Southerners and Soft Drinks

November 17, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Forget the rural-urban divide, college allegiances, or barbecue preferences, what splits North Carolinians into warring tribal camps has long been our tastes in carbonated sucrose. We have the mainstream, Coke versus Pepsi, divide, but two other soft drinks in North Carolina also have fervent followings: Cheerwine and Sundrop. The former was invented in North Carolina, in Salisbury, and the latter has been adopted as a native son, or native soda, and is certainly the soda of choice here in the foothills region. Some locals proselytize more than others. For instance, one farmer here often buys his temporary employees Sundrop. “When you buy Sundrop, excellent,” said a worker, who was from Mexico. “When I buy Sundrop, so-so.”

One thing that is somewhat confusing about the south is that coke can be both a specific and generic term. It could very well refer to a Coca-Cola, or it could refer to any Coca-Cola like alternative like Pepsi, or it could refer to any caffeinated and carbonated sugary beverage, like Sundrop or Cheerwine or Mountain Dew. Most likely, if someone tells you that they want a coke, they either want a Coca-Cola or, if that is not available, a Pepsi. But, if someone asks if you want a coke, they are likely using it in the general sense of any soft drink. If you respond “yes,” they will likely respond, “What kind?”

My wife’s grandpa, who died last year at the age of eighty four, always used the term dope as a generic term for soft drink. “Let me get a dope,” he would tell the waitress. The waitress, likely being born in a different millenia, would just smile nervously at him, as if he was senile. “He means a coke,” I would translate.

“Oh, ok, what kind?” she would ask, relieved.

“A Sundrop, if you have it,” he would say.

Apparently, dope was once the customary term for soft drink in western North Carolina. That usage, however, is becoming archaic, as evidenced by those puzzled looks on waitresses’ faces, and due to the fact that the people who used the term are dying off. My wife’s grandpa had an extra refrigerator in his utility room that he kept stocked with 2-liter bottles of Sundrop. He called it his “dope refrigerator.” He didn’t drink alcohol, but by golly he had a dope refrigerator, and he faithfully imbibed Sundrop till the day his very last days. Possibly, his heavy consumption of Sundrop over the years hastened his demise due to kidney failure. His doctor told him to “go easy on the stuff” but as far as I know that’s all he ever drank.

Before he died, my wife’s grandpa basically weaned our son, his great-grandson, on Sundrop. Thomas would toddle next door to visit, clamber up on a bar stool, and gulp down “tasty drink,” as he still calls it to this day. I’m not sure what the generic term for soft drink is in heaven, but hopefully some sort of tasty drink springs eternal there. Back here on earth, where time is limited, it’s likely less about what you drink or what you call it, but more about the time spent with the folks sipping dopes or cokes or tasty drinks. In his latter years, that’s something my wife’s grandpa seemed to know well–life is too short not to sit down and have a Sundrop with someone, even if it’s against the doctor’s orders.

Soccer in the South

December 16, 2023December 16, 2023 ~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

I hate to claim trailblazer status, but I think it’s only appropriate that youth of today learn about the sacrifices I made growing up as a young soccer player in the South. Recently, I took my three-year-old son to a new park, one that has a battery of swingsets, a half dozen sliding boards, and all the latest in juvenile climbing scaffolding, when I realized the most impressive thing about this park were the ball fields–green, flat, irrigated fields, meticulously lined and delineated for one singular sport, soccer.

This would have been unthinkable in a rural county decades ago, so I’d like to think that all those hours I spent picking sandspurs out of shoelaces and scraping cow manure out of soccer cleats played a small part in the progress we’ve made. And it’s not because our county was dirt poor and had little discretionary funding to spend that we lacked soccer facilities. We were the second poorest county in the state, but by golly that didn’t stop us from emptying out the government coffers on what mattered most. I think it was codified somewhere in the constitution of our county that two percent of our GDP had to be spent on the defensive line. Defense wins state championships.

At that time, the head football coach was the highest paid government employee in the whole county, and the defensive line coach was the second highest–of course, this was just base salary before all the kick-backs from the booster club. Our county was built around football, the American version with thousands of adults cheering on adolescent males on Friday nights (we only had one high school in the whole county, likely, many conjectured, so we could have the biggest possible talent pool for the football team). I have nothing against this version of football, and always enjoyed playing backyard football growing up, when my bones were pliable, but eventually after a dislocated elbow and broken collarbone, I was forced to take my talents to another supposedly safer sport.

But playing soccer in the South in those days was anything but safe; in fact, our rural Junior High Soccer League, with a meager four teams, was likely the final frontier for the worldwide game of soccer.

The Mill Hill Team was by far the most primitive and had resorted to face paint, bandanas, and war chants as their main defensive strategy. They had one player who had failed the eighth grade twice who never could grasp the rules of the game. He seemed to think you scored points by how many opposing players you bowled over. Beating the Mill Hill Team was never in question, but surviving them was.

The Peach Orchard Team was by far the best team in the league and made up mostly of children of hispanic farm workers. They were led by two outstanding players named Carlos and Paco, whose wizardry with the ball was wasted on most of the spectators watching our games, by which I mean bovines watching from the fenceline–The Peach Orchard Team’s home field was a rough and tumble hayfield bordered by a cow pasture. I sometimes wonder what happened to Carlos and Paco and hope they made it to bigger leagues, where human spectators were more appreciative of their considerable talents.

The main rivalry in the league was between the Small Town Team (population 7,000) and Big City Team (population 9,000). As Captain of the Small Town Team, I can undoubtedly say that we weren’t very good. But that didn’t stop us from thinking otherwise. When our two teams collided (and I mean that more literally than figuratively) it felt as if the whole world was watching, even if the only people in the stands were our blood relations, most of whom would have rather been watching the other football.

“Kick the ball hard,” was the general exhortation from the parental cheering section in those days, back before ritzy soccer parks full of millennial parents who could Google the rules of soccer and give more advanced encouragement.

My soccer career peaked when I was recruited, as a high schooler, to referee local parks and rec games, which meant I was given a white T-shirt that said REFEREE on the back, a whistle, and ten dollars in cash after the games. Apparently, in those days, finding adults in a rural county who actually knew the rules of soccer was not easy–not that you needed to know the rules to referee three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Mostly, you just tied their shoes and pointed them in the right direction and tried to keep their parents from fist fighting in the stands.

And that, in my opinion, is when the game of soccer peaked. Now the primitive innocence is gone. The three- and four-year-olds I see playing at the local park would run circles around my junior high team. Meanwhile, the parents are no longer invested in fist fighting in support of their offspring because they’re too busy tracking biometric data about their three-year-old’s performance. And the referees, well–they are full grown men, decked out in official referee attire, who take themselves too seriously and act as if they’re about to officiate a World Cup Game. Someone probably ought to knock them down a peg and tell them if they tried giving a red card to one of those bandana-wearing mill hill boys from my youth, they likely wouldn’t have made it out of the mill hill alive.

But those were simpler times, back when Soccer in the South was basically the Wild West.

The Swift Pinch of Justice

January 27, 2022January 27, 2022 ~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

Sometimes I feel like I’m a member of the last well-mannered generation–that is, the last generation to know swift discipline. No one was swifter than my mom. I can remember when she used to snatch me up in front of the whole congregation for no good reason other than to inspect the shrubbery outside the church. Back then, I always thought it was unfair to have a momma with a green thumb, and by green thumb I mean she could snap a privet switch with a mere pinch. A few pews ahead of me, Johnny could do jumping jacks and taunt me with funny faces and his mom did nothing. However, I could barely contort my face in self defense before I was yanked up and escorted to the hedgerow.

My mom does not suffer fools. Never has, never will. Maybe this explains my fondness for writing foolishness, as it’s perhaps the one way I can smuggle foolishness past her. She was a high school English teacher, and she always seemed more concerned about the grammatical correctness of my sentences than their content. As long I put my commas and periods in the right place, then the subject of my sentence could slip on the object of the preposition, say a banana peel, and do five flips for all she cared.

My mom also taught me the grammar of southern living, meaning manners. These rules were so indoctrinated in me that even now I convulse when breaking them. Back then, breaking the Ten Commandments might get you a stern talking to, but breaking the rules of southern etiquette got you a temporary tattoo on the posterior. The rules, as I remember them, were,

You do not brag. Ever.
You say, “Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, mam. No, mam.”
You say “Please” and “Thank You.”
You do not talk back to your parents or teachers. This was called sassing–if you got caught doing it, it was more or less the death sentence.
You never wear a hat at the table.
You sit as still as a statue in church.

Back then, these were the communal standards for children. Of course, maybe Johnny’s mom didn’t get the memo, but it seemed like most other kids in school had a similar set of dictates set down by adults in their life. And it’s not like I went to some fancy private school. I just went to your typical rural public school with trailers as overflow classrooms and paddles hanging on the wall of the principal’s office.

By that point, the paddles were mostly a decorative scare tactic, a vestige of a barbaric age when principals were feared and respected. Corporal punishment was well on its way to becoming taboo, at least in schools. In private homes, not so much. Although I felt my mom was stricter than most, she was at least lenient in her preference for switch wielding. My neighbor’s mom used a blunt force wooden spoon, and I knew several kids whose dad’s used a leather belt.

Eventually, all forms of corporal punishment were lumped together in a catch-all term called spanking. Then spanking was linked to some sort of Freudian sexual repression and shunned by society. However, I just linked it to pain, not a lot, but enough. Enough for me to realize if I didn’t want to get my legs switched, I’d better behave.

This isn’t to say that we should bring back spanking–I wouldn’t touch that topic with a ten-foot wooden spoon. It’s just to say that Southerners of my parents era may have been sexually repressed, but their children had good manners.

Collards: A Southern Superstition

December 30, 2015 ~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

The New Year means resolutions for most of the country. But in the South, it also means it’s time to cook collards. Eating collards and black eye peas on New Year’s Day is a southern tradition, or really a superstition.

Collards represent cash, and black eye peas represent cents. If you eat both on New Year’s Day, you’ll make lots of money in the upcoming year, or so the superstition goes. And just so you’re prepared to make lots of money in the New Year, below is my mom’s recipe for cooking collards, with some photos of her collards at Christmas. She cooks them like my grandma used to, frying them after boiling them.

Have a Happy New Year and don’t forget to eat your collards and black eye peas!

Here’s my mom’s recipe that she learned from my grandma:

Cut the leaf off of the main vein that runs through the leaf. They seem to cook better if I have a large amount of leaves to cook at one time.
If any of the little veins that runs through the leaf is of any size, I cut the leaf from around those also.
Once I have my leaves, I wash them several times.
Then using a large large pot, I boil the leaves until they get really soft (I usually cook for an hour or so)
Then drain the leaves good to get rid of excess water.
Then with my hand chopper, I chop the leaves up really small.
Then in a large frying pan I put oil (enough to cover the pan but not deep).
Place collards in pan to begin cooking process.
Sprinkle some sugar over the collards and stir.
Once they start cooking I turn heat down and cover with a lid. Keep checking. Sometimes I keep adding a little oil and sugar.

Do not let them dry out when cooking (Keep moist with oil). I let them cook slow for a while. Many people do not add the sugar, but that is the way we like them.