In case there is some way you could have missed the news, our own Emily just had her very first baby, Eiley Grace Fazakerley. Yay! You are personally invited to join in on the celebration. To give her a little maternity leave from blogging, and to give you readers a little break from all things baby, please enjoy this wonderfully masculine guest post from our long distance friend, Michael Strongman, who I will forgive for dogging on us Southerners for calling all soft drinks "Coke," because I enjoyed this post so much.
Why pop is superior to soda:
Confessions of a Californian living in Michigan.
Last fall I was able to host my brother for a visit for the first time since I moved to East Lansing, MI five years ago. I had tickets to the football game that Saturday (Wisconsin at MSU). Enjoying the Michigan fall and attending my Dutch reformed church (so Dutch, the pastor's name is DeYoung) were also on the agenda. However, the first stop after he arrived was to get some grub at Jimmy John's, a sandwich chain built on the premise that a good sandwich starts with good bread. It's a typical American chain, which would be perfectly at home on State Street-Santa Barbara as much as Grand River Ave-East Lansing. But after Kevin ordered his sandwich, the cashier asked if he wanted a pop. “Pops?” queried Kevin, and I had translate that he was being asked if he wanted a soda. “Yes, please.” After we got our sandwiches, we had a conversation about how Michiganders (among other northerners like Minnesotans and Wisconsinites) calling fizzy drinks pop (not pops!), and the people of the deep south centered around Atlanta call them Coke (even Sprite is Coke), and everywhere else it's soda (like our home in Northern California). And then Kevin asked the question that prompted this entire blog post, “Do you call it pop?”
I moved to Michigan five years ago in order to attend grad school in nuclear physics. I was three months removed from graduating from Westmont and part of my coping mechanism from my first extended period out of the Golden State was to be fiercely Californian in outlook. I defended the Governator to critics (however laughable that view may be now; forgive me), extolled the virtues of Californian products and the vastly superior weather, and still rooted for my beloved 49ers. I didn't watch basketball and am sorry to say I never went to a Westmont b-ball game. And I called soda soda.
One crazy thing about Michigan is if you ask anyone where they are from, they quickly pull out an open palm face up and point to it, “I'm from there!”
If they are from Detroit, they'll be putting the finger on the soft pad between the thumb and wrist. Saginaw, they point to the webbing between the thumb and forefinger. Traverse City, and they'll point between the tips of the pinky and ring finger. And of course, if they are from the Lansing area, they point point right in the middle of the palm, the center of the state and location of the capital. That's where I managed to end up, going to the “little brother” of the flagship University of Michigan (Wolverines are the lowest scUM of the earth), and attending a Reformed church where the motto is, “If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much.” (Not really, that would be a sad church indeed.) However, these Dutch, academic, wolverine-hating, Spartan loving, cheese and meat eating brothers and sisters in Christ, welcomed me into their families and quickly indoctrinated me in the ways of Spartan football and basketball and ice hockey. It helps that the basketball team has been to two Final Fours back to back, though.
Now five years later, I am a die-hard Michigan State Spartans fan in both football and basketball. I even had accidental sightings of the coach (In Izzo We Trust) in the local supermarket and have gotton giddy in excitement. I've had paczkis (pronounced poonch-keys) for Fat Tuesday, which are gynmormous Polish jelly-filled or cream-filled packets of dough and sugar, better than a jelly-filled donut (And should only be consumed one-day a year – they are that fattening). Hummus is consumed on a weekly basis, brats are the goto BBQ fare, and Bell's Oberon is the beer of choice on hot summer evenings as the lighting bugs flash in their little behinds everywhere. And most intriguingly, I call pop pop. Why? It saves time; one syllable verses two. It actually sounds like what it's describing, unlike soda, with it's flat consonants, and let's not forget that Coke can only be Coke. Sprite isn't Coke, neither is Dr. Pepper, Sunkist, Fanta, or any other fizzy drink that southerners call coke.
Pop will always be my little reminder that I lived (for a little while) among the Dutch of West Michigan. I still hold onto things that define me as a Californian, like the secrets to tri-tip BBQ, love of the mountains (Michiganders have to ski literally on hills of garbage. GARBAGE!), and the knowledge that a true coast experience requires the sun setting over the water and smell of the sea. I am a Californian, and a Michigander, and sometime soon I going to be Floridian? Crazy!
Okay, lobsters, what regional peculiarities have you picked up on your journey through life? Any
delicacies you crave that you can't get at home? Any loyalties of fandom that you can't claim you grew up with? Any traditions that you wonder how you lived without them growing up?
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