South Meets North, No. 678,932

Okay, so it was 14 degrees here this morning and the snow that was all melting yesterday had frozen and driving (and walking) was very treacherous.

I bundled Jane and myself up and I took her to school. I was actually running a little late because the streets were scaring me. But I dropped her off just fine and I'm driving down the street by the school and I see this woman slip in her driveway and fall down--hard. I swerve over and roll down my window.

"Oh, my gosh! Are you okay??"

"Oh, that hurts so bad. So. Bad," she says but she's getting up, nothing seems broken... and just about then I notice that she's only wearing her bra and some sweat pants.

My brain sort of freezes. I think, randomly, "Is she some homeless woman?" (As if it would make sense that some HOMELESS woman would be running around on her bra trying to mail a letter when it's 14 degrees out with the wind chill. Right.)

She puts the letter in her mailbox. She says, "I'm sorry I'm just in my bra but it's MY house..."

"Oh, right, of course! Sure! Uh huh!" I say, in my Southern there's-nothing-odd-about-that-at-all way.

And then I drove on, thinking, "Huh."

I always say that if I was thin and in shape, I'd just walk around naked all day but you know what? Maybe not when it's 14 degrees out, and maybe not on a busy street during the morning drop off time at the elementary school...

But you know, she wasn't even all that embarrassed. And she didn't have anything to be embarrassed ABOUT, really, because her bra was just like wearing a bikini top or whatever but...

It was just sort of a surreal moment.

So, then I e-mailed my friend Tiffany, who lives in Chicago, and her response was “So I'm thinking about this, and finding that I don't really know how to react, because the only part of this that surprises me is that it's 14 degrees. Other than that, it seems sort of a "Well, I wouldn't do it, but whatever" kind of thing. As I search my mind, I find that it's not that I see a lot of this kind of thing--certainly not enough that I'd consider it "normal"--so I can't pin down why I don't think it's odd. I think we just don't have any DECORUM in the north. There's definitely a whole "well, it covers everything a bathing suit would, so who cares?" kind of mentality among a lot of people.”

So, I'm wondering, is this another culture shock kind of thing that resulted when I moved from the South to the North?

If you, wherever you live, ran into a woman wearing nothing but her bra in 14 degree weather, would you think, "Dude, it's freaking cold out. Put some clothes on!"? Or would you think, "There is a woman in FOUNDATION WEAR out in public! Oh, my gosh, she's wearing a BRA. Out in PUBLIC. On a BUSY STREET. She must be drunk! Because who would do that? And, especially when it's so COLD?"?

Would you be more surprised that she was undressed in that kind of cold, or would you be more surprised that she was undressed and the cold just added another surreal layer to the situation?

I did one more check to see if the whole experience was weird because I'm from the south or if it was empirically weird: I asked my new friend Anna. "Well, my first thought really was about how cold she must have been," she said. "But that's fairly unusual up here, too. Unless you're in the Village where it's abnormal to see someone WITH a shirt." She thought for a moment.

"You don't ever just have normal days up here, do you?"