonnaise.
“How much?”
“Till it looks right.”
“What does right look like?”
There was a pause.
“Is he actually going to make this?” she asked her daughter.
“He says he is.”
“All right. Give him my number.”
On Saturday, I sent a photograph of a bowl of potato salad to a woman I’d never met.
She called immediately.
“Looks a little dry. Have you still got the mayonnaise out?”
I’d asked for a recipe.
It came with supervision.
During a power outage in Georgia, the man across the street knocked on my door.
“Is your power out too?”
“Yes.”
“You eaten?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Grill’s on.”
By the time I crossed the street, his wife was bringing out paper plates. Someone arrived with sausages. Another neighbor brought ice cream that apparently had to be eaten immediately.
I respected the urgency.
We sat in lawn chairs while the children argued over who got to hold the flashlight, despite it still being daylight.
Then every porch light on the street came back on.
Nobody moved.
“Well,” I said, “I suppose we can all go home.”
His wife put another sausage on my plate.
“We’ve only just got you seated.”
The electricity had been restored. My freedom of movement remained under review.
As a boy in Scotland, I knew houses where the nicest room was reserved for people who weren’t there.
The good room.
You could look into it from the hallway. There were cushions nobody had leaned against and a glass cabinet containing things nobody had touched.
“Who’s coming?”
“Nobody.”
“Can we sit in there?”
“No.”
Meanwhile, six of us were squeezed into the other room, watching television around a clothes rack.
Once, a visitor arrived and was shown into the good room. I followed him in.
“What are you doing?” my mother asked.
“I’m with him.”
For twenty minutes, I sat in an armchair I’d known for years but had never formally met.
Then he left.
“Right,” she said. “Out.”
Apparently, he’d been sponsoring my visit.
A friend in America asked me to hold his ladder.
In Scotland, this meant gripping both sides and occasionally saying, “Careful.”
Apparently it also meant listening while he explained what the last homeowner had done wrong.
Twenty minutes later, he hadn’t climbed a rung.
I knew the wiring was questionable, the gutters were crooked, and a man called Gary should never have been allowed near a house.
“Ready?” he asked.
I felt I ought to hear Gary’s side first.
My cousin and I could divide a chocolate bar with the precision of land surveyors.
One cut. The other chose.
We’d inspect the halves from several angles, checking for crumbs.
Years later, we agreed to share a slice of cake at a restaurant.
“Just bring two forks,” my brother told the waiter.
“And a knife,” I said.
He looked at me.
“I haven’t forgotten.”
My mother could spot a good climbing tree from a bus window.
“Don’t you even think about it.”
I hadn’t said a word.
Years later, I took her for a drive and pointed out a tree we used to climb.
“You never knew about that one,” I said.
She looked at it.
“Your brother got higher.”
All those years I’d worried about being caught. Now I had a ranking to dispute.
A friend told me his house was old.
“How old?”
“Built in 1985.”
I waited for the rest.
Back in Edinburgh, I’d lived in a building that had spent longer than that waiting for someone to fix the front door.
“Does it need much work?” I asked.
“We’re hoping to restore some original features.”
I pictured a microwave.
At a cookout, someone told me to make myself at home.
So I went inside and put the kettle on.
The host found me opening cupboards.
“Looking for something?”
“Tea bags.”
He handed me a beer and gently steered me back outside.
Apparently “make yourself at home” has a property line.
Growing up in Scotland, we could turn a patch of grass into a soccer field with four jackets.
Arguments over whether the ball had gone over an imaginary crossbar could last longer than the game.
One afternoon, a boy took his jacket home while his team was winning.
We stood there looking at the missing goalpost.
Even then, the wealthy could take their assets abroad.
A man gave me directions that required me to have lived in town since 1987.
“Turn left where the old Winn-Dixie used to be.”
“What’s there now?”
“Dentist.”
“Why not say turn left at the dentist?”
He looked at me as though I’d suggested renaming his children.
Years later, I caught myself telling someone to turn where the old gas station used to be.
It was a bank by then.
I could have said bank. But those weren’t the directions I knew.
My older brother bought me a secondhand bike that was too big for me. My feet could barely reach the pedals.
One of my favorite childhood memories is riding that bike along a path across a meadow on a summer day. The caretakers were cutting the grass. The wind was in my face. Not a care in the world.
I couldn’t tell you how far I rode that day, or where I was going.
But even now, the smell of freshly cut grass takes me right back to that boy on that bike.
My brother bought me more than he knew.
Is there a smell that takes you straight back to childhood?
I knew I was settling into America when a female coworker invited me to dinner with her family and asked me to take the trash out.
In Scotland, I’d have waited years before assuming that level of intimacy.
“Bags are under the sink,” she said.
Her husband was washing dishes. Her son was being sent out for ice. I was apparently in charge of sanitation.
When I came back, there was pie at my place.
“Same time next Sunday?”
I said I’d love to.
“Good. He always forgets the trash.”
No, I think the root of this is relaxed immigration standards. There was a time when only the very best could qualify to enter the US which is why we had so many doctors, engineers etc, then the system got so diluted that anyone could get here. As a result we ended up with the dregs of society. I said what I said
I have finally cracked the mystery of Indian hate.
For decades, conversations about race in America have gone like this. Liberals accuse conservatives of being racists, conservatives respond that they have non-racist reasons for their opinions.
"No, I don't hate Mexicans, it's about the rule of law."
"No, having more police isn't racist, in fact it helps black people the most."
You can make an arguable case in each instance that conservatives had a point. This was our dialectic.
Then the Indian came along. He's everything that conservatives have ever said they wanted in an immigrant: law-abiding, high-earning, family-oriented, legal, English-speaking, no terrorism or illiberal attitude.
Here was an ultimate test that would show whether conservative opinions were ever based in reason.
Conservatives not only failed to embrace Indians. They reacted with a fury to their existence that made all their previous prejudices look mundane.
Imagine a woman who is attracted to toxic men but says she wants a nice guy. When she gets a nice guy who checks all the boxes, she hates him more than anyone else because he exposes her as engaging in self-delusion. His existence attacks her very identity.
That's conservatives and Indians.
The right wanted to believe that they had a political ideology that could appeal to smart, decent people. The conservative intellectual was always reverse engineering justifications to flatter the prejudices of chuds. Again, on most issues there was a plausibility to the arguments being made.
Indians have exposed how fake the entire thing was. Conservative politics on a mass scale was rooted in stupidity and racism the whole time. Political scientists knew this already, but it's now become too glaringly obvious to deny, even for uninformed rightists themselves. There is nothing left for conservatives to do but give up on reason and embrace racial hate as their organizing principle.
We should thank Indian immigrants, among all the other things they do, for providing this clarity. richardhanania.com/p/conserv…
At a cookout, a man handed me his tongs and said, “Watch these a minute.”
Twenty minutes later, I was still turning burgers.
People were placing orders. A woman brought me a plate of cheese slices. Someone asked when the next batch would be ready.
Eventually I spotted the man sitting under a tree, eating.
“Any chance of getting you back over here?”
He came over.
“Sorry. You looked like you had it handled.”
“Lovely party,” I said. “You’ve got a beautiful home.”
“Oh, I don’t live here.”
I looked at the tongs.
“Then how did you end up cooking?”
“Same way you did.”
He nodded toward a man approaching with an empty plate.
“Careful. That’s how he got me.”
I told a man his barbecue was “not bad at all.” His wife put her fork down.
He’d been tending the smoker since before sunrise. There had been discussions about temperatures, wood and something called “the stall,” which sounded worrying but apparently was part of the plan.
At dinner, he watched me take my first bite.
“Well?”
“Not bad at all.”
His smile weakened.
“What would you change?”
“Nothing. It’s excellent.”
“You said it wasn’t bad.”
“Yes. Not bad AT ALL.”
I gave the last two words a little more weight, hoping he could hear the distinction.
His wife started laughing.
“He’s Scottish. I think that means he likes it.”
I explained that where I grew up, “not bad at all” could carry considerable enthusiasm. “I’ve had worse” was also available, though I could see we weren’t ready for that yet.
He shook his head and passed me the sauce.
Later, I asked about the peach cobbler his wife had made.
He took a spoonful, looked straight at her and said, “I’ve had worse.”
She turned to me.
“Look what you’ve started.”
A young man chased me across a Kroger parking lot carrying a loaf of bread I hadn’t paid for.
“Sir! You forgot this!”
I checked my bags.
“No, I’ve got mine.”
“You get another one.”
“Why?”
“Buy one, get one free.”
I’d missed the sign. I told him not to worry; I was already at the car.
He looked at the loaf in his hand, then at me, puzzled that we might abandon the operation this close to completion.
“But it’s yours.”
He’d come all the way from the checkout, past three rows of cars, to deliver bread I didn’t know I owned.
“Thank you,” I said, and took it.
“Have a good one!”
He jogged back toward the store.
I stood there holding both loaves. I’d gone in for a few things and somehow acquired enough bread to require a plan.
That evening, I took one to the couple next door.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“Apparently it’s yours.”
She looked puzzled.
I understood. There’d been quite a bit of that already.