Yes, This IS NJ

Attempting to sleep in on the weekends isn’t a possibility when you have an alarm clock that is always set at 6:30 a.m. Our alarm clock is named Chloe and she generally wakes us up with, “Mommy, get up! I’m hungry and thirsty!” This morning it came with an additional eye-opener…turning on Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom lights.

Since we were up early, we decided to go into downtown for breakfast at a regular haunt. It’s probably the most famous eatery in our town, winning many “People’s Choice” awards for the low-cost, myriad of choices and obscene amount of food given. Because of this, it attracts a large crowd on the weekends and as we learned this morning out-of-towners.

We had just sat down and were perusing the menu when a married couple sat at the table next to us. They had the “deer in the headlights” look on their face as they admired other diners food choices and asked, “Oohhhh, what did you order?!” while invading their personal space. “Isn’t this place charming?” the woman asked her husband in her booming NY accent. She didn’t wait for a response because the lady sitting at the table behind me had just gotten her strawberry-banana pancakes delivered, and she was all up in her space wanting to know if they were good and if they ate at this restaurant a lot.

The woman sitting behind us responded in a WAY too loud voice, “No, we’re from Long Island. This is our first time here.”

“NO! You don’t say! We’re from the Upper East Side in The City!” yelled back the other woman. “What brings you here?”

“Our daughter is at a sleep-over so we decided to get out of the hustle and bustle and stay at some place rural. We’re staying up the road in a new Marriott. The concierge told us about this place and this charming, little town.”

OK, the last statement nearly made my head spin around! Well, at the very least it made Matt and I nearly choke up our coffee. Go someplace rural? You’re 16 miles from downtown NYC you fool! Now, maybe it’s me. I grew up in Dallas, Texas but 16 miles outside of Dallas is still suburbia, full of shopping malls, chain-restaurants and neighborhoods. Hardly, rural. Now we live 16 miles outside of NYC with the greatest population in the U.S. How could 16 miles outside of The City possibly be rural? You can see The City from our town!

Before I continue with this story, let me make one point clear. I wasn’t snooping into the conversation of these two couples. This restaurant does such a bustling business in the mornings that it creates a buzz that makes it hard to concentrate on what the person across from you at your table is saying much less people at nearby tables. But, somehow these two couples managed to speak at decibels above the crowd. They spoke like they had headphones on blasting music at the highest volume while trying to have a conversation.

After sharing that they were on a rural getaway, the other couple shared that they crossed the George Washington Bridge this morning (shock, from the other couple…they made a day trip to NJ? There are plenty of hotels nearby) to bring their daughter to take her ACT test at the high school in our village.

They then began, and I will try to be accurate, possibly dumbest exchange I ever had to listen to---

Upper East Side Lady: “This town is soooooooo cute. I thought it would be goombas with mullets and trucks.”

Long Island Lady: “I know. It seems nice. Not like Jersey at all.”

UES Lady: “I can’t believe how many NY plates I have seen parked here downtown. I wonder how they found this place. We only found it because we had to come for the ACT.”

Long Island Lady: “We had heard this is a nice place to live and a nice town. A friend of ours came for a weekend.”

UES Lady: “When we were on line to register our daughter for the ACT someone said that this school district is one of the best in the nation. Can you believe that?”

UES Lady’s Husband: “I thought the whole state was like Newark.”

Let me state again…we are 16 miles from Times Square in NYC in one of the most densely populated and wealthiest county in the U.S. We aren’t rural and we aren’t stereotypical NJ. I mean, I have come across hayseed hillbillies when I lived and taught in Texas. It’s a big state and many people I met and taught had never left Texas and had a very limited and narrow “view” of the world. But, we live in NYC suburbia. Surely, that limited a view could not exist here. Well, those two couples proved it does.

I know I live in a state that is stereotyped. Heck, when Matt told me he was being transferred to NYC and that he wanted to look for houses in NJ, I nearly flipped! NJ! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! How can I ever tell my friends and family I lived in NJ? The disgrace! I love our village now and I love NJ. Sure, if you drive up the NJ Turnpike and watch The Sopran*s you might get the wrong idea. Two years after moving to NJ I still find myself fighting the stereotype and saying to myself, “I can’t believe this is NJ!”

So, for those of you who think you know NJ, and would find yourselves in our village eating breakfast and feeling compelled to share with the entire restaurant your shock at the real NJ, read this first (I found this in a discussion thread about the real NJ).

• When the rest of the world thinks your home is all gigantic hair and hypodermics on the beach, you kind of have to find a way to laugh about it. Not every residential dwelling in the state faces onto the NJ Turnpike. Look, people: owning The Sopran*s on DVD and really liking the song "Thunder Road" does not equal "knowing anything about Jersey," and when you think it does, you annoy the natives.



• "Joisey" is a Brooklyn pronunciation. We don't talk like that. Don't say it that way, or write it that way. Ever.



• A North Jersey accent is like a NY accent and is a bit different from a South Jersey accent which favors a Philly flair.



• Contrary to popular belief, it's not called "the Garden State" as a joke. Jersey is something like fifty percent arable land. The Pine Barrens is a forest, and it's big. The Watchung Reservation is horse trails and trees with a road running through it, and it's a fifteen-minute bike ride to a U.S. Open championship golf course. If all you see is the view out the window on the Parkway, yeah, it looks like a concrete hell, but the state is really pretty. Go through the Delaware Water Gap sometime; it's a nice drive.



• Newark isn't Mayberry, but it isn't the gold standard of dangerous crappy urban blight, either. It has a spiffy arts center and great restaurants, and a minor-league team right near the train.



• The Mafia is not something most Jerseyans deal with in their day-to-day lives.



• Bon Jovi is really not as strongly identified with Jersey, in a weird way. It's more of a time-period thing than a Jersey thing -- like, we'll happily claim Bruce and Sinatra, but mention Bon Jovi to us and we're kind of like, "Oh, this is about the hair, isn't it. Okay, fine." We didn't really decide he was A Jersey Emblem; everyone else did, because of the perm. I mean, yeah, we all listened to their music, because everyone did, because they had two huge albums in a row and were all over MTV.



• Big-hair is like Bon Jovi in that it wasn't a function of Jersey; it was a function of the eighties. When the eighties ended, so did that hair.



• The fact that Thomas Edison is from NJ and Princeton U. is in NJ doesn't seem to count for anything. Come on, people. At least try to see the good.



• A Jersey beefsteak tomato is the apotheosis of tomato-ness. If you don't agree, you've never eaten one in season.