If you are not a long-time native of metro Atlanta, you will just have to trust me on this one.
Growing up, I walked to grade school and I walked to high school. My mother had taught me to look both ways before crossing the street, so she never worried about my daily excursions to and from classes until I turned 16 and bought a motorcycle.
We knew all our neighbors and all my schoolmates lived within walking distance. Our church pastor lived on our street and his children – slightly older than myself – took great pleasure in aggravating me.
When I got sick, I went to see the same doctor my grandparents, parents and eventually, my daughter went to see. If one of us required a hospital, we went to a small, caring community hospital across town that somehow managed to pull us through our medical difficulties.
Most of our meals were taken at home, lovingly cooked by my mother. My father, an accomplished cook in his own right, having been trained by the army, reserved his culinary skills for the grill.
The secret to his outdoor cooking success was a home-grown BBQ sauce that could turn the most pedestrian cut of meat into a gastronomical delight. In the old southern tradition, his secret BBQ sauce recipe remained just that - his secret.
Years of begging and cajoling on my part failed to convince my father to divulge his secret recipe. I shamefully admit to having stooped so low as to enlist my mother as a spy to watch him cook his magical concoction in a vain attempt to steal the potion. Sadly, most of my adult life as a grill master was relegated to the dirty little backwaters of commercial sauces that came sealed in colorful glass bottles that offered much promise but delivered only disappointment by the quart.
A few years back I celebrated yet another in a long string of birthdays that God in his infinite wisdom has seen fit to bestow on me. Tucked inside a birthday card from my parents was a piece of paper, upon which my father had written out in his own handwriting, the sacred and heretofore elusive BBQ sauce recipe.
My heart leapt in my throat and my eyes welled with tears. After regaining my composure, my father proceeded to give me a hands-on demonstration of the proper way to apply the family sauce to the family chicken and the handing down of a family tradition was complete.
We, as a culture in the South, have many valued traditions. Some, like my father’s BBQ sauce will continue on. Others will become lost to the ages because they do not represent the current American culture.
We have lost the flag that linked us to our ancestors who gave their lives for a cause they believed in. We let hate groups make it their banner and now it is stained, not with our forefather’s blood but with the poison of a group that insists on preserving their own ugly tradition.
We have lost the small hospitals where the candy-stripers were our neighbors and the doctors were leaders in our churches. We now have giant medical corporations that have to teach customer service to their employees. We need “patient bill of rights” laws to protect us from HMOs whose chief executives glean millions in salaries.
We have lost our streets to the drug dealers and pedophiles. Our southern hospitality has been replaced by materialism and multi-culturalism. I used to see bumper stickers that said, “The south shall rise again.” My fellow native Georgians, the south may have risen from many of its shortcomings but many of its qualities are on the dusty road to the landfill of history.
Resting in an envelope and sealed in a safe deposit box is a hand-written note, waiting to be passed to the next generation. If my daughter continues to display the southern-rooted family values she was taught, then maybe on some distant day, she will proudly present to her child, the old family BBQ sauce recipe that once belonged to her grandfather.
I hope, on that day, that child will feel some small sense of his heritage.
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