I Don’t Feel so Good

In this frigid time of year when temperature-related illnesses abound, it might be worthwhile to go over some Southern phrases for expressing how one feels.   We have already covered “tol’able” and “po’ly” in an earlier, two-part column entitled, “To Your Health,” so today we will discuss other possibilities so the reader can vary his or her language as needed.

      Say you have flu-like symptoms, the main one of which is a malaise that causes you to want to sleep most of the day and night.   You might say, “I feel as if I’ve been run over by a transfer truck, which then ran back over me in reverse.”  Or if you add the dimensions of nausea and dizziness, you might say, “I feel worse than a five-eyed goat in a sandstorm.”

    But the kicker of them all was once said by an old lady nicknamed “Miss Bittie,” who lived in the lovely old tree-shaded house that once stood in the triangle where Beauregard Boulevard veers of from Georgia Highway 85 in Fayetteville.  That Miss Bittie’s stately old home was replaced by an auto parts store is a bit of urban planning your compiler shall never understand or condone.  But he digresses.

    Miss Bittie was a Southern lady whom your compiler remembers for two principal reasons:  first, she sang a solo – Great Is Thy Faithfulness, he thinks — in her quavering tremolo soprano at his great-grandmother, Miss Ellie’s, funeral at Fayetteville Methodist Church in October 1969.  He remembers Miss Bittie did a creditable job, but was a bit shaky on the high notes; however, his abilities as a musical critic were not well-honed at age seven.  The second reason was that Miss Bittie was always very kind to your compiler when he was a little boy, and so for the longest time he remembered her as a nice old lady with a pretty singing voice who died at about age eighty in the mid-1970s.

     But his great friend, the late Dr. Ferrol “Sambo” Sams, who had been a neighbor of Miss Bittie’s, said, “Dan, I think you’re the first person I ever heard who called Bittie ‘sweet.’  What she was, was plain-spoken – sometimes painfully so.  Her mother lived to be nearly a hundred, and turned mean with dementia in her old age.   One day around the time JFK was killed, I asked Bittie how things were going, and she said, ‘Mama has lived out her own life, and then some, and now she’s grinding down on mine.’  That was the truth, but it was rough as a cob.”

    Sambo also told your compiler that the most vivid expression of sickness he ever heard was from Miss Bittie.  She had come to Sams Clinic one day looking all disheveled and feverish – far from her normal tidy state — and when he entered her examining room, looked surprised and said,  “Bittie, what in the world’s the matter with you?”

     Miss Bittie said, “I don’t know, Sambo, but I’m sick as pukin’ dog.”   

     It’s hard to get much more vivid than that.  And by the way, your compiler once told Sambo, who had sung in the Methodist choir with Miss Bittie for years, about her having sung at Miss Ellie’s funeral, and about his recollection that she was shaky on the high notes. “Bittie was hell on the high notes, not just shaky,” was his response.  Reckon it was because she was sick as a pukin’ dog?