TWO IN A BED

Back then I had a friend named Ruthie who complained about her grandmother all the time. Everyday it was something and it wasn’t good. See, Ruthie was spoiled cause she was an only child and because she was cute with wavy hair and she had dimples like Shirley Temple only she was ten and always talking about something her grandmother did to make her life miserable.
"...and she smells!"
"You mean she don’t take a bath?"
" Of course my grandma takes a bath!" Ruthie said irritated that I could even asked something stupid like that.
"She wears so much baby powder she makes me sneeze. If it’s not that, the fumes from her Shalimar gives me swimmin’ in the head. Sometimes I can’t half breathe!"
"Well at least she don’t stink stink."
"Yeah, but she snores."
‘Real loud?"
"What do you think!"
That Ruthie could sure talk about her grandmother. I guess when you got to sleep two in a bed even sisters and brothers fall out. But at least with them, you can fight, push and shove ‘til finally you get yo’ way. But when your grandmother do something you don’t like, ain’t nothing you can do. Cause you got to respect your elders. I think it’s in the Bible somewhere. Thou shalt respect old people or else the devil will get’cha.
"I keep askin’ my mother when she gone leave. But Mama say she ain’t gone leave cause she too old to stay by herself. So I’m stuck with an old lady in my bed. Used to could do what I want in my own room, now that she’s in it, I’m the one visiting in my own room.
Ruthie and I were on our way to school. The afternoon the sun was cool as lemon popsicle, and morning traffic with the sound of impatient car horns pushed people along the bogged down lanes. We were passing by Big Jam’s Diner wanting to go in and get some fries but we couldn’t cause when you buy anything at Big Jam’s it’s greasy and stink so strong people in Detroit can smell it. But them fries be good though and you can see kids at lunchtime lined up around the block with their sweaty change in their hands trying to get fed before the school bell call’em back to school. I have seen kids crying cause the bell rang and they had to miss those fries. So all we could do was wait ‘til lunchtime, which seemed like a thousand years away. Just the thought of them fries made my stomach growl and I had eaten a big bowl of oatmeal for breakfast.
So we kept walking and Ruthie kept complaining and I just skipped cracks while Ruthie stepped on them on purpose. But it wasn’t her mother’s back she hoped she’d break. She sho’ was mad about her grandmother.
Now Ma Pearl was eighty something if she was a day. Had more cracks in her face than a crushed egg with a hammer. She had the habit is clicking out her false teeth. All of a sudden while you were talking to her, she shoot them things out and in so fast! But she was nice. Real nice. Liked to tell stories which I liked but she couldn’t tell none to Ruthie.
"I don’t want to hear nothin’ about the old days either. All that bent down Negro stuff where they scared of the white man and be sayin’, Yessah, boss! She be always wanting to tell me stuff like that cause she say I ought to know how things was. My Mama told her don’t be telling me stories like that. We the New Negroes now. We stand right up and look white folks in the eye. You don’t hear no Dr. King bowing and scraping," she said.
"But they do be spray everybody else with water and beatin’em up and stuff. And it’s because of stories yo’ grandmother be talking about," I said. Like I told you, I liked hearing about the old days-about where we come from. I guess Old folks ain’t got nothin’ much in the way of money but they are rich in the history of ourselves and I loved when they stepped back and pulled the sheet off of time. I liked that Ruthie’s grandmother liked to sing them old songs too, you know the ones that’s all about feelings and ain’t many words to remember. I cried a time or two cause some of the stories about those days made me thankful I got to be a new Negro.
"Back in my time, colored kids couldn’t go to a good school. We had fallin’ down shacks-me and my brother Jo-Jo had a coal room where the sound of coal chunks just be rolling down the shute while they were reading books so old the pages crumbled in our hands."
"All the same Mama is sick of her too. But you know she Daddy’s Mama and he loves his Mama and that’s why him and Mama fight all the time. Cause since she been livin’ with us there are two women tryin’ to rule the house and Mama don’t like that one bit, cause you cannot separate a boy from his Mama. My Mama want to send her to the old folks home but Daddy ain’t nothin’ wrong with his Mama. She got good sense and she strong as an ox. Then he said sending his mother away would kill her dead."
"Yeah," I said. It was the same way with my grandmother. She’d be just fine until you said something about an old folks home and then she’d start crying and saying, "Jesus, don’t never send me to the Po’ House."
My mother promised her no matter if she gets the Old Timers disease (Alzheimer’s) and cain’t remember nothin’ she’d still wouldn’t have to go there."
Anyway, that’s how it was for a long time wiht Ruthie complainin’ about her grandmother until one day, her grandmother got sick and they had to rush her to the hospital. Doctor said it was a stroke. Ma Burton didn’t come back home again.
Three days later she was dead. Days later, they had her funeral. There were so many flowers you could barely see the casket that was white with gold handles. Ma Burton’s son sure stretched his mother out nice. She lay there like a queen in gold brocade. So many folks turned out that it surprised Ruthie and her Mom. Folks they didn’t know. Folks they didn’t know she knew. Folks who loved that old woman just like me, Mama and Daddy did. Folks from down the South, New York, California. They came by bus, train and automobile and filled the pews and stood along the walls in their Sunday best, their faces and the faces of their children soaked with tears. And I was thinking how does somebody so small live a life so big that that many people be loving you that hard that they they’ll put off work and play and school just to send you off the good and perfect way.
Pastor Hayes stood in his great black robe and gave her the kind of eulogy that set folks sobbing and then he swept up through sorrow and peaked his sermon on joy. He said he had a dream that night before and the Lord showed him a vision of Ma Burton strutting down the streets of gold and the Church started shouting. And the tambourines started jingling , organ, piano and drums set the place rockin’ to its foundation.
When it was time to view the body one last time, Ruthie’s mother, decked out in a black velvet dress with a hat so wide that people behind her couldn’t see round it, ripped off her rope of white pearls, dropped to her knees and wailed: "Why, Lord! Don’t take my Mama! Please, Lord. Don’t do it!" But everybody including Ruthie who held her up and took her back to her seat, knew it was all for show.
The thing was with all that weeping and wailing I looked over at Ruthie who sat between her mother and father staring at that casket and she didn’t shed one single tear. Her eyes weren’t even red and never once did she do anything in the way of showing sorrow. It kinda made me angry to watch that stony face. Later as we all stood at the gravesite, Ruthie’s father gave her a rose to lay on her grandmother’s grave. She walked straight as a broomstick gathering dirt on the tips of her new her black paten leather shoes and tossed it in without feeling.
Weeks later, I was still angry and I blurted out: "Well, I guess you glad now that you got your room to yourself again. Happy now you got your bed all to yourself?"
"...yeah," said Ruthie all quiet like. I turned to look at her cause her voice sounded so strange.
We were walking back home from school and kids came pouring out the sides of the school building like marbles from bag.
Cory Thomas, the boy I liked in fifth grade was walking with his friends and laughing loud enough to draw attention to himself that he was walking with Kimberly Jones. Hmph, just cause she was light skinned and had long hair. I almost spit! He struttin’ down the Boulevard like he was a full time rooster! He got a big head anyway and I was thinking just cause he got hazel eyes don’t make him so handsome!
"I miss her, Punkin like nobody’s business," said Ruthie.
"Huh?"
"Didn’t think I would. Mama miss her too but she don’t say nothing. I guess nobody would believe her anyway. And my Daddy sometimes he just break down and cry out of nowhere. Sometimes all of us at the same time be missing that old lady," she said and then she howled like something was wrong with her stomach and tears came belching out so fast she was choking on them.
"Ruthie!"
"I don’t know why I should be cryin’. All that time I kept prayin’ to God to make her go away and then she went and now I swear if I could have that old lady stinking of baby powder, smothering me with the smell of Shalimar, I would be so grateful."
Ruthie broke down then and just sagged on the bench at the bus stop. I didn’t know what to do so I just stood there watching people watch us, shrugging my shoulders like a fool.
"Hey, girl! People are staring at us!"
"How come I didn’t know, Punkin?"
"Know what?"
"How much I’d miss that old woman?"
"Huh?"
"...we used to whisper in the dark."
"Whisper what?"
"Silly things. Girls things. She say it was the way of women things."
"Like what?"
"She used to tell me stories about when Daddy was a little boy and all kinds of stuff about the way girls should act when they’re around boys. Sometimes we’d be giggling so Daddy would have to knock on the door and tell us to settle down cause we both had to get some sleep."
Ruthie smiled then. "And we both liked sour prickles. Remember, I used to buy two?"
"I thought you was just being greedy."
"Naw, she loved’em. Our lips be all puckered up. Me and her both be stinkin’."
"She loved you, you know," I said.
"I was mean to her. I said such a lotta mean things."
"Ain’t nobody Jesus," I said sitting down next to her and raking my sweater sleeve on her face . "He died. The rest of us in just wrestlin’ the devil to get to heaven."
The bus drew up and opened its doors but I waved it away.
"It’s the craziest thing," said Ruthie swiping her face. "I can still remember some of them stories she used to tell."
"Me too."
"Like the one where-"
"Yeah, that’s the one about the old man that used to eat onions and-"
"That’s the one!"
We just started laughing. And soon we were walking toward home again with the sound of jump ropes cracking like whips against the cement pavement while girls jumped double Dutch in rhyme. We skipped pass boys thundering by with balloons trapped in their bicycles wheels, and watched the sun dancing off the chrome of automobiles and zig zagged our way pass overworked daddies loping up the Boulevard like weary elephants, their happy children yanking at their calloused hands and dragging them the rest of the way home.
We talked about Ruthie’s grandmother all the way, remembering her stories, skipping and smiling and singing that old lady songs. And I tell you she missed that old woman all her life.
　
　
copyright 2009 Venice Johnson

COMPANY IS COMING

It's been at least six years since I entertained at my home. It's been a mess. An Oprah show for sure. Thank God for the few years who have been willing to strap on hip boots and walk through shit to save me.
I lost my way after my mother died. I lost what it was I was going to do to change the world. I lost the will to care about and for myself, which is amazing since before then I was 200 pounds overweight and fighting to stay connected-to find my way out of a hundred sparks of depression. But Mom dying while I watched her trying to breathe and yelling into the phone for 911 and remembering the rule if they are breathing on their own let them-or was that it-I know I paniced because I didn't know whether to touch or not. The paramedics got there and worked on her. I knew she was dead then, but they didn't declare it. Like a zombie I drove behind the wheel to the hospital as they took her out and wheeled her into Emergency. I called people. Friedns came-Mary first-then she went and got my family... well...that's for another time.

As I said company is coming and I am putting on a BBQ. I realize it means a lot to me because I am finally willing to go amongst people again. To feed them and smile and it not be work or obligation. I invited my friends and family and people I care about. Maybe most will show up, maybe some will get waylaid, but I am doing something, good.

I love people. When I was lost I was afraid of them. I thought them all to be parasites because they all seemed to be takers and I am run out of blood. Now, in recent days, years under exile, I find true friends-givers. They always were, but I had lost my way. My vision blurred by disappointment, heartbreak and death. My greatness defection was my anger at God for not coming and saving me and the people I cared about. I started rail at Him.
When Mama died...I remember a scripture that reads-and I don't know where...in the year that Uzziah died I saw the Lord.

Well, there will be ribs and chicken, brocolli and nondles, shrimp and tea and people. PEOPLE ONCE AGAIN in my house. People laughing and meeting each other. New friends and old friends and people who are passing by.
I'm going to be 60 years old. Seems like I've been down under for the last 40 years-30 maybe. I read somewhere that He'll give you back the years the locust and the cankerworm have eaten. It means that all the time that has been stripped from you. All the life you've lost will be given back to you. It means I am reborn again-to believe-to care about the world-to pass on..

*****

Everyone is gone and the Grilling Man is still turning ribs and chicken, though everyone has gone to bed. I told him there was no more need to girll. Everyone had gone home. Possibly asleep already. It was nearly midnight and as long as the ambers were hot he would be there. I left him there, man among the cinders and doused the light.

*******
This morning the janitor comes to say my shower is linking into the basement apartment. Indeed, the only way to get something fixed is that to have a flood or disaster. Maybe they will fix my leaking shower. But I've learned not to freak out about things.

This morning I read in The Word in which it talked about "Love". For the first time I began to understand that you make a commitment to live your life a certain way-the word is commitment. You make a decision that you're the one who's going to be the "Lover" and YOU do that whether anyone else gets it or not. YOU DECIDE to FORGIVE. YOU DECIDE TO HEAL. YOU DECIDE TO KEEP HOPE ALIVE IN YOUR HEART WHEN IT ALL TURNS BAD.
The YOU in everything is both greatness and failure. Triumph or Defeat. In that word is everything.

It was a good BBQ for me. Not all my old friends met with the new. But my long time actor and friend got the award she long deserved. I was glad to see her-my old friend Barb back from a surgery. My family who were in one place, not since the memorial for my mother.

I think you know what it means to lose your way. One minute you are unshakeable and know everything and the next you don't care whether you'll ever get out of bed.

HIGH SCHOOL PLANET

For some people high school is a place and torment or a place of ascension. I mean, you can go and remember all the awful things that happened to you in the locker room before gym. The bullies that made your pain their music. The snobs who let you know how much everything cost and how little yours did; the gossips who started the rumor and then came to you as a friend, the ones that made everyday coming to school a living nightmare because it was in their cruel minds to make somebody afraid.
Or you could have been the cheerleader with the petulant boobs that had all the jocks in school salivating during a game, captain of the basketball team who kissed and told about his every conquest behind the school bleachers; the coolest guy who didn’t need a school book only the way he looked at a girl that made her want to be his, the homecoming queen who sat on her throne with a tiara in her hair waving to her subjects. Whoever you are or were in that world, it’s the only planet that matters for bus ride to school bell. For four years even though there is a world beyond those echoing halls of learning, you learn really fast, that whatever you do or will ever do, how you fare in this world will change your future for the good or it the bad, will haunt you forever.
Somehow I knew that in my freshman year. I thought if I just keep my head down and stay invisible four years could go fast. Daddy was long gone and everything in my life was measured with how much pain I could manage and still walk and breathe. My mother had lost the first and only man she ever loved. For a woman like her to have opened up her heart for just a tiny bit, his leaving her doomed her forever in a tomb of isolation. She would not risk her heart again.
Me and Mama were foolish enough to believe that Daddy’s exit would not impact our four year old Tina. We thought she would not be remember because she was so young. So her grieving heart wasn’t managed and her feelings of abandonment plague her now, her fear to trust or love anyone. And me always longing to fill in the gap of missing Daddy, I filled myself with too much food and still lived a life that was empty.
How many fathers walk away not knowing the pain they leave behind. The questions a child asks himself: "What did I do to make him leave?" And some one will say you didn’t do anything but inside you always know- they didn’t just leave Mama, they left you too.
It didn’t take long to find out who the most popular were-the most beautiful, the more affluent, the cruel one, the kind ones, the ones like me, hiding.
I met my friend, Angie, that first year. Her mother was a social climber who’d vowed that her daughter was going to be homecoming queen before she entered school. But Angie wasn’t what her mother wanted her to be. She was shy and nervous and afraid like me.
I don’t think I could have survived on that planet of pungent air and the high pitched shrieks of gym shoes on high varnished floors, or the world changing outside if it had not been for Angie. In four years Malcolm was slain, King was assassinated and Bobby was felled by another bullet. The 60s was a bloody decade. It was the bloodiest of times and we endured it all without the protector we have come to count on for air itself.
　
Remember how you cried on that last day, as your tassel stuck to your wet face-as you said goodbye to the teachers who made your life a living hell and the ones who inspired you-the ones that made you believe you could change the world?
We left our teachers who had said a thousand farewells to kids with faces like ours for the next few decades. Teachers who would remember or forget us over time- preserve the child we were or thought we were, forever. Years later when curiosity draws us back to that class reunion-to see those faces some twenty years later- that teacher who looks the same, who says you haven’t changed at all, will look into your worldly-worn face and find the you you’ve once been and smile. Somehow..it still riddles me how, Mama and Tina and me, survived the days...when Daddy left us.

THE BABY BOOM GENERATION

The statistics show that there were 76,000,000 babies born in the Post WWII period from 1946 to 1964. I was born in 1949, right at the beginning of what was to be the most amazing generation of anytime. If not by its sheer numbers, but by what it was to witness, change and uproot.
This generation saw the end of horse and buggies, ice men and rag men. A man on the Moon. The end of crank phones with operators to Princess phones to cell phones. From computers in huge buildings with thousands of people to a computer at home with someone sitting alone in the dark at a glowing screen.
We are a part of the old and a part of the new. We are shaped by traditional beliefs and yet rebellion to those same traditions which we embrace now as though they are and were the most perfect thing.
When we were growing up we saw only what was wrong with our parents. Believed they were somehow the monsters who held us back. Years later, parents ourselves, we want our children to think of us as friends. Later we realized that friends don't often make good parents and we became the "monsters" we once dreaded. And while standing in their shoes wondered how they managed it all because for all their monstrous ways, we turned out pretty decent human beings. Think about it, we changed the world because we believed we could. They had a lot to do with it. As they told us their stories of the cruel war, as they showed us the numbers stamped into their skin, as they taught us to fight for what we believed in, they were as much a part of the change as we were. One day I looked up at my mother and found her to be the wisest woman I ever knew. Then all the things wrong with her weren't so bad anymore. In the end we were bachelorettes, eating Chinese food at Christmas and celebrating the New Year with Spanish rice, chocolate milk and Casablanca. I realized my dream of truly knowing my mother came in the latter part of our lives when I didn't have to pick at what was wrong and she didn't have to be right. I learned to end every brief argument with "You're absolutely right. After all, you're my mother." That always stopped the fight and we'd laugh. And I am so glad I was born at a time when you can make your life-reboot your life-be born again.
What an amazing time to live. Being 60 will have its challenges, I know. But every Boomer knows that old Dylan poem: "Don't go gentle into that goodnight."

TELEVISION STARTED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

"You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent!"
"Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is."
"My bologna has a first new, it's O-s-c-a-r. My bologna has a second name, it's M-a-y-e-r. Oh, I love to eat it everyday and if you ask me why I'll say: "Because Oscar Mayer has a way with b-o-l-o-n-g-a."
"Back when the West was very young there lived a man named Master-son. He wore a cane and derby hat-they called him 'Bat', Bat Master-son."
"The Rifleman!" Pow! Pow!
"Have Gun Will Travel: reads the card of a man. A knight without armour in a savage land..."
"Look up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane!"

"Ya'll, get up now! It's time to wash up. We got Tang for breakfast!

Fuzzy heads pop up. Feet scrambling for furry slippers and kids smash into each other on their way to the bathroom. To be the first to drink the same drink, the astronauts drink.

All around the country, images flashed at the same time. White or black or any other color, we were driven by the jingles and the songs on that small screen. We didn't know it at the time, but television brought their version of the world to us. We believed everything it told us because we lived in shacks and the projects and in mansions and the suburbs. What we knew about the rest of the world was what that screen brought us.
The truth is, Madison Avenue was bringing us the image of the world that said we would be loved if we bought this car or that. Commercials told us what soap to buy and how halitois would ruin our social life. Those guys were sitting in their rooms, proposing ideas, helping to create shows to sell products, but it all came out dreams of something better.
It was gentle manipulation. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was my favorite movie. It showed every national holiday. It made me believe that every man was my brother. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Frank Capra created indelible images.

In the beginning they told us to dream of world where all people were equal. They told us: this is was time to embrace new things. Television gave us all the same primer lessons and gave us all the same common holidays. It was through television, we were galvanized as a country when we saw dogs tearing the flesh of children, fire hoses stopping blacks from marching. Suddenly, it wasn't just black people. White people, Jews and anybody else who couldn't sit still from the side lines and watch joined in protest. Television kept a record of our involvement. We went from our living rooms into the world. Once outside, we saw other things that needed changing.
It was television that helped my parents elect the first young, Irish Catholic President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And it was on television that broadcast the feed of his assassination. We saw the blood on Jackie's dress as LBJ was sworn in. And all over this country, it was black. Day was night for a time. It was the end of Camelot. We would turn Jack into a god. Then King. Then Bobby.
Then television said it was time to move on...Death didn't sale many products...

We saw the Beatles land and toss their mushroom hair. Negroes began appearing on television without dogs and firehoses. This upped the ratings as The Temptations, James Brown and over half of Motown, dressed for style and flash guested on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Those good images made us dream we were finally a part of something bigger than our one room-our poverty-our pain.
Our dreams grew. And every other skinny girl with grapefruit eyes, tried to scrap up two friends and be Diana Ross and the Supremes.
There was Motown and Dick Clark and American Bandstand with that one Negro couple.

Every outrage we ever felt in those days-every fuzzy feeling of Christmas and brotherhood. Every moment of art and our dreams came from television.

If it wasn't for that little bitty screen and the images and songs that shaped us, we might not have an African-American President. It was television that helped us believe it was possible. It was television that showed us 40 some years later, our faces wet, a rainbow sea of faces, sobbing as we listened to his speech and believed in ourselves once again. We were one all over the world and television-that curse and that blessed thing that allowed me, miles away, to drop to my knees and thank God.

To hear my grandmother she has saved more marriages than an expert with what she called "mother wit".
"Mother what!"
"Mother wit. It’s what some people are born wit’. They just know how to handle things by instinct."
"Is that good, Grandma?" I said my mouth stuffed with chitterlings and cole slaw. If you don’t know it, chitterlins is the intestines of a pig that gets boiled until tender then eaten with hot sauce, cornbread and cole slaw. It stinks something awful but they taste good. Let’s put it this way, white folks eat kidneys and colored folks eat chitt’lins. I blinked at Grandmother’s conversation.
"Of course, it’s good! Without mother wit you get into more trouble than good thinkin’ can keep you out."
"Oh," I said, but I didn’t know what she meant. I never did. She always talked about being a woman and I had a chest flat as a Pepsi after it ran out of fizz. I liked boys but I didn’t have much hair so all I could do is look at most boys and wish. Besides everytime I got close to one I’d start sweatin’ like a pig who smells a Negro holiday.
"The reason I keep tryin’ to school you is because I don’t want you to grow up to be no foolish woman."
"What?" I said pushing my plate forward for more of everything. I watched her go to the pot and put a small strand of chit’lin in my plate and cut a finger tip of cornbread. I frowned when Grandmother started rationing the food cause I could eat ‘til the Rapture come.
"Baby, one day you gone start likin’ boys, and they gone start liking you, sso you better get smart good. Cause if you don’t watch it, they’ll be tryin’ to get into yo’ pocketbook."
"Huh!"
"Child, cain’t nobody teach you nothing! Yo’ pocketbook," she said and pointing to my kooshi.
"Oh!" I said as she slapped a hunk of butter on my cornbread and I was in heaven. Let her tell her story. I didn’t mind one bit."Yes, you can teach me, Gran, only I don’t get you too good bein’ as I am ain’t got the woman’s call."
"Just cause you ain’t had yo’ period don’t mean you got to be no fool!"
"No, ma’am."
"Well, listen about when you get and marry a good man."
"Grandma! I’ll be a hundred before then."
"Shush up and listen. One day you gone get married and I don’t want you to be no foolish woman especially if you got the kind of man that works hard, comes home and ain’t stingy wit’cha."
I licked butter from between my fingers and listened to Granny like she was tee vee.
"There was this woman worked on my job. Foolish woman. Had a man-a good man-didn’t do nothin’ but work, come home, take off his shoes, eat and go to bed. She complained that his feet stank something awful."
"His feet be so loud the people next door knock on the door with foot spray," she'd say. "Now, baby, I had to laugh at that."

SATURDAYS @ GRAND'S HOUSE

"Grandmother, I want my eggs sunny side up with the yolks wet enough to have my toast take a bath in it," I said one sunny Saturday morning. Grandmother would wake early to feed me and then send me in her room and I’d play old 78 records until it was time for lunch.
"Child, you are too particular!"
"It’s yo’ fault, "I’d say. "Cause it was you that spoiled me."
"Tee hee. I sho’ did. Child what am I gone do with you!" she’d say and be so tickled, that old lady would try to cook my eggs just that way. Sometimes they came out perfect and sometimes those yolks were as hard as rubber balls. And she’d start again. But sometimes she had no patience for my silliness and told me so.
"Child things ain’t gone always turn out the way you want them and that is the truth and you ought to know it before you get out in the world and find out the hard way," she’d say.
"Aw, Gran, why you got to say something like that. You the one got me eating my eggs like that. Is it my fault that you cook them so good."
"Tee hee!"
"Don’t go thinkin’ you know me that well. I mean what I say. You remind me of that story of that woman I heard tell a long time ago."
"What story?" I said gobbling down my rubbery eggs with a side of crispy bacon and hot buttered toast. When Grandma got ready to tell a story she let that low Baritone voice sink to a hush.
"Well once upon a time and this is a true true story there was a beautiful girl who was very poor. But because she was beautiful, she had a whole lot of men coming after her.
"How many?"
"A duke, a Lord-"
"The Lord!"
"I said ‘a’ Lord!" she said frowning this ain’t no Jesus story. Now hush up and eat and let me tell my story."
"I bet it’s gone end up tryin’ to teach me something," I said not irritated at all. I liked my grandmother’s stories even though they all seemed to circle around women doing something wrong and how they was supposed to make it right. You see, my grandmother was an authority on how women were supposed to be.