10:00 In the Garden of Good and Evil

Greetings from Savannah, GA, y’all!

Amanda, Caroline Ruth, and myself made the trek down here for a little weekend getaway, something we haven’t done in quite a while. With all the craziness with the past few months, we all needed it! It’s been really nice to get to spend some quality time with the girls. Caroline has been absolutely adorable! She was wired for sound last night, after spending 5 hours in a carseat. She was in the best mood, which helped her dad, because I was flat worn out.

I wasn’t in the best mood when we got here. It was late afternoon, and Savannah was much busier than I had anticipated. We had planned to come and eat dinner at Paula Deen’s restaurant, The Lady and Sons. Truth be known, that was the main reason we came to Savannah! Anyway, it took us an hour to find a parking spot, and by the time we got to Paula’s, they were booked for dinner. Word of advice: if you ever plan to eat there, you have to line up at 3:30 in the afternoon to get put on the list for dinner. I recommend getting there at 2:30. Yes, you read that right. Line up at 2:30 to put your name on a list to eat dinner sometime after 5:00. But I will tell you this: it’s absolutely worth it! That woman can COOK! I’ll probably need angioplasty after eating there, but it was amazing.

Savannah as a whole is pretty cool. Lots of history (it was first settled in 1733), and really pretty overall. I personally like Charleston, SC better, but it’s worth coming just to eat at the Lady and Sons. No joke.

Well, I’m not just writing this to tell you about our trip. We took a tour today, and got the Cliff’s notes version of Savannah history. Evidently, though it was settled nearly 300 years ago, the greatest thing ever to happen to Savannah was the Kevin Spacey movie “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, because that’s all the tour guide talked about. Evidently, 3 centuries of history is not as exciting as a 2 hour movie. But I digress. One particular little tidbit on our excursion really got my juices flowing. Deep end time for those of you who’d like to swim to the other end of the pool…

The statue you see at the top of the post is called “The Waving Girl.” It’s in memory a young girl who fell in love with a sailor, but he had to ship out, so he told her to wait for him. And wait she did. For 44 years, according to Sue our tour guide (another digression: our guide had a disctict Northern accent. Shouldn’t tourguides in the South be FROM the South?). Everytime a ship came up the river to the port, this chick would run out and wave, hoping her sweetheart had come home. Alas, she died of a broken heart, because sailor-boy never returned.

Sad, isn’t it? Well, that’s not the saddest part. The historic society of Savannah decided to raise money to build a statue to commemorate this love-sick girl. They raised $700,000 to build it. Yes, you read that right. Take a good look at that picture, because that’s what $700 large will get you. What struck me most about this was the fact that Savannah has a fairly large homeless population. The city has squares dispersed throughout the historic area, and most of them had groups of homeless people hanging out in them. There were quite a few who had developed cottage industries making touristy items out of palmetto fronds who hung out down by the waterfront, not far from our waving girl. So, the city can raise $700 grand to commemorate the waving girl (who is dead, remember), but the living sleep in the street? It just struck me as truly sad.

But before I get too high on my soapbox, I realized that I do the equivelant everyday. I spend money on all kind of “waving girl” type things, when I could use that money to help the poor here or abroad. I could save the $2 I spend on soft drinks and give it to charity. I could buy groceries for a needy family instead of eating out every day for lunch.

And here’s the real issue: in realizing this, I can sit here and write a blog about it. Or I can go and do it.