The Devil Made Me Do It!

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  Pay-back is a bitch—especially when it is from your husband!  Say for instance, if on a three-day, rainy weekend, you get a little carried away and coerce your man into “cuddling and relaxing” with you while watching a celluloid marathon of “Steel Magnolias,” “Beaches,” and “The Notebook,” you may end up having an issue.  On top of the estrogen-soaked weekend, if you end up drinking three times the amount of merlot that you should, and hysterically sobbing into your Hubbie’s arms, you better know that eventually, any man, but especially “White and Wonderful (WW),” is going to extract a heavy toll for being inundated with that many chicks’ flicks and its aftermath.  You won’t know when or how or where you’ll be required to pay up—you’ll just know that it will cost you dearly, and your man of 34 years will demand that for every one “chicks’-flick tearjerker” he had to suffer through, two “getting-kicked-in-the-man-marbles” movies will be required as pay-back.

“The Notebook” (old and young Allie and Noah)||source: jackiefelger.blogspot.com||Google Image

“When Allie questions Noah about when she won’t be able to remember anything anymore, he reassures her that he will never leave her. She then asks him if he thinks their love for each other is strong enough to ‘take them away together.’ He states that he thinks their love could do anything. After telling each other that they love one another, they both go to sleep in Allie’s bed. The next morning, a nurse finds them in bed together, having both died in each other’s arms.”— (The Notebook) Wikipedia

As I collapsed into WW’s arms (as I do every time I see The Notebook), sobbing about the sacrificial love of Allie and Noah being “just like our love, Honey”—as rivers of snot dripped unapologetically down my husband’s arm while he comforted me—I heard him mutter a resolution under his breath that sent chills down my spine.   “Okay, I’ve had it up to here with vagina dialogues.  I know I’m a Renaissance man, but there’s only so much even I can take.   We’re going to the movies next weekend, and I get to choose what we see.  We’ll start with the Avengers in the IMAX Theater in 3-D with 12,000 watts of sound!  When we’re finished, we’ll grab some quick sustenance from Five Guys (two bacon cheeseburgers with everything and a large bag of greasy fries) and then back to the movie theater to see Battleship!  Yes siree, you betcha—a day of testosterone without an estrogen tear in sight.  And while I’m on a roll, I may pop in the latest Mission Impossible DVD when we get back home to cap off the day in an action-packed surround-sound coma.  Julia, Bette, and Nicholas, I am alpha male—hear me roar!”

******

I can’t say I remembered much of The Avengers except for the excellent “eye candy” of all those amazing male bodies, because the sensory overload made me so incredibly dizzy, I got sick to my stomach.  I am one of the few people in the world who just doesn’t get the joke about 3-D.  At one point, I had to doze off just to survive it all, and that is when art began to imitate life and The Avengers movie morphed into a courtroom scene with the Devil as the plaintiff and me as the judge.

The Avengers Movie Poster||produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures||Wikipedia Image

BAILIFF:  All rise. Hear ye, hear ye, the Celestial Court for the District of Mankind is in session—the Honorable Judge EeTe presiding. All having business before this honorable court draw near, give attention, and you shall be heard. You may be seated.

JUDGE EeTe:  Well, hello, “Lucy”—long time, no see.  What part of the Earth have you been roaming about, and what people group have you been trying to devour as of late?

LUCY:  My name is Lucifer to you, Judge.  I don’t utilize nicknames—you know that.  It’s not becoming to my stature.  How would you like it if I called you, “Ellie,” Judge EeTe?

JUDGE EeTe:  You can call me anything you want, sorry-ass devil; it will only diminish me if I answer to it. And I sho-nuff don’t answer to you. You and I settled that argument long ago when I rendered the “N” word powerless over me, and my addictions null and void.  So, what brings you to my neck of the woods, Beelzebub (a.k.a. Luuu-ccy)?

LUCY:  Again:  MY NAME IS LU-CI-FER!  Don’t make me lose my cool or you’ll regret it.  Now for the matter at hand:  I’ve come to file a law suit against The Avengers for tarnishing my brand and for theft of intellectual property.

JUDGE EeTe:  Really, now!  Well, first of all, you have no authority here, so you better not lose anything—let alone your temper.  I am in charge in this courtroom.  Second of all, who do you think you are–the Incredible Hulk? Ha!

Source: Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner & The Hulk in The Avengers|Marvel Comics||screenrant.com

LUCY:  Listen—don’t fuck with my name or my game, because if you go “there,” then I’ll go all “N” word kamikaze on you here.  Are you feelin’ me, Shortee?

JUDGE EeTe:  Oh, my God, you’re a hoot!  Once again, Lucy, your threats are not an issue since my real name is “Awesome Woman, Child of God”—that is the only name I recognize and the only name I respond to with any sort of passion or identity.  The rest is like water on a duck’s back to me.  But since we’re on the subject of identity, why do you look like Newt Gingrich?  That’s an odd persona to assume, especially if you’re trying to appeal to my good graces—not!  I know that the writer, Nelson DeMille, once said that “somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face,” but Luce, this is a bit much.  If you want to get to me, “Wormwood,” why didn’t you appear as Nick Fury from The Avengers, ‘cause this Big Mama sure could tap that on any given day.  You hear what I’m sayin’, Beelzie?

“Nick Fury” (Samuel L. Jackson)|The Avengers||photo from goodgirlsgonegeek.com

Devil “posing” as Newt Gingrich||Source: littlegreenfootballs.com

LUCY:  Ugh!  Because I had to appear in some sort of human casing, so I chose the human skin of a heart that most resembles mine.  That old bastard had me possessing his sorry ass with the first five words of one of his quotes awhile back:  “I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it. I am now a famous person. I represent real power.”  As soon as Newt said those quotes among all the other idiotic words dripping with buckets of hubris from my realm, I said to Siri:  “Siri, make a note: ‘Newt is my kind of guy!  Next time I appear in the US, remind me to assume Newt’s persona.’”  So, here I am, Biotch, I’m Newt and I’m proud!  Are you going to hear my case or not?

JUDGE EeTe:  Knock yourself out, “wanna-be Newt,” but you might want to keep it short.  I’m expecting Jesus to show up any minute, because where I am he’s not far behind, and you really can’t hold your own against that force.

LUCY:  Oh, good grief!  Fine!  I’ve come to get my due.  According to your own Gallup poll, up to 70% of Americans who “believe in God” think I exist, but only 22% of those who said religion is “not very” important said they believe in me.  And yet, you humans have been butchering my rep (believers and non-believers alike) since time immemorial.   You either ignore my existence (the Jews don’t have any overt concept of a “devil”—how is that possible given the “evil” that came against them in the middle of the last century?), or the Muslims and the Christians label each other as me just to win the argument or war du jour.  How demeaning is that?  And your storytellers either make me a punch line as in the movie, Bedazzled, or I get an offstage role as “The Other” in The Avengers.

I get third billing, for Christ’s sake.  I’m not Satan, not The Devil, not Beelzebub, not Lucifer, not the “snake in the garden,” and not even Goethe’s Mephistopheles which I can somewhat tolerate—but I’m “The Other” in the movie.   And to add insult to injury, that damn “Other,”—what little glimpse I got of him in the last frame of the film—is ugly as sin and loses the war to subjugate all of Earth.

I’m telling you “Ellie”  (you see, two can play this game), the only Faustian movie that ever did me justice was The Devil’s Advocate.  Now that was a role to sink one’s teeth into.  Didn’t Al Pacino do some representin’?  Al was a spitting image of me, if I do say so myself.  That said I want to bring a lawsuit against The Avengers to recoup monies owed for compromising my brand.  There, is that succinct enough for you?

Asgardian Loki (servant of “The Other”) who wants to take over Earth but meets his demise at the hands of The Avengers||Pinterest|9gag.com

JUDGE EeTe:  “Sneaky-snake,” you could use an anger management program, you know that?  And you do know The Avengers aren’t real, right?  It’s just macho Marvel Comic crap with a bunch of guys punching each other out and a couple buxom women thrown into the mix as “eye candy” in skin tight flight/fight suits.

LUCY:  I don’t give a flying fuck!  I demand that they pay me a cut of the $441.8 million that Disney says they are going to make on this film with a public disclaimer that “The Other” is not me, the Devil.   It’s actually Marvel Comic’s super-villain Thanos, and he’s such a freakin’ loser!   Did you see that creepy smile he gave the audience at the very end (if you blinked, you missed it) intimating that he’d return to fight another day.  That’s my fucking M.O.  I’m telling you now; The Avengers either better pay up or have hell to pay from me!

East 9^th Street in Judge EeTe’s home town (Cleveland, Ohio) used as double for New York’s 42^nd street for scenes of final battle between The Avengers, the Asgardian Loki, and the Chitauri army ||Wikipedia image

******

I woke up when Loki (the bad guy) came crashing to the ground, and I had the oddest feeling that the underlying premise of The Avengers might make an intriguing blog topic, but I couldn’t quite place my finger on the pulse of why it would, due to a massive headache from the blaring speakers.  As WW and I left the theater, we ventured into our usual “Siskel and Ebert” banter:

WW:  So, did you like the movie?  How many thumbs up would you give it?

Me:  Heh?  I’ve lost my hearing from the wall of sound.  What did you say?

WW:  Did you like the 3-D features?

ME:  What?  Do I want any feeding?  No, I’m a little nauseous from that 3-D dive Iron Man took from the top of Stark Towers.  I sure loved the men in tights, though.  Hubba-hubba!  I wouldn’t kick any of that “eye candy” out of my bed—that’s for sure.  I’ve always said that if the Devil could ever tempt me into committing adultery, WW, it would have to be no one less than an action figure, super hero.  Ha!  You better be glad they’re fictional characters, Babe, or you’d have a situation to defuse.  So, do you want to go to Five Guys before seeing Battleship?

WW:  No . . . on second thought, let’s skip lunch and go home and work out (suddenly, I’m feeling rather out of shape).   You also need to figure out what type of blog you can write about this movie that is a bit more “mature” and substantial than the chiseled bods of Captain America, Thor, and Nick Fury.  There was more to this movie than the “punching” for me and the “eye candy” for my scandalous wife.

Captain America and Tony Stark [Iron Man]||Photo: Zade Rosenthal/Disney – AP

“There’s a thunder god, there’s a green “id” giant rage monster, there’s Captain America from the 40s, there’s Tony Stark who definitely doesn’t get along with anybody. Ultimately these people don’t belong together and the whole movie is about finding yourself from community. And finding that you not only belong together but you need each other, very much. Obviously this will be expressed through punching but it will be the heart of the film.”—Joss Whedon, director of The Avengers, about the film.  Wikipedia

***

I am discovering that whether one believes there is an “actual” devil or not, we all can agree that mankind has the heart-stopping ability to bring about Hell on Earth through the choices we make via our free will, and they can be so cataclysmic and devastating that—devil or no devil—those choices plunge us into a searing (sometimes inescapable) Hell.  As corny as it may sound, sacrificial love does seem to be the answer and a coming together in community—family—does seem to be one of the weapons in the arsenal to defeat evil of all kinds.  It’s a little hard to harm your neighbor (as in all people) if you love them like yourself.

Which comes first—do you know?  Is it the forceful nature of our free will that chooses hatred over love, greed over sharing, murdering over nurturing, self-righteousness over humility, bullying over grace, and resentment over forgiveness that collectively energizes evil and thus culminates in a satanic presence like storm clouds gathering into a catastrophic tornado?  Or is it an evil entity that churns in our midst or just beyond the veil, manipulating our every need or want, and turning our demands into an addiction that motivates humans to choose against our better selves and our communal best, causing a tsunami of suffering on the entire Earth from Botswana to Siberia?  Does the devil make us do it or does what we do make the devil?

“If the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 “It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.” ― Helen Keller

 “No matter how an individual views Satan, whether they believe that he is a real character or that he is just the product of literary scholars and imaginations, no one can deny that each one of us has an aspect of the devil within us. By studying the character and nature of Satan, we learn about ourselves; and the more we know about ourselves, the better we can fight our own personal demons—metaphorical or otherwise—in order to create a better tomorrow.” ― Nwaocha Ogechukwu

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

How Then Shall We Live?

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  I have to believe in a God because I am obsessed with the concept of chaos emerging out of nowhere and steam-rolling my life—“Cheese and Rice”!  On any given day, something that you couldn’t possibly know about can come out of the blue, bite you in the ass, and take you out.  If I didn’t believe in God, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning (unless there were bed bugs and there is nothing I hate worse than bed bugs except roaches, rats, serial killers, and pedophiles).

I’m not an End Times nut, nor am I a conspiracy theorist, but if you’ve ever taken a gander at Revelation in the Bible (from which many a fantasy tale has been woven through the millennium), you’ve got to admit that those Four Horses of the Apocalypse (white, red, black, and pale) who wreak havoc on the Earth through conquest (people stealing your shit), war (people waging mayhem on you and your countrymen’s asses and stealing all y’all shit), famine (people starving you to death because of mismanagement—just ask Africa—and stealing the shit you were going to eat), and death (from diseases both known and unknown to random crap and planned attacks, and then fighting over your shit when you’re gone).

Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov—Painted in 1887||Wikipedia Image

***

First, you’ve got your phobias:  homichlophobia (fear of fog); chronophobia (fear of time); homophobia (fear of the gays—see Westboro Baptist Church for full-blown phobia on crack); socerophobia (fear of in-laws—if you had met my mother-in-law, you’d understand why this fear exists);

Engagement proposal card||styleblueprint.com

. . . triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number thirteen); metrophobia (fear of poetry, sorry M. Angelou and e.e. cummings); hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (fear of long words); agoraphobia (fear of the “market place” or crowds); aquaphobia (fear of water); vasovagal syncope (fear of sight of blood); claustrophobia (fear of tight spaces); anuptaphobia (fear of staying single); acrophobia (fear of heights); pantophobia (fear of everything!) just to name a few out of a list that goes on and on until Jesus comes back!

Healthtips from sastha.blogspot.com

And then if you haven’t had a stroke from the fear of your phobias, you’ve got your diseases: Necrotizing Fasciitis (fleshing-eating disease caused by bacteria getting into a cut or wound from brackish water, dirt, or body fluids—probably the mother of MRSA, but don’t quote me); Progeria (rapid and premature aging in children); Acanthamoeba keratitis (common amoeba found in tap water that invades the cornea and can cause blindness and is excruciatingly painful); Paralytic Shellfish Poison (PSP) (found in the tissue of some shellfish—death can occur within 30 minutes); and Candiru fish—aka, “the penis fish” (you must live near the Amazon River and swim in it if you’re human, pee in the water, where a translucent tiny fish will follow the stream of urine that will lodge in your penis and grow up to six inches long while feeding on your blood—moral of the story: never, ever pee in a body of water again, you nasty boys!); and Prion Disease (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) which can hit us in one or two forms, just to name a few of the gazillion diseases on the Earth:

• Fatal familial insomnia (genetic condition in which you will never fall asleep again—EVER!)
• Kuru (disease from eating the flesh of another human—extremely rare unless you are a cannibal, so you should be good to go)*

joanhascheezburger.com

If we can manage to pull yourself out of bed after these revelations, then we’ve got our animals gone wild and opening up a can of whup ass on us when we least expect it (Google “Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin killed by Stingray”).  Oh sure, they look all cute and cuddly when they are babies:

Baby Platypus||M. Mentry Photo||animalz.com

“The baby platypus (platypi?) are adorable when they are little but the male platypus has venom strong enough to kill a small dog, or cause excruciating pain and leave humans writhing in pain for months.  The platypus is Mother Nature’s way of saying, ‘I made this thing out of spare parts I found on the workshop floor, and it can still fucking cripple you.’”—The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You |Cracked.com

I always thought baby hippos were so cute and harmless—too fat to do anything but eat and float about.  Baby-girl, my younger daughter, has had an inordinate fear of hippos since she was a baby, which didn’t make any sense because we live in the Northeastern part of the US and hippos generally hang tough in Africa.  She hated them from the first moment she laid eyes on them at the zoo and I have since learned why the “instinctual” repulsion.

Author’s perspective of a hippo’s non-violent life||pinned by Yvette Thorne on Pinterest

. . . And then just when I was contemplating a trip to Africa, I saw this video and I “got the joke” that Baby-girl had known all along—hippos are some angry sons-of-a-bitches:

Photo of YouTube video—“pissed-off hippo chasing a park ranger”|Google Image

“It turns out in the real world, hippos fucking kill people.” ”—The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You Cracked.com

Sigh!  And so, burdened with my life teetering on an apocalyptic precipice, and fearing injury and death from every corner, I went to Liberty University last weekend to support the graduation of someone near and dear to me.  Not having totally made up my mind about the fiber of one Mitt Romney to be the leader of the free world (I have Mormon friends who are the salt of the Earth and who we would be well-suited to be leaders in our government, so I don’t have “Mormonphobia”), I was hoping to take a measurement of Mitt’s character.  I went to the graduation hoping Mr. Romney would prove his critics wrong and throw me a freakin’ bone out of his Mormon heritage and roots to give me and the thousands of graduates some encouragement or revelation about “getting over” on this scary planet of conquest, war, famine, and death.  Ol’ Mitt followed the octogenarian CEO of Chick-fil-A who had brought down the house with a one-line homily:  “I decided long ago that a good name was better to have than riches.”  All Mitty-boy needed to show me was that he could at least match the chicken guy’s compassion for his community—a man who never went to college (S. Truett Cathy) but who has managed to provide 125 local students with college scholarships and sponsored and built fourteen foster homes in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Brazil.  Hell, Mitt just had to show me he had a human heart and not the core of a robot underneath his commencement gown.

Well, I’m here to officially announce that Mitt gave a gift to the audience—thousands of graduates and I left the stadium with a new phobia:  mittromaphobia (fear of Mitt Romney becoming our next president).

Mitt Romney||Liberty University Commencement Speaker

 “I saw that the President and Mitt Romney both gave commencement speeches over the last few days.  Obama was like:  ‘You can be whatever you want to be,’ while Romney was like: ‘I can be whatever you want me to be.’  But actually during his commencement speech at Liberty University, Mitt Romney revealed his campaign staff loves Chick-fil-A—the other thing that he revealed is that he doesn’t know what to say in a commencement speech.”—Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon/NBC

***

Oh well, maybe I should give Romney the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe he has Glossophobia (the fear of public speaking)!

***

I am discovering that most people just want to raise their families, have enough to eat, put a roof that doesn’t leak over their heads, worship the god of their choice, live in peace with their neighbors, have a little merriment with their friends every once and awhile, live a long and fruitful life, and die a peaceful death—scary trauma and drama need not apply.  We are pretty much the same underneath when it comes to our core desires in life under our different color skin, the veils, the turbans, the pe’ot (side curls of orthodox Jewish men), the Western suits, and the Eastern saris . . . until we are overcome with fear of the unknown (“we’re all going to die!”), and then more often than not, we make the choice to succumb to the choas and add our individualized mayhem to the mix.

Happy Children yr9naiduk.blogspot.com & www.123rf.com

Fear of the past (atrocities from those who hate us for no reason other than being different than they), fear of the present (attacks from those who hurt us to “get over”), and fear of the future (disastrous things of which we have no control) make us go crazy.  Reason alone fails to stand up to our own personal holocausts and reign in the phobias that overwhelming fear and hopelessness engender (sorry my Four “atheist” Horsemen—Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett).   Even though the fierceness of evil’s atrocity should make us want to sucker punch God for seemingly hanging us out to dry at times, it is only the ability to “trust” in a higher power that gives us hope beyond what we can see (faith) for another day, another generation, and another burst of “joie de vivre.”

The consummate expression of “Joie de vivre” on the face of a three-year-old||J Tomczyk Photo

***

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”—Mark Twain

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”—Nelson Mandela

“I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.”—Albert Einstein

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.”—Albert Einstein

“I fear one day I’ll meet God, he’ll sneeze and I won’t know what to say.”—Ronnie Shakes

*** 

P.S. RIP DONNA SUMMER

 (You will be missed!  You were only 6 months older than I when you passed away, and I am way too young to be singing with Jesus at this point in my life.)

Donna Summer Fan site||Google Image

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

*http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/18/necrotizing-fasciitis-blinding-larvae-more-scary-diseases.html

 

Redeemed by Splendor and Grace

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   I don’t know what possessed me to think it would be a good idea to dangle hundreds of feet in the air in a wicker basket half the size of a bathtub, borne aloft by hot air from massive gas burners a couple feet above my highly flammable wig, while being carried along by the currents, above an endless mountain range at 6:00 in the morning.  Fortunately, I have my plans and God has his plans.  Fog set in each morning of our trip that was as thick as pea soup, cancelling my crazy-go-nuts plan, where I had fantasized that I was going “to sing a song and sail along the silver sky” sounding like the exact replica of the Fifth Dimensions—all five-part harmonies coming out of my mouth at the same time.   Maybe God knew I had booked myself on the Titanic of hot air balloons and wanted me to live to see another day.  Whatever the reason:  balloon day was a big fat bust!

Hot air balloon festival||Google Image

On top of the “no show” balloon ride, it rained on and off the entire weekend (as in the heavens opened up and exploded on us) throughout our winery tours, and the overly-crowded wineries in the Charlottesville area proved to be as lackluster as I had remembered.  One very popular winery, which will remain nameless, moved us along an assembly line of mediocre “watery” wines as if we were pigs at troth while each new section wine pourer barked at the crowds to get their samples and “move away from the counter” while waves of busloads of people filled in the gaps to line up at the troths to swig swill.  Maybe it was just me, but it was starting to look like the best laid plans of mice and men were beginning to go asunder.   Thanks Steinbeck!

But then when I stopped complaining and worrying about the weather and my missed opportunity to potentially get killed, along came the unveiling of the splendor that is the Inn at Willow Grove, our lodging that we had discovered by accident several months ago after a road trip through Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

 

Inn at Willow Grove||photo by J Tomczyk

“The parlors in the big house at the Inn at Willow Grove are just chic beyond chic, the height of elegance, beautifully and luxuriously decorated, swathed in yards of fabric in understated blacks and grays and beiges, so tasteful, so subdued, so soothing, so rich.  It’s all serenity and silence.”—Zofia Smardz, The Washington Post (May 2011)

Usually historical places that bare the stain of slavery give me hives.  But the Inn at Willow Grove, located off Route 15 near Orange, VA is an 18th century plantation manor home situated on 40 well-appointed acres that was renovated from top to bottom by David and Charlene Scibal, and they have chased all the bad “juju” away with their gracious hospitality and charm.  Besides the main house, the property has five elegantly refurbished cottages with a couple of butlers to boot and a fabulous gourmet restaurant run by Executive Chef Jason Daniels.  Even though I was born a poor black child in the ghetto of Cleveland, Ohio, I have long suspected that I was destined to be “to the manor born.”   My diva spirit was confirmed when we were booking our room in the Inn and my wonderful white husband, WW, temporarily lost his mind and suggested we take one of the cheaper, smaller guest rooms in the Carriage House (beautifully done, but obviously the historical significance went right over WW’s head).  I remembering saying, in no uncertain terms:  “Hell to the no, “White and Wonderful,” I have waited over 200 years to sleep in the ‘Massah’s House,’ so pull out that platinum card, book us the ‘Master Suite,’ and have that cute, young, white butler fetch me a mint julep on the verandah, thank you very much, ’cause this is how Big Mama rolls!”

“Big Mama and WW’s Suite” (The Master Suite)||Inn at Willow Grove) ||Willow Grove website photo

As I walked the meticulously groomed grounds in the early mornings while giving my “shout out to God” and meditated on the grace of my Lord, I thought of my historical lineage (descendent of a slave owned by the Wimbushes of Pennsylvania and a Cherokee Indian grandmother).  When I later sipped champagne with my Coupmance friends and WW on our Jeffersonian balcony (it magically has no visible means of support) while the rain exploded in raucous joy and our genuine laughter matched its timber, I slowly but steadily began to realize that this redeemed plantation acreage (“where urban meets plantation” according to Mrs. Scibal), that had once been a place of disgraceful suffering in the 1700s, had now become a venue of healing and relaxation under the tutelage of people who not only had an eye for beauty but had the knack for hiring some of the nicest people I’ve ever met to propagate that welcoming spirit of a modern inn for the ages.  When the breakfast tray of French-pressed coffee and a bag full of warm beignets was delivered by the butler the next morning, I thought:  “Hot damn—now, Big Mama, this is change we can believe in!”

Garden Pathway||J Tomczyk photo

Butler’s Cottage||J Tomczyk photo

Main Event Space (receptions and corporate meetings)||J Tomczyk photo

Old School House Cottage||J Tomczyk photo

I am discovering I agree with John Lennon in that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”  I didn’t get to risk my life in a hot air balloon and I’ve toured better wineries in my day, but I’ve rarely had such an engaging, peaceful, laugh-filled, sumptuous, beauty inspired weekend as I did at the Inn at Willow Grove.  I returned to the front lines extremely grateful that I am a black woman living in 2012 and not the 1700’s—thank you very much!

I am discovering that I’m rested enough to live on to fight another day.  Which is good, because apparently this weekend I am scheduled to be in a crowd of 34,000 people (I’ll be able to count the Democrats in the audience and the Obama supporters on one hand) at a university, which was built by Jerry Falwell (the uber-religious Moral Majority guru), while listening to Mitt Romney give the graduation speech as I try to behave and not heckle him from the stadium stands with the question I’m dying to know:  “why do you hate poor people?”  Now that’s a blog to stay tuned for!

http://theinnatwillowgrove.com||owner photo||

“That a gracious innkeeper can be found in Virginia is hardly surprising. That one who offers of-the-moment fare and Fifth Avenue urbanity has taken up residence here lends this hidden gem a brilliant shine.”—Karen Sommer Shalett, The Radar|Weekender

The Author on the day she serendipitously discovered the Inn at Willow Grove

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man (or woman/parenthesis=mine) with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”—Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War

 “People have the power to redeem the work of fools.”—Patti Smith

“The highest compliment that I can give Charlene and David Scibal, the proprietors of the Inn at Willow Grove is that they have ‘redeemed the work of fools’ (from the historical plantation stain of slavery to a magnificently elegant property of graciously welcoming, restful inclusion to all who cross their threshold).  I shall return—again and again.”—Eleanor Tomczyk, How the Hell Did I End Up Here?

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Up, Up, and Away. . .

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  Big Mama is exhausted and she’s beginning to develop a teeny, weeny bit of an ungrateful ‘tude about life in general and her blessings in particular.  So she’s decided to get away for a short break with her man, WW, and her “Coupmance” friends (see previous story titled “Coupmance Tango” for full definition) and soar above the Earth with other balloonists to let all her worries and agitations shake themselves out of her head and heart as she sings Florence and the Machine’s hit (Shake It Out) at the top of her lungs.

SHAKE IT OUT (chorus)

Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh woaaah

 Shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, shake it out, ooh woaaaah

 And it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back

 So shake him off, oh woah

I am done with my graceless heart

 So tonight I’m gonna cut it out and then restart

 Cause I like to keep my issues drawn

 It’s always darkest before the dawn

Big Mama promises she’ll be in a better mood when she returns.  (Also, if she survives, you just know that the concept of her chubby menopausal ass in a hot air balloon is blog fodder for years to come!)

Hot Air Balloon Festival||art.com

In the meantime, while she’s gone don’t do anything she wouldn’t do, especially regarding relationships.  And in case you can’t figure out what that is and this particular balloon ride is the day she ends up singing with Jesus, she’s left you a few tips with the house sitters and the guards at the gates:

DON’T . . .

get involved with any “coupmance” (couple to couple friends) until you’ve read:

“Couple Seeks Other Couple” by Ann Bauer at her blog www.theforevermarriage.com because, forget what I said last week—the problem just might be you!

Newly Married||Google Image

DON’T . . .

make your friends (“coupmance” or otherwise) a meal from one of the 8 most bizarre cookbooks, no matter what fancy chef from the Food Network tells you that the insects are an alternative food source to animal protein—not a good way to win friends and influence relationships.

Yes, THOSE ARE REAL WORMS you’re looking at!

Photo: odditycentral.com||”The Insect Cookbook”

“(The Insect Cookbook) includes recipes for dishes such as chocolate muffins with worms and grasshopper pie, and argues that insects are a valuable source or protein at a time when livestock production is nearing its limit.” By Daniel Lefferts for Bookish from 8 Most Bizarre Cookbooks/Huffingtonpost.com

DON’T . . .

get involved with a dentist and then break up with him or her two days before you need to see them for a horrendous toothache, and never, ever expect them to remain professional or give a shit about what the outcome will be.

Toothless Old Man/Google Image

Relationship News from Poland last week via the Daily Mail

A scorned dentist (Anna Mackowiak) may just end up in jail for allegedly pulling every single tooth out of the mouth of her nasty-ass boyfriend who had broken up with her two days before his dental visit.

Scorned Dentist:  “I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions.  But when I saw him lying there I just thought, ‘What a bastard.’”

(Under the banner of “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” the dentist allegedly knocked the ex-boyfriend out with anesthesia, locked the door, extracted 32 teeth, and wrapped his entire mouth in gauze so that “toothless dumb-ass” wouldn’t notice he was going to be eating strained baby food for the rest of his life until he got home.)

The Idiot Boyfriend:  “. . . when I got home I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it.  The bitch had emptied my mouth.”

(Big Mama thinks girlfriend should have gone for a balloon ride and screamed “Shake it Out” to the heavens and forgotten about the likes of the now “toothless wonder” boyfriend (obviously, he doesn’t have the sense he was born with)!  Now she’s gonna’ end up in jail for a crime of passion while he runs free—toothless—but free.)

DON’T . . .

hook up with Simon Cowell while Big Mama’s gone.  You need to know that even if Big Mama was still “hot” like back in the day, she wouldn’t let that nasty-ass Simon tap her jelly—ever!

Alicia Douvall and Simon Cowell (AP photo)

“A former lover of Simon Cowell (Alicia Douvall) told The Sun that Cowell was an insatiable lover who ‘kept her up all night,’ but the downside was that he allegedly ‘analyzed my performance just like a judge on TV, and say how there could be an improvement next time.’”—THE WEEK

Hmmm . . . seems like we could all do better than this, ladies, even if the dude does have more money than God.  This type of “usury” can’t be worth it.  Better to be single and cuddle up with a good book and a puppy than to put up with this poser of a “good man.”

DO . . .

stay away from these relationship pitfalls and you should be pretty safe for the week.  Until then . . . here “moi” (Big Mama) goes up, up and away in my beautiful balloon!   Big Mama says:  Keep on believin’, Babies!

The Author||eltomczyk

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

COUPmance Tango

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  Trying to find couple friends as an established married couple, who aren’t insane, full of crap, religious fanatics, nasty-ass swingers, or Amway sales people are like trying to find a virgin in the Playboy mansion.  You know, like the couples in the movie “Couples Retreat” who irritated the hell out of one another at times, but would go to the ends of the Earth to be with each other and help each other over the hurdles of life.

“Couples Retreat” Movie Trailer|| Vince Vaughn, Kristen Bell, Malin Akerman, Jason Batemen, Faizon Love, Kali Hawk, Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis

No one ever tells you if you can manage to make friends in high school and college that that is as good as it is going to get.  But once you move (which statistics show Americans do every three years or so), or your roommate from your “Friends” days marries an asshole, or you marry late in life, or you’re shy, it is damn near impossible to establish a Lucy and Ricky Ricardo relationship with a Fred and Ethel Mertz—best buds forever who stick with you through thick and thin.

“I Love Lucy”||Ricardos and Mertzs||Google Image

I thought the only ones having trouble making couple friends at this stage in our lives were my husband WW (White and Wonderful) and me until I read an article from 2007 and discovered that couples of all ages were facing the same hurdles:  “Doubling the tension:  Being a couple is hard enough, but socializing with other couples can be tough” by Rita Pyrillis from Crain’s Detroit.com.  WW and I could have written that article.   In our quest to find “normal” friends who live in the same town, we have met some of the weirdest, oddest, rudest, sorry-ass couples known to man, and we were beginning to think the problem was us.  We had begun to ruminate maybe we had bad breath or horrible body odor until we started asking other couples if they had suffered similar nightmarish couple ventures.  Come to find out, compared to most, we were doing all right—most of the others were completely traumatized and had decided to give up the ghost and become hermits.

As soon as I realized that couples from all age groups and all nationalities were suffering the same dearth of relationships and nobody knew why, I decided to take up this subject at my “moonlighting” job on Curious Talk-Radio as my alter-ego, Big Mama.  What I learned from that show blew me away.  I was stunned by the things I heard and I’m still not sure how to process it all.

******

TRANSCRIPT OF “BIG MAMA SPEAKS”

CURIOUS XM RADIO, CHANNEL 127||airing 12:01a.m. – 12:59 a.m. Mon – Fri

“Big Mama Speaks” radio show opens with the theme song from the 1980’s TV sitcom “Cheers”: “Where Everybody Knows Your Name”—written by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo.

“Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.

Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.

Wouldn’t you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,

and they’re always glad you came.

You wanna be where you can see,

our troubles are all the same

You wanna be where everybody knows

Your name. . . .”

BIG MAMA:  Well, good evenin’, Babies.  How’s life out there in the twilight zone tonight?  If you’re hearing my voice then you’re workin’ the midnight shift, comin’ home from the four to midnight shift, or you’re Cinderella and you’re just plain doing things you shouldn’t be doing after the clock has struck midnight.  You know Big Mama’s motto:  nothin’ good happens after midnight except moi, Babies, so you might as well go home, stay out of trouble, and hang with me tonight!

Tonight’s show is dedicated to all those lonely couples out there, looking for “coupmance.”   You know, couple romance, just like two straight guys can have a “bromance”—I mean good friendships, no swingers shit—(get your mind out of the gutter, Bruno).    So many married people are looking for compatible married couples to be friends with in all the wrong places and coming up with . . . bupkis!   Let’s call it what it is.  There is no other way to express it.  But why is it so hard to find couples to just “hang” with, Babies?  We don’t need a rocket scientist to solve our dilemma; you know what I’m sayin’?   We just need people to do the right thing by each other.

After a lot of thought and discussion with my man, WW, I’ve decided that in order for couples to meet other quality couples in life, we have to have what WW calls our “Nyeculturnik-dar” operating at all times.   Nyeculturnik is Russian (from the adjective “Некультурный” ) and basically means a “really crude person.”   WW says most of the crap that happens in life is because people are being “Nyeculturniks” (Did I tell you that I’m married to one smart white man and he speaks several languages—Russian being one of them?).  Anyway, WW says one has to have a fine-tuned radar to ferret out the really crude people (stingy, humorless, rude, and disrespectful), and you do that by immediately discerning who people really are underneath (and I paraphrase Maya Angelou):  “People will always show you who they are; when people show you who they are, believe them—the first time, not the ninth time!”

So, Babies, I’m interested in hearing from my audience.  What are some of the worst “coupmance” dates you’ve experienced in your search to belong and build community?  Call in and tell Mama your stories and we’ll do a little “coupmance” commiseratin’ together.

GENEROSITY

Walrus overwhelmed by the generosity of a birthday “fish gift”|| pinned by Tan WeiJie on Pinterest

CALLER #1:  Hi, Big Mama, I’ve got a real “Nyeculturnik” story for you.   I’m from Atlanta, Georgia and my husband and I moved here after graduate school, and we’re having the dickens of a time meeting other couples.  After not meeting anyone in over two years, we recently met a couple that we thought we’d have a lot in common with and invited them over for dinner.   I just graduated culinary school and made a dinner that I had hoped would be a real gift to jump-start our friendship.  I made spinach salad with goat cheese and walnuts with a homemade raspberry dressing, herb roasted chicken with roasted tomatoes and English summer peas, garlic mashed potatoes, and a lovely grilled peaches and cream dessert.  The meal was bookended by fresh lime margaritas and a lovely pinot grigio.  The couple stayed for hours.  We all seemed to have such a good time and the other couple volunteered that we should get together and have dinner at their house the next time.  Well, the next time came and my husband and I were so excited, but when we went to our “coupmance’s” house, we were informed that they were just too tired to cook and would we mind going to Chuck E. Cheese with them and their three children because it was one of the kid’s birthdays.  (I’m from another country and I had never heard of Chuck E. Cheese or I must admit, I would have fled and gone screaming into the night.)  To add insult to injury, when we got to the restaurant, the couple raced ahead and paid for their families’ meals with a coupon and left us standing there at the counter to pay for our own meal “sans coupon,” in a sea of colorful balls and screaming kids, to eat the worst food I’ve ever had in my life.  Two hours later I had a splitting headache from the cacophony of little kid screeches and this couple had the nerve to suggest that “y’all, we’ll have to get together and do this again real soon—wasn’t that fun!”   Did I mention that their kids were the worst brats this side of the Atlantic Ocean and the “birthday girl” kept peppering us with one annoying question that was on a continuous loop all evening:  “Where’s my birthday present—didn’t you bring me a present—everybody else gives me presents?”  Did I also mention that I’d never been in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant before and never plan to go again?  In fact, my husband is getting a vasectomy after that experience into multi-color-ball hell.

BIG MAMA:  Lord, have mercy, child!  You mean to tell me that you put all that effort into cooking a fabulous meal for this Atlanta couple and they pulled the cheap-ass stunt of making you pay for dinner at a cheap-ass restaurant with their nasty-ass kids and never told you beforehand?

CALLER #1:  Yep, and my meal for them was delicious, if I do say so myself, Big Mama.  We don’t have kids and our home is nicely appointed and given to hospitality, relaxation, and peace.  In other words, their experience with us was not a goddamn noisy Chuck E. Cheese, house of horrors which still causes me to break out in hives when I think about it!

BIG MAMA:  Um, um, um, um, um!  I hear you, Baby!  Change your cell phone numbers and move to the other side of town so that you’ll never even have the potential of accidentally running into these cheap-ass mofos.  Generosity is one of the key components of any relationship.  If people aren’t generous in the beginning of a relationship, it will only get worse with time.  Hang in there, you’ll find a good “coupmance.”  Don’t get discouraged.

Caller number two.  My producer says you hail from Boise, Idaho.  What’s your “Nyeculturnik” story?

RUDENESS||Google Image

CALLER #2:  Blessings to you and yours, Big Mama.  I am a Christian and I try to build my friendships within the Church because that’s where I feel God is “calling” me to invest my time and energy.   The Bible says that “light should not fellowship with darkness,” and I truly feel that “birds of a feather should flock together so as not to fall into sin.”  Well, I have developed a friendship with another mother in my Bible study group and we hit it off real well becaise she seemed like the “perfect” Christian woman.  I had planned to invite her and her husband to play golf in the near future to try and build a relationship as couples.  Recently I dropped by my new friend’s house to drop of a gift for her birthday and her husband was there with her.  I hadn’t been in their home more than 10 minutes when I heard him mutter, “You said you were going to stay for just a minute, so why aren’t you leaving”?   At first I thought I had misunderstood him and said:  “Beg pardon—what did you say”?  He repeated it— just loud enough for me to hear— but not enough for his wife to hear.   (She had walked into the other room to get me a cup of coffee.) “You said you were going, so why don’t you GO,” he said.  I was stunned, Big Mama, and I couldn’t move fast enough to get out of there.  I sit beside this man and his wife in the same pew every Sunday and he treated me like I was a Communist or something.  Wouldn’t you call him a “Nyeculturnik”?  Wait a minute . . . is “Nyeculturnik” one of those Communist words?  Oh, dear. . .

BIG MAMA:  Girlfriend, I hate to break it to you this way, but you’re fucked.  I think there might be two “Nyeculturniks” in your story”:  the husband and you!  (Lord, Jesus, where do I begin?)  First of all, what is this “light should not fellowship with darkness” thing?  Who you callin’ darkness, Miss Thang (according to the Bible you read, we “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”)?  Do you know that not too long ago in Christian history, the Scofield Reference Bible defined the scripture you quote as God not wanting whites and blacks to date or intermarry?   Well, history has proven that Mr. Scofield was full of shit and way off base.  So who died and made you God so that you get to determine whose heart is “dark” unless they reveal that to you?  Don’t misunderstand me, I get what you’re saying about people showing their true colors and revealing their “Nyeculturnik” ways, but how can you predetermine someone is a “Nyeculturnik” just because they don’t attend your church?

Some of the biggest assholes Big Mama ever met belonged to churches I’ve attended.  Not that long ago, WW and I joined an adult Sunday school class (our last foray in trying to make the modern church thing work) that was called, “Building Relationships.”  This class was in one of the richest, whitest, most prominent churches in our area.  The leader encouraged us to sign up to eat dinner together in small groups once a month in order to get to know each other in our overstressed and overworked congregation of lawyers, doctors, politicians, and CEOs who all lived in million-dollar mansions (except for WW and me).  When I went to sign up for a group with the coordinator on behalf of WW and myself, the woman looked me straight in the eyes and said there were no more spaces available (“sorry”) because most people in the Sunday School class only owned six place settings, not eight.  Really, SERIOUSLY?!  I grew up in the ghetto and even I had more than six place settings.  The plates may have been cracked and mismatched but you could eat off of them.  And if that didn’t work, there were always paper plates from the corner store.  WW and I left that church as soon as the Sunday service was over and knocked the dirt off our feet, so to speak, never to return.

Now as to your friend’s husband, a newborn baby would sense your “church-going” man was the epitome of rudeness and he wasn’t going to get any better.  My advice to you is that you’d better flee that “couple relationship” because honey, “when a person shows you who they are, believe them the first time . . .” In the meantime, darlin’, if you really want to experience the best that God has to offer from his great community on this planet, try widening your circle beyond your church and go out and meet people with an open mind.  You just might be pleasantly surprised at the quality couples you find.

Caller number three:  My producer says you’re calling from Morgantown, West Virginia and you’re having an Aretha Franklin “Nyeculturnik” issue.  What’s the problem, Baby?

“Respect for Others”||copy of a Jeffrey Michael Green painting from Fine Art of America Gallery

CALLER #3:  RESPECT, goddamn it, Big Mama—I need respect!  I can’t get respect from my best friend’s new husband.  She married a Neanderthal and now she expects us to have this cozy couple relationship and I just can’t do it, Big Mama.  She says that if I loved her I would ignore her new husband’s jabs because she knows him and deep down inside he doesn’t mean the racist things he says.  What I’m trying to determine is if my friend’s new husband is a “Nyeculturnik” or not?

BIG MAMA:  Hum . . . give Big Mama and our listening audience a couple of examples.

CALLER #3:  It started the night before their wedding.  We flew all the way to Bermuda for a destination wedding with my friend and this hillbilly and when he met me and my husband (we are an interracial couple, they are white), the first thing he said was:  “Cindy told me you were a salt and pepper couple; I got no problem with the race-mixin’ for the most part, but I do think people should stick to their own kind in general ‘cause Coloreds and Whites approach life differently.  If God had wanted us to mix and match the races, he would have made us all zebras, if you know what I mean—yuck, yuck!”

BIG MAMA:  Oh, no he didn’!

CALLER #3:  Oh, yes he did, Big Mama.  Now he’s joined the Tea Party and dragged my friend with him and what he says about our first black president, I can’t even begin to repeat or I will really explode and you will lose your listening audience.  My friend says if I knew his mother than I’d understand.  Bullshit, the hell with his mother—that hillbilly is responsible for his own thoughts and words.

BIG MAMA:  Calm down, Baby. No need to call people names.  Some of my best friends are “hillbillies,” and they saved by life at a time when it needed saving which is another story for another show.  As far as this dude is concerned, Flee, Baby, flee!  No respect means the inability to build a decent “coupmance,” and with lack of respect there can be no true bond.   Your friend’s husband is a “Nyeculturnik” from way back, and your ex-roommate has become a “Nyeculturnik” by not standing up for her friendship and defending you against her new husband’s ignorance.  Big Mama’s so sorry you’re losing a friend, but your personhood can’t afford her or her husband.

(SOUND OF THE CHEER’S THEME SONG STARTS TO PLAY)

BIG MAMA:  Well, that’s all we have time for, Babies.  Big Mama’s gonna have to call it a night.  But until we meet again, keep working on your “coupmances,” and to rip off a phrase from the playbook of the late, great Soul Train’s Don Cornelius, “I’m Big Mama and as always in parting, I wish you Peace, Love, and Happiness”!

******

I am discovering that this “couple romance” thing is a huge deal because it is one of many aspects of “community.”  If you have it, you feel as if you belong—if you don’t, you feel isolated, lonely, and lost at sea.  This is so because humans were not built to live outside of community, and having friends to socialize with, no matter what your social configuration (single, married, or married with children) is a necessity for strong mental health.  It doesn’t just take a village to raise a kid, it takes a village to provide community in order to survive our life and times on Earth.  In case you haven’t noticed, it is pretty rough living on this rock.

In fact I’m feeling a little weary myself, and I’ll probably take a rest next week because WW and I are going to the wineries and hot-air ballooning with a couple we met a couple years ago.  They are the salt of the Earth and just knowing them has made our lives so much richer and fuller.  From the moment we met them, we knew they were a gift from God.  We can talk about any and everything and never run out of interesting conversations.  I’ve never known an evening to drag with them, yet we are so different.  They are younger and I am old enough to be their mother, we are religious and they are not, we are an interracial couple and they are white, the husband is a Republican and I am a recommitted Democrat, they like sports and WW and I would rather drink poison than attend a sports game, we are singers and actors and they can’t carry a tune, WW and I knew each other 6 years before marrying and they met on an online dating site, we’ve been married for thirty-four years and they’ve been married for two years.  They inspire us to “keep it real” with their new, freshly-minted love, and they say we inspire them with the longevity of our romance—we all have the ability to laugh at ourselves and to “pee our pants” from laughing at the humor that flows continually from each other.   Our “coupmance” husband and wife also excel in Big Mama’s litmus test:  they are generous to a fault, funny as all get out, deeply kind, and passionately respectful to everyone.  It doesn’t get better than these two when you’re building a “coupmance.”

A note of interest:  All the stories used on the Big Mama Talk Radio show actually happened to WW and me in our quest to find community and belong at various points in our lives.  The names and the towns have been changed to protect the “Nyeculturniks” they represent.

******

“Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don’t need a lot of money to be happy–in fact, the opposite.”― Jean Vanier, Community and Growth

“Ever console or scold people hurt in human relationships that satisfaction comes from God alone? Stop. Adam’s fellowship with God was perfect, and God Himself declared Adam needed other humans.”  John Ortberg Jr., Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them

“Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted “it takes a village”.”― David James Duncan

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Customer Satisfaction Required

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  I’ve been betrayed!   I was born a poor black child without a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of and I was told that if I worked hard enough I could have the American Dream and all the respectable, attentive service that came with it.  All my life I’ve worked to be able to make enough money to not only live well but to grab hold of that promised American gold ring:  “Guaranteed Quality Service.”

But “GQS” has been alluding me most of my life. When I finally had enough money to buy a car, the gas stations went from “full service” to “self-serve” overnight.   (I was so pissed that I had missed out on this basic white people perk that I refused to learn how to gas up my car for two years and cajoled my husband, WW (who is “White and also Wonderful”), to do it for me just out of principle.   And just when I finally had made enough money to take my sorry-ass off of the Greyhound bus line and onto our nation’s airlines to fly the friendly skies on a 747 in my diva swag and bling with my Louboutin knock-offs, the airline industry went to Hell in a hand basket at record speed.

First-class passengers in a BOAC Boeing 747 being served lunch in the 70s|| Fox Photos/Getty Images

Passengers having a rootin’, tootin’ good time in the “coach lounge” (coach and lounge must be an oxymoron) of a 747 Continental plane in 1971//cruiselinehistory.com

Nowadays when I fly, if the plane can manage to arrive on time, depart on time, doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg for a seat, and doesn’t fall out of the sky with me in it, I feel blessed.  I can’t let it bother me anymore if I don’t get fed on a plane and faint dead away, or if I get nickel and dimed for a bag of stale peanuts and a gin and tonic (“no twist of lime—that went away with our cost-saving measures”), or if I encounter angry stewards or stewardesses with a snarky-bark instead of a pleasant smile (“TURN OFF ALL ELECTRONICS—NOOOOW-GRRRRR!”), or if I run into rude passengers who are just as pissed as I am about the missing GQS and lack of overhead storage space.  I try not to get dismayed if I get a passenger in front of me who assumes he or she has the right—no, the “inalienable right”—to flat-line his or her seat right into my 38 DDD’S and remain there for the rest of the six-hour trip to California while I pee my pants trying to figure out how to squeeze out of my seat to go to the bathroom and still keep my nipples attached to my breasts.  I won’t let it bother me that Alec Baldwin gets kicked off a plane for playing “Words with Friends,” and I have to put up with a half-naked seat mate eating a tuna fish sandwich while passing gaseous fumes at such a furious rate as if his ass contained the fuel needed to help propel the plane while he pontificates on why he is sure God is dead!

“Fat Dude on a Plane” Pinned by Cruiselinehistory.com

But these are one-offs and not the worst of my problems.   I realize that “pooh-pooh occurs,” and I’m old enough and mature enough to know one has to learn to go with the flow.  My real problem is that I think I’ve become the victim of a grand “GQS” conspiracy:  planned obsolescence of any and all electronics and appliances that kick into gear one day to a month after your warranty (factory or extended) gives out and with that a literal burial of any customer service.   I was watching The Wiz (black version of The Wizard of Oz) with Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor the other day on some offbeat channel, and I started wishing that there was a great and powerful Oz I could go to, to get some GQS.

No matter how great the advertising, or how fabulous the salespeople, at some point, the appliances, the cars, the electronic devices break down, and the customer service people of many of the companies turn into “Evillene,” the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wiz, and they don’t want to hear “no bad news” just at the time when you need a “little tender loving care.”  Because many of them never had any intention of making good on that warranty when they suckered you out of your hard-earned money and you sold your first born child to make it happen.  The fab sales person told you the warranty was a “must have” or you would rue the day.  But you slowly began to realize you’re screwed when the company kept giving you the run-around about the extended warranty that you thought would replace “said item” with a brand new “whatever” at equal value—after they sell you a lemon (s) (Kenmore 790.95664102 oven that would start out heating a Sunday roast and end up setting your kitchen on fire) — (Best Buy HDTV of 2003 that “popped” one day and turned every show and everyone into the color of split-pea soup), and it slowly dawns on you that you don’t have a legal snowball’s chance in Hell of getting that item replaced.  Unless, someone like my husband, who logs everything and all business phone calls and has the tenacity of a pit bull, takes a folder 500 pages deep of correspondence and telephone calls on the TV from Hell with the customer service department into the Best Buy store where the HDTV was purchased, and the store manager can do nothing less than replace your shit TV with an even better brand, because he knows he’s met his match—unless you have that kind of advocate—you know your only recourse is to add your complaint to the millions of other “Sears, Best Buy, or Verizon Sucks” consumer complaint sites and hope others heed your warnings.

“Evillene” (Mabel King)||The Wiz||Universal Studios & Motown Productions||Wiki Image

(Evillene is the embodiment of wretched customer services and she expresses it a portion of her signature song below)

*

“When I wake up in the afternoon

 Which it pleases me to do

 Don’t nobody bring me no bad news

 ’Cause I wake up already negative

 And I’ve wired up my fuse

 So don’t nobody bring me no bad news.

If we’re going to be buddies,

 Better bone up on the rules

 ’Cause don’t nobody bring me no bad news

 You can be my best of friends

 As opposed to payin’ dues,

 But don’t nobody bring me no bad news

*

Through the years I have found a couple of reputable companies with great customer service, although there is only one company that I constantly hold all others in comparison to:

“Have you heard about the customer who tried to return pants that had clearly been worn for an extended amount of time, but was still refunded? Or the Nordstrom employee who made a house call to exchange a pair of shoes? How about the blouse that was returned and refunded when it was clearly from another store? And then there’s the one about Nordstrom splitting two pairs of shoes in order to fit the man with different sized feet.” (Toddand.com)

It’s the yearning for all my merchants to be like a Nordstrom that caused me to cut my losses with Sears, get rid of all their broken-down appliances, and restock my home through a local company that I heard had gotten good reviews:  Bray and Scarff.   They were much more expensive than the box stores (Home Depot and Lowe’s), but their mission statement was just what I was looking for:  “Since 1930: Doing Things RIGHT the first time!”  WW and I thought, well alrighty now!   Bray and Scarff—have at it!  Here’s our hard-earned money.  Replace our nasty-ass Sears’ stove before we burn up in our sleep, replace our ghetto Sears refrigerator, the demonic Sears Kenmore washer that ate our clothes, replace the microwave that stopped working ages ago and only heated food on one setting (popcorn), and while you’re at it give us granite counter tops (with a bonus free stainless steel sink and garbage disposal) because—dammit—you’re just that fuckin’ good and we’re “grateful” to have you take our money.   How do I know all this:  Because you say so in your advertising and via those smooth-talkin’ salesmen of yours.  We are weary of being played and you are our salvation.

Google Image

. . .and they lived happily ever after. . .

Until, until the day, the microwave handle broke and Bray and Scarff refused to cover it with the warranty until I finally convinced the fourth customer service person over a course of two days that my warranty said “all parts” and “all labor”included with my 5-year contract.  Bray blamed the misunderstanding on their service provider and the service provider blamed it on Bray because they were trying to “ease out those inclusive warranties” (code for:  weren’t making barrels of money off of the customers and had to cut those suckers loose).

And then, and then, the garbage disposal exploded one evening (exactly one month upon installation of the “bonus sink” which came with the granite counters by Bray and Scarff) while the dishwasher was running and summarily flooded the entire kitchen.  When our plumber came rushing to the rescue, all he could do was shake his head in dismay because, as he said, “I don’t like to speak ill of another tradesman, but it’s obvious the Bray and Scarff’s repairman’s gift was installing granite and not plumbing; they should have called in an experienced plumber but they’ve brought remodeling kitchen work all “in house” to save money.  The dude didn’t know what he was doing when he hooked up your pipes and he used the wrong materials—you got screwed.”)

Continuing on, and on, the electric starter that ignites the gas in the oven that is only 6 years old and only 8 months and three days past its 5-year warranty stopped working.  I called Bray and Scarff and they gave me a day when a repairman would come and fix my oven.  I was assured it would be a nominal charge and they would call and let me know the “window” when the repairman would arrive.  They never called.  I took off work, I waited and waited, and waited and the dude never showed.  I called every hour on the hour; Bray said he’d be there.  I called again; they said they didn’t know where he was.  He finally showed at 6:00 p.m. complaining about how his company had severely overbooked him which was the reason for the delay.

Repairman Dude||mylifeinmommyland.com

The repair dude was in my house all of ten minutes.  He did not open the oven door, he did not do any diagnostics, he did not test everything else that was working, he simply announced: “You need a new computer board in your stove.  That will be $84.95 and I need to order the part because we don’t carry those on the truck, but ‘no worries,’ I’ll put a rush on your order because my word means something and you’ll be good to go by next week.”  And then the repairman slipped away as quickly as a specter.  My husband and I broke out the grill, the crockpot, and frying pan while waiting for our liberator to return with the part(s).  Surely, this company that we had given so much money to would hasten to our aid.  The call came and the amorphous voice on the Bray side of the line told me, not that the end was near, but that I needed to authorize the order of the new part before they could proceed.   But days had passed since the Bray and Scarff technician had briefly appeared.

Flummoxed Me:  (Slightly hysterical with uncontrollable high-pitched voice)   “But I thought I had ordered the part with the signing of the “order the part form” and the giving of my $84.95 check to the technician?”

Amorphous Monotone Bray:  “No Ma’am.  That $84.95 was payment for the repairman’s diagnostics—just to walk across your threshold, so to speak.”

Flummoxed Me:  “What diagnostics?  He never opened the damn oven door, he didn’t touch the thing.  Everything works on it—everything—except the starter fails to ignite the gas in the oven.  I just need a starter.  This isn’t my first merry-go-round with an oven you know.   I told the repairman what was wrong.  You should be paying me!

Amorphous M. Bray:  “Regardless, Ma’am, you need to authorize us to charge you $495.00 for the new board, $100.00 for the starter, and then there will be labor and taxes (TBD), and any additional costs if this doesn’t fix the problem, Ma’am.”

Flummoxed Me:  (GETTING HEART PALPATATIONS AND A NERVOUS TIC) “What about the $84.95?  Doesn’t that apply to the bill?  The ‘slam-bam-thank-you-ma-am’ repairman said it did.  Also, the repairman gave me his word that my stove would be fixed today. Today!  I have a horde of company headed this way on trains, planes, and automobiles for my daughter’s college graduation.  How long is this going to take?  How in hell am I supposed to feed these people?  When do you plan to get this motha up and running?

Amorphous M. Bray:  “No, Ma’am. . .our repairman wouldn’t have told you that and it could take three weeks or so—give or take a week—to fix your stove.  We are going to have to search far and wide for the part.  We don’t keep those parts on hand.”

At this point I went off the rails, demanded to talk to a supervisor, demanded to know from the supervisor exactly what the cost would be (more than the cost of a new stove it turns out), demanded my $84.95 back, threatened to call the Better Business Bureau, canceled my order, and summarily announced that I was going to go buy a “new stove,” but it wouldn’t be with Bray and Scarff—in fact, I said I’d go ice-skating in Hell before I bought another thing from Bray and Scarff.  It was at that point that I looked down and saw the beginning of the slightest crack in the sealant on my new granite counters installed by Bray and Scarff and I fainted.

******

ME:  (As if waking from a dream) “There’s no place like Nordstrom’s, there’s no place like Nordstrom’s, there’s no place like Nordstrom’s. . .”

WW:  “Honey, wake up!  Wake up!  Are you okay?  Why are you napping on the kitchen floor, and why are you knocking your heels together?”

ME:  “I don’t know . . .I was getting ready to open up a can of whup ass on Bray and Scarff about the repair of our stove, and the next thing I knew I was dreaming about being in The Wiz and trying to get home to Nordstrom’s while singing its ‘yellow brick road song,’  ‘Ease on Down, ease on down the Road—don’t you carry nothin’ that might be a load, come on ease on down, ease on down the road. . . .’  And suddenly I was clicking together a pair of ‘fabulous’ silver Louboutin’s  (they were simply ‘to die for’). . .

“. . .and I was clinging to our grand dog, Wednesday Addams, whose name was ‘BA Mofo’ (Bad Ass Motherfucker) in my dream.

“BA Mofo” (a.k.a. Wednesday Addams) ||courtesy of C. Tomczyk

“In fact, you were there as “Prince Glen” instead of “Glinda the Good Witch,” and you gave me my silver shoes to get me back to Nordstrom.  Bray and Scarff was the Wicked Witch of the West (Evillene) that got melted.  Amazon.com was there as the Lion, Zappos.com was there as the Scarecrow . . .

“. . .and there was that company that repaired my “bling” and was so kind to me and gave me such fabulous, efficient service—as if I was their most valuable customer—what was their name?  Moissaniteco.com?  Yeah, that’s it!  They were there as the Tin Man.

ME:  “We were all traveling to Oz to ask the Wizard where we could find Guaranteed Quality Service to model our businesses after.   But somewhere along the way—between fighting the Bray and Scarffs and trying to survive—we realized that my companions all had GQS within themselves.  They just needed to keep on improving on what they were doing and spread the word in such a way that people shopped were they were treated with dignity and respect and stopped patronizing the places that didn’t treat them well!  No quality service, no business!

WW:  “Hum. . . Well, I don’t know about all that.  Let me help you up off the floor, because right now you and I need to go to Lowe’s to buy a new stove.  I sure hope they are on your ‘GQS’ list, because we’re running out of places to buy things.”

Ersatz Wizard of Oz “Poppy Field” in author’s “dream” (in real life, ET’s 2012 peonies) J Tomczyk Photo

******

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises; he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”  Mahatma Gandhi

 “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”  Sam Walton, Founder of Wal-Mart

 “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”  Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.com

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

******

 

Imagine: Life Without Critics

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   According to every art critic this side of Jupiter, I should be mortified, shave my head, put on sackcloth, grovel in ashes, and never show my face in the light of day to intelligent people for years to come because I own (gasp!) a rather large “signed” Thomas Kinkade painting (a numbered reproduction of “Cobblestone”) which resides over my fireplace.   Because according to art critics far and wide, Kindade’s work is schlock, a bunch of shit, paint-by-numbers for the uninitiated, schmaltzy pooh-pooh for the Walmart set, fodder for white trash, and just plain ol’ untalented treacle to set sophisticated people’s teeth on edge.

Cobblestone by Thomas Kinkade

Yet, I (college-educated, avid reader of Shakespeare to David Foster Wallace, patron of the arts, aspiring writer, one bad-ass Black Diva, and nobody’s dummy), own and proudly display a Thomas Kinkade painting in my home.  Horrors! Egads! WTF! Alert the goose-stepping art police.

The critics have been merciless these last few days since the announcement of Kinkade’s untimely death—merciless to him and anybody who can even say “painter of light.”  And as soon as Thomas Kinkade’s duplicitous sorry-ass life came to light (no pun intended) which revealed him to be an alcoholic, as someone who had groped a woman’s breast that was not his wife (WTF!), as a patron of strip clubs and bars, as someone who divorced his wife and left his four children, as a scoundrel who  screwed over his business partners, and as a luddite who pissed on Disney’s Winnie the Pooh just for the hell of it (seriously, dude?), the art critics—hell, anybody who could spell the word “critic”—fell into apoplectic spasms of glee and danced on the man’s legacy with abandonment as they skewered him into the grave.

Well, his critics should have asked me before he died whether I thought he lived the pristine Christian life he painted and boasted about, and I would have probably said, “I doubt it.”  Not because I would have been judging the man, but because I know human nature and I know a little bit about art.  The Kinkade dude was painting a life he “wished we could live” just as Picasso splintered the world he saw into cubism because he said, “The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”

Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair – Synthetic cubism (1912–1919)

But here’s the deal:  I love Picasso’s “Blue Period” (hell, I can even tolerate Picasso’s “Rose Period,” and I really liked his short-lived “African Period,” known as his “Negro Period”), but I hate the Cubism that made him a household name.  I feel his pain when I contemplate his “Blue” paintings (for it is the betrayal, rejection, and isolation I have struggled with all my life), but I feel absolutely freakin’ “nothing” when I study his Cubist art, even when an art teacher is standing beside me trying to browbeat my taste beyond that of a Philistine.

Picasso’s La Vie (1903), Cleveland Museum of Art

As I began to fume over the art critics and their pretentious and snarky remarks about a dead man who couldn’t defend himself, I started to meditate on how much critics of all kinds are so similar in stripes to bullies.

Think about it:  Wikipedia notes that a bully is one person or group trying to use “superior strength or influence to intimidate, manipulate or control (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants.”  I decided to start a petition to send to Congress (who isn’t doing anything anyway except being bullies so they might as well work on my idea) to pass a bill that would give us an IYTDWYWTD (“It’s Your Thing, Do What You Want to Do”) month-long celebration.   (The name of the bill is inspired by the Isley Brothers’ song:  “It’s your thing, do what you wanna do.   I can’t tell you, who to sock it to.”)  For one month a year, I propose we declare a national holiday to wear, eat, build, make music, recite poetry, buy art, paint pictures, etc. that really makes us happy, helps us understand the world we live in, and helps us translate the grace and love of God in an otherwise fucked up world.  I only have one binding caveat:  Don’t do anything that will harm our nation’s children or another race or gender.

The bill I shall propose to Congress will read something like this:

My fellow Americans—If you think being fashionable is wearing the outfit critics ridiculed as the worst Oscar outfit ever, then go for it baby!  Wear it to the damn PTA meeting next week if you so desire.

Celine Dion in a Dior backwards pantsuit||Getty Image

And if your hairdo of choice makes Bob Marley roll over in his grave, then “johncrow always tink im picney pretty.” (Rastafarian for: Parents always think their children are beautiful anyway, so what do you care what people think?)

The Rastafarian Elephant Hairdo||pophangover.com

Maybe your fancy is to build one of the world’s ugliest buildings.  If so, grab a hammer, some nails, and basket weaving materials and have at it, Sweatpea!

Longaberger Home Office, Newark, Ohio||travelandleisure.com

However, if construction is not your thing, you can write another episode of “Glee” (you can’t do worse than Ryan Murphy’s been doing lately) or sneak and watch it while your biker friends go play pool with the other Hell’s Angels.  But if watching Glee is your thing then do what you have to do to bring a little joy into your life, Sugah!

Moment in Contemplation: Why Glee Sucks Now||www.east-of-nowhere.com

And maybe if the faith you can’t live up to and the family you can’t hold on to, or the addiction you can’t shake, but wish you could, gets expressed through paintings and sculptures that only certain people get but others don’t, then screw the critics!  As long as you aren’t perverting little kids, or hurting other people, knock yourself out!

Thomas Kinkade||Jesus Statue

(In the interest of full disclosure:  I hate this painting and the subsequent sculptures of T. Kinkade that came from it, and I can’t hold back expressing my criticism, even if I keep it stuffed down inside, because the pain on my face says it all.  I mean, I loves me some Jesus—don’t misunderstand me—but I can see what Kinkade’s critics meant when I look at this particular segment of his artwork—I choke on the smell of cotton candy that oozes from it.)  See what I’m talkin’ about? (Sigh!)

******

I am discovering that we are all “critics” (bullies) in some form or another because we all are hyper-critical as a nation and a people, and we all want our own way.  And we don’t just simply disagree and walk away—we disdain each other and hold each other in contempt if our tastes don’t marry.  We all harshly judge the self-expressions of others if they don’t align with our opinions of what is “good taste” because we want everyone to be created in our image which is only an honor that God gets to mandate.

On the day my husband, WW, and I purchased the Kinkade painting many years ago which hangs over our fireplace, I didn’t know much about Thomas Kinkade, nor did I give a shit that he was considered kitsch art.  WW and I had lost one of our loved ones to a world of drugs and we thought we’d never see her again.   People we counted as friends had betrayed and abandoned us, and we couldn’t find sustainable employment to save our lives.  We were close to losing our home and everything we had worked so hard to acquire.  All our dreams seemed to have been destroyed by forces that were beyond our control.  As we strolled through art galleries in a town whose name I no longer remember (just to take our minds off our misery), when we saw the painting, “Cobblestone” by Thomas Kinkade, nothing in it reminded us of the harsh ghetto from which I had escaped or the lower middle-class New England spiritual darkness that WW had fled, or our then current nightmare.  What the painting did remind us of was the vision of the love, the home, the community we had tried to build and had seemingly failed to hold on to.   The light and the promise in that painting gave us hope that maybe, just maybe, all was not lost, if we just held onto each other and trusted God to see us through the darkness.  I don’t know why the copy of the Picasso, the original Gullah painting by John Jones, the other originals from artists whose names are not well-known that grace our home did not break through that particular darkness.   All I know is that at the hour and the time we most needed it, Thomas Kinkade’s painting did what the kind of art I like tends to do—it encouraged me to “never give up hope” because I would see a brighter day.   I only wish it had done the same for Thomas Kinkade.

John Jones’ “Gullah Shrimp Bateau”||www.gallerychuma.com

“We all know that Art is not truth.  Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.  The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”  ~Pablo Picasso

“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”  ~John Updike

“God is really only another artist.  He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat.  He has no real style.  He just goes on trying other things.”  ~Pablo Picasso

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Easter Bunny Throw Down

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   Easter bunnies take their lives really seriously and the competition among them to be the Queen Pooh-Bah of Bunnies on Easter is something else.  You’d never know that Easter was supposed to be the celebration about the death and resurrection of the son of the Christian God who came to redeem us from horrendous choices (both ours and others) and teach us how to live on Earth together in love, peace, and joy both here and beyond.  To hear the bunnies talk, Easter is ALL about them, the colorful eggs, and the baskets filled with chocolate Cadbury candy.   I caught wind of this fierce competition recently when the Miss Easter Bunny Pageant of 2012 was held in a copycat Beatrix Potter world up in a small town in New Hampshire like the Hill Top Farm in the village of Sawrey, Cumbria, Lake District that Ms. Potter loved so much.

“Friends” Pinterest image

I went “undercover” as Big Mama for my “Big Mama Speaks” column this week to participate as the Master of Ceremonies of the anthropomorphic bunnies and “bunny wannabe’s” who were competing for the title of Miss Easter Bunny 2012.  Below is a segment of the question and answer session for some of the lucky finalists.

BIG MAMA:  “Our first contestant is Black Bunny Rollin’ from the Southside of Chicago.   I ain’t gonna’ lie—glad to see one of my ‘peeps’ trying for the gold ring.  Ms. Rollin’, since the Trayvon Martin murder, our country has been on edge racially.   56% of Whites think we should move on to other subjects and drop this distasteful matter, while 90% of Black people think we should hold the Sanford police department’s feet to the fire until justice is done.  How would you use your Easter Bunny title to heal race relations amongst the citizens of Sanford and foster brotherhood and love throughout the nation?”

Bunny Wallpaper/Google Image

BLACK BUNNY ROLLIN’:  “Hey, Big Mama.  How YOU doin’?  I am so glad you asked me that very sensitive and important question because I’ve been thinkin’ about this very thing for a long, long time.  I would flood the land with Easter baskets filled with hollow chocolate bunnies and “marsmellowey Peeps” to show that we are all one and the same under the skin or coating, as it may be, so why don’t we just ‘chill’ and follow the great Rodney King and ‘just all get along!’”

(AUDIBLE GROWN IS HEARD FROM THE BUNNY AUDIENCE)

BIG MAMA:  “Thank you Black Bunny.  Sounds like your answer to our racial problems is ‘get high on sugar and die.’  Obviously, we haven’t read the latest report on sugar, now have we?  Um-humph! Anyhooooo. . . our second contestant is Bunny “Going Rogue” Palin.   Ms. Palin, your name sounds vaguely familiar and really scary; in fact, I’m getting eye tics just saying it out loud.  Have you ever run for office?  No?  Okay, I could have sworn, I’d met you before.  Ms. Palin, the NRA lobbyists have gotten completely out-of-hand.  What are your views on gun control?  What would you do to reign in this growing scourge in our country?   Guns are flooding our schools, homes, and streets, and we are gunning each other down like clay pigeons and without so much as a “by your leave!’”

Courtesy of www.angrybunnycomic.com

BUNNY “GOING ROGUE” PALIN:  “What the hell is that, a gotcha question?  I support our constitutional right to bear arms, and if you’ve got ‘em—flaunt ‘em, if you don’t—‘tote a Colt,’ or maybe you are a sucker and have been brainwashed by the lame-stream media.  At the very least, I’d flood everybody’s Easter basket with chocolate toy guns and bullets from the cradle to the grave that sport the inscription:  Viva la Second Amendment!  And then I’d pass out NRA stickers with the lock and load insignia for their Easter Baskets.  Yeah, Baby—‘cause that’s how we roll in Alaska!”

(ONLY CRICKETS CAN BE HEARD FROM THE OUTSIDE.  NO SOUND COMES FROM THE HORRIFIED BUNNY AUDIENCE BECAUSE THEY CAN HARDLY BREATHE WONDERING WHICH BURROW IN HELL  THIS BUNNY CAME FROM.)

BIG MAMA:  “Ooooh-kay. . .!  Thank you Ms. Palin.   Let’s move on to the next contestant.  Ms. Norma “Nutria” Bunny.   Ah, Norma, I don’t mean to be rude, but you look awfully big for a bunny.  Where did you say you were from?”

NORMA BUNNY:  (BUNNY VOICE EXTREMELY HIGH-PITCHED EVEN FOR A FEMALE BUNNY) “I’m from around these parts.  What’s it to you?  Toss me one of them contestant questions so we can get this over with, Big Mama—I ain’t got all day.”

BIG MAMA:  (clears throat, trying not to show how close she is to opening up a can of “whup ass” on the obnoxious bunny)  “The human recipients of your Easter joy are stressed to the max.  They will need to know that you have a sense of humor.  The March jobs report just came out and it is below expectations.  What is an example of some of the things you’d do to help cheer up the jobless and lighten their spirits?”

NORMA BUNNY:  (BUNNY VOICE EVEN HIGHER THAN BEFORE) “Why, I’d use my girlish bunny charms and my beguiling ways and “make ‘em laugh.  I’ve got tons of jokes like this one:

Two chocolate bunnies walk into a barn.  One has a hole in his ass and the other has no ears.

  What do they say to each other?”

Pinterest

(AN ANGRY COMMOTION IS HEARD IN THE AUDITORIUM AS AN AUDIENCE MEMBER SCREAMS OUT:  “That’s no female bunny, that is ‘NORMAN Nutria’ from Louisiana—the river rat that attacked the woman in Wal-Mart a couple of years ago.  He/she’s an imposter and she’s wanted by the PO-lease!”)

Norman Nutria (a.k.a “Norma Bunny, a.k.a. Myocastor coypus)

WANTED BY THE FBI

Louisiana woman sues Wal-Mart over incident with “Norman the nutria”||May 7, 2009||LA Times

(AS THE COMMOTION REACHES FEVER PITCH, BUNNY SECURITY CAPTURES “NORMAN” NUTRIA AND BIG MAMA RESTORES CALM TO THE AUDIENCE WITH NO ONE THE WORST FOR WEAR.)

BIG MAMA:  “My goodness gracious.  Lord, have mercy—you just never know what’s gonna’ happen in a day.  Calm down everybody.  No one got hurt, thank God, so let’s do our best to carry on.  We only have one more contestant and then we’ll choose a winner.  Now where were we?  Our next contestant is Dr. Henrietta Beatrix Bunny.  Welcome Dr. Bunny.  I understand that you are a history professor at Beatrix Potter University.  A lot of humans are interested in the history of how the bunny, the basket, the boiled eggs, the Cadburys, and the jelly beans supplanted the death and resurrection of the Lord?”

***

Pinned by milkbeforebed.tumblr.com

DR. HENRIETTA BEATRIX POTTER:  “I’m-so-happy-you-asked-me-that-question-because-it-is-really-quite-the-story-since-history-is-always-quite-the-story-is-it-not? (GULP) Well-you-see-the-Christians-stole-all-the-pagan-rituals-and-tied-them-into-their-new-celebrations-and-Easter-is-no-exception. (GULP) Greg-Jenner-has-written-a-marvelous-article-(I-tell-you-just-marvelous)-entitled-‘Easter:-what’s-with-all-the-bunnies-and-stuff?’-and-he-says- that- the-word-Easter-came-from-the-word-‘Eostre-who- was-a-pagan-goddess-in-the-Saxon-religion. (GULP) In-fact-almost-everything-we-do-or-have-done-emerged-from-the-pagans-and-we-either-modified-it-to-fit-the-biblical-characters-or-we-outgrew-it. (GULP) Why-Mr.-Jenner-tells-the-most-delightful-story-about-how-Christian-farmers-used-to-bless-their-lands-to-make-them-fertile. (GULP) They-would-go-out-and-follow-these-pagan-instructions-to-the-letter-of-the-law:

‘1) At night, dig up four clumps of soil from the four corners of the field

 2) Then take a sample of every grass, herb, tree in the field, and add it to milk from every cow, and honey from every bee hive.

 3) Now add holy water to this concoction, and drip it in the holes…

 4) Now sing an incantation, asking them to grow.

 5) Now sing the Lord’s Prayer, several times

 6) Now take the four clumps of earth into the church, and get your local priest to sing four masses… one for each clump

7) Now get four crucifixes and write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on them. Place the crucifixes in the holes you have dug, and shout ‘Grow!’ nine times

 8) Now sing the Lord’s Prayer nine times

 9) Now turn east, bow and say a prayer

 10) Now turn around clockwise three times, and then lie prostrate on the ground while chanting about your lovely green fields

11) Now bless the plough and bless the seed

 12) Now plough a furrow, and place a cake of honey and milk in it.

 13) Well done, you now have a fertile field!’

WHEW-isn’t-that-so-silly! (GULP) Now-back-to-bunnies-eggs-and-Easter-which-came-to-us-via-the-Germans in the 17^th Century. . . .”*

***

I am discovering that one must never give a professorial bunny an open mic!  Anyway, a very beautiful bunny won (Miss Honey-pot Bunny) that was a mixture of all the bunny races and became the proud Easter Bunny of 2012.   But since none of the answers of the bunnies were satisfactory to nourish the spirit and soul of humans, Miss Honey-pot’s Easter duties only encompassed satisfying the taste buds and the body.  IMP. NOTE:  “Norma” Nutria escaped from the Bunny security and is still on the lam.

Prize Rabbit/Google Image

I am discovering that bunnies, boiled eggs, and Easter candy (I do so love me some jelly beans) can only feed the body, but the rejection, the loneliness, the fear, the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain and horror of living on this Earth can only be overcome by the touch of a god who has the ability to feed my soul and inhabit my spirit so that I will not retaliate and become the evil that assails me.  I don’t understand everything about my Lord’s death and resurrection, but nobody has come back to tell me what is really on the other side (I don’t believe that little boy who claims he saw Heaven for a “hot chocolate minute”—he’s a mimic of his religious parents—no more no less), so I could be wrong about so many things which is why I respect other religions and would never, ever lead a crusade.  But until the newly departed atheist author, Christopher Hitchens (“Hitch”), comes back and says, “nanny-nanny-boo-boo, I was right—there is nothing beyond the veil,” and Carl Sagan tags along to confirm it, I’ll stake my claim on the resurrection and keep aiming for an abundant life on this rock and beyond.  To that end, the Easter Bunny will stay in its place of “cuteness” along with Santa, and I’ll go and join in on Handel’s Messiah with the rest of the imperfect Christians on Easter as I humbly sing, “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the Earth.”

Happy Easter and a glorious Passover (“Chag Pesach Sameach”)!

Ruben’s Resurrection of Christ

* http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/greg-jenner/easter-whats-with-all-the-bunnies_b_1406355.html

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Are You Happy?

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  The Federal Government wants to start measuring our happiness as American citizens.   After all, our constitution does guarantee us the right to the “pursuit of happiness.”   What a hoot!  They’ll probably call it the GNH (“gross national happiness”) as opposed to the GDP (“gross domestic product” or the sum of our economic output), and that will be one more thing to worry about.  (Note to the Feds:  please do not give me a survey on my opinion of our sorry-ass Congress or the state of the Republican Party before you give me the survey about my GNH—results will definitely be misrepresentative of my actual state of being which will be highly agitated.)

Kingdom of Bhutan—“Land of the Dragon” (Photo courtesy of buddhanet.net)

The term, ‘gross national happiness,’ was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck but according to Peter Whoriskey’s article in The Washington Post (“If you’re happy and you know it . . . let the government know”), “. . .statisticians will first have to define happiness and then how to measure it.  Neither is a trivial matter.   There is even some doubt whether people, when polled, can accurately say whether they are happy.”

Photo courtesy of businesspundit.com//Google Image

Right now the Mega Millions Lottery which covers 42 states is worth $640 million, and I’m sure most Americans are secretly fantasizing about what they would do with that much money if they won it, because they are all assuming it would make them super happy.  But research has borne out the facts that 9 out of 10 lottery winners end up worse off than before they won the lottery and many wish they had torn up the ticket.  Because, you see, humans are creatures of extremes:  whatever shit you were addicted to before you were flushed with cash will simply get magnified once it is infused with $640 million.  Data has shown that if you were a gambler before the jackpot, you’ll simply become a person who bets higher stakes until the money is all gone; if you have an addictive personality before you win the extra Benjamins, you’ll become a junkie who uses a gold tipped syringe to “shoot up” rather than a stainless steel one.  And if your cash-infused habits don’t get magnified to the extreme, then relatives you never knew you had will come out of the woodwork and torment you for handouts until the day you die or give away all your money—whichever comes first.

Daily News/Google Image

So I’ve given this entire “gross national happiness” concept a lot of thought and since I’m old and have learned a few things along the way, I thought I’d write an open letter to our President in this week’s blog to offer him some suggestions as to what he should look for to determine if his American peeps are really happy or if we are just bullshitting him (not counting Fox News or the Tea Party—there is nothing that would make them happy except Ronald Reagan coming back from the dead).

OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Dear President Obama:

First of all:  How you doin’?  My name is Eleanor Tomczyk and I’m one of your biggest fans.  While reading The Washington Post the other day, I noticed that the Feds want to start monitoring GDH.  Personally I don’t know how you’re going to accomplish that since we are such a desperate, angry bunch of humanoids.  But if you were to ask me, if you really wanted to know how to do this, I thought I’d send you a few tips to pass along to your census takers.

IMHO, Mr. President, all your questioners need to ask are three non-sectarian, bi-partisan questions and they will be able to determine the state of mind of any American in the land.

GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS SURVEY

• DO YOU NAP?

Nap Time/Google Image

Here’s the deal, Mr. President:  I’m sure you’ve noticed that you are in charge of a bunch of really cranky, partisan people.  We are perennially pissed off about everything, and some of us are really bent out of shape because you slipped by them into the White House!  On top of all that angst, we love us some guns almost as much as our religion and lack of sleep and guns are a volatile mix!  Why, today, in a neighborhood not too far from where both of us live, one neighbor shot another neighbor over three trees bordering the property that wasn’t the property of the neighbor who got shot.  And the shooter wasn’t even the owner of the house—the owner’s father shot the other dude on his behalf who was the friend of the neighbor who lived down the street—all because of three fuckin’ trees (pardon my French)!  I think we Americans are on the verge of losing our minds just because we are so freakin’ tired.  I don’t mean to sound like an “old fart,” but we haven’t had a good attitude about life sense the Sunday Blue Laws were struck down.  Even if you weren’t religious and didn’t go to church, no matter how rich or poor you were, at least you could catch up on your sleep and read a good book.  It may be my imagination, Mr. President, but we could use a national nap time to up our “happiness quotient.”

•  DO YOU GARDEN?

E. Tomczyk’s “Blush” Hibiscus

E. Tomczyk’s prize-winning variegated yellow Princess Hibiscus

E. Tomczyk’s Violet Wave Petunias

Mr. President, enclosed is a small sample of my flower garden last year (aren’t they fab!).  I’m recreating something similar on April 30^th for the 2012 summer season.  As I’m sure the First Lady has told you, there is something about digging in dirt that eases the stress and elevates the endorphins, especially when Puccini’s La Boheme (or Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”—whatever floats your boat) is playing in the background.  (Personally, I’m rather suspect of a person who doesn’t like to garden.)  Mr. President, my American sisters and brothers need to get back into the dirt.  Anything as little as flower boxes outside our apartment windows to community gardens would help relax our minds and shrink our chubby waistlines.  Whether a person gardens or not, will give the Feds an excellent understanding as to whether Americans are happy or agitated as hell because they don’t have any dirt to turn into something beautiful to soothe the soul.

•  DO YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ANYBODY BUT YOU AND YOURS, AND HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT CULTIVATING EMPATHY FOR OTHERS WHO ARE NOT LIKE YOU OR HAVE DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES?

Twins: blue-eyed white-skinned “Remee” and her biological twin sister, brown-eyed, brown-skinned “Kian” born in 2005 in Britain

Mr. President, I’m sure you know this, but I have discovered a secret:  we are all God’s children—just different flowers in God’s garden.  I know an alien from another planet would never believe that concept that we’re all created equal if “It” had dropped down into our country the past two weeks and witnessed the Trayvon Martin murder and miscarriage of justice, along with the attempted smearing of Trayvon’s reputation from the extreme Right, and Spike Lee’s stupid terrorization of that sweet old couple when he tweeted their house address by mistake in his attempt to flush out the murderer, George Zimmerman.  (Really, Spike?  Seriously, Dude?)    Mr. President, if you see Spike when you’re out and about would you please ask him what the hell was he thinking?

The other day I discovered a phenomenon:  Black and white twins born from the same parents.  Did you know that the chance of this happening is only one in a million, but in one family it has happened twice?  But don’t you think God purposely allows twins to be born of different skin and eye colors from the same parents just to mess with our heads and to illustrate a point:  we are all sisters and brothers under the skin?

Triniti and Ghabriael Cunningham—twins born in USA/ABC news file photo

 If we answer the “happiness” survey as people who try and consistently learn something that will broaden our perspective about those who appear different than us, then the Feds might find that our happiness equates to that openness.  Might I suggest that you have the survey ask how many of us have seen or plan on seeing “Bully,” the documentary about the realistic portrayal of middle school and high school students who are bullied—some to the point of suicide?  Have the Feds ask your survey takers if they plan on teaching their children not to stand by and watch the bullying of another child or if they plan on teaching them how to put a stop to it.  Our country’s happiness and future depend on us becoming more empathic to the suffering of others, not becoming bullies ourselves, and joining together as a nation to stamp our this scourge.

Courtesy of www.thebullyproject.com ||Contact this site for distribution of the film in your city

Thank you, President Obama, for considering my input and here’s wishing you and yours an abundance of joy and grace.  I’m pulling for you.

E. Tomczyk (a.k.a “Big Mama”)

P.S. I just have to ask, Mr. President:  Are you happy?

******

I am discovering that money will come and it will go, things will always happen that we can’t control, and that happiness is temporal:  Joy is what is eternal.  Happiness is circumstance based and the circumstances can be destroyed in a heartbeat by mean people, the weather, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But joy is attitudinal and no one—absolutely no one—can take that away from you.

Author: “One Joy-filled Big Mama”//photo by J. Tomczyk

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”—Viktor E. Frankl

“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor E. Frankl

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

A Bridge Too Far

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  I am never, ever going to join the world of “The Twitter.”  I realize that it is one of the many forms of communication needed to stay in touch with one’s peeps, especially when one is a writer or an entertainer, but I cannot be trusted with the medium.  I’m 63 years old and I’ve finally gotten to a place of maturity where I no longer use my inside voice (pissy rage) in places or situations where only my outside voice (reasoned grace) should ever be heard.  Just in trying to explain why I wouldn’t engage with the little blue bird when it first emerged, I once commented to a group of my younger daughter’s friends (guys and gals), “I don’t tweet, I don’t twit, and I don’t “twat.”  (Apparently, in the world of twenty-something white kids, the words “tweet” and “twit” are fine, but the word “twat” is not to be used with one’s outside voice, which became very obvious when they all stared at me in horror, and my little vanilla bean daughter slid beneath the restaurant table to hide her mortification.)  Who knew?

ruthawestbrooks8654.highschoolfootballhq.com//Google Image

But that is my point.  The Twitter may be legal and accessible, but it doesn’t mean that someone with my temperament and hot-headedness should ever tweet my thoughts because that would be going a bridge too far in my efforts to conquer my ability to “keep in touch.”

A case in point:  Last week a person whom I’ve known for years, and whom I used to call a friend, finally crossed over the line with me.  Through the years, I’ve put up with her taking me for granted, her Neanderthal husband’s racist comments to me, her verbal attack against me in front of a mutual friend rather than engaging me in private, and finally her public broadcast attack and lecture about a subject that was mine to hold an opinion about that she didn’t agree with but not hers to lecture me on as if I were a child.  All those years of trying to be “nicer than Jesus” with this person finally collided with my hurt and anger, and I realized that we hadn’t been friends for a very long time because she had trespassed on the relationship too many times to count. Had I had access to The Twitter when that revelation of trespassing on my heart hit the hurt and betrayal I felt, all hell would have broken loose because I would have opened up a can of “whup ass” that would have verbally beat the shit out of that woman and left her racist husband’s sorry ass to put her back together again.

Getonmyspace.com//Pinterest

Getonmyspace.com//Pinterest

See what I mean?!  I’m not to be trusted with the privilege of The Twitter or I’ll make Jesus cry, and I would really like to end up in Heaven when I die.   (To all my current friends and readers, please note: I’ve never knifed anybody in my life, except with my words, but the visual of me bitch-slapping somebody underscores why I need as many filters in place as possible to keep my mouth shut until I can calm down, and the appropriate contrite verbiage can be found, which ain’t ever gonna’ happen with an instantaneous access to The Twitter.  I know myself.)  I don’t think I’m the only one who should back away from access to The Twitter given what I read nowadays.  Most of the time, I hear all sorts of famous people screwing up over that thing.  Just ask the actress, Patricia Heaton (you know, of “Everybody Loves Raymond” fame?).  She ran off at the mouth on The Twitter against Sandra Fluke (a young woman from Georgetown University [G-Town]) who was testifying before Congress (you know, the one who Rush Limbaugh called a whore and a slut?).  Well, Ms. Heaton had to eat her Twitter account and come back with her tail between her legs and publicly apologize to Ms. Fluke for being such a self-righteous bitch!

Patricia Heaton’s Use of Her “Inside Voice” on Twitter/E-Online

Without access to Twitter, I thought and prayed about the incident I’d experienced with the ersatz “friend,” mulled over the history between the old girlfriend and myself, decided that that some relationships were never meant to go the distance of a lifetime, forgave her, and then let her go without fanfare or hyperbole.  Then I blocked her sorry ass from my Facebook page and went on my merry way.

2-year-old-Indonesian boy who smoked 40 cigarettes a day/Google News Image

There are other things that come under the umbrella of going a “bridge too far” besides The Twitter abuse.  Take the story of the children from Indonesia who can’t stop smoking.   They are addicted to cigarettes and smoke 25 – 40 of them a day.  Why?  Because there is no law that dictates an age limit to smoke in Indonesia.  If you can puff it, you can have it.  It doesn’t matter if the kid “becomes emotionally aggressive and uncontrollable and acts like he’s possessed by evil spirits,” according to an eight-year-olds father—it is still legal.  Half the Indonesian population lives on less than $2 a day, but cigarettes account for the second largest household expenditure in that country and it has the world’s highest percentage of young smokers according to Yahoo News.

Why is it “because we can,” we humans think we should?  Which brings me to the subject of “every mother’s son:”

17-year-old Trayvon Martin with his little brother who was recently gunned down by George Zimmerman, a vigilante self-appointed neighborhood watchman

You would have to have been living under a rock not to have heard about the egregious murder of the seventeen-year-old child that went out to buy Skittles and an iced tea in a gated community and never made it back to the home he was visiting with his father.  By all accounts Trayvon was a darling boy, a good student, and a football player who had never even gotten into a scuffle in his boyhood life.  As Trayvon walked home in the rain while talking to his sixteen-year-old girlfriend on his cell phone—armed with only a bag of Skittles and an iced tea—a paranoid, self-appointed (unofficial) neighborhood watchman followed him because he was black and wearing a hoodie which made him appear suspicious.  Somewhere in between the store and home, Trayvon noticed the stranger following him in a car.  The last thing that Trayvon’s girlfriend said to him was “run,” but Trayvon said he wouldn’t run (he knew better), but he would walk fast.  The last things neighbors heard were a child screaming for help and gunshots.

Trayvon’s body lay in the morgue for three days as a “John Doe” while his parents frantically searched for him.  Who goes out for candy and tea and doesn’t return?  His body was drug and alcohol tested by the police (he was clean) but the murderer was never tested, never investigated, and never asked to provide proof of his claim that he shot in self-defense.  Trayvon is dead but the murderer, as of this posting, has yet to be arrested because he pursued this child under the protection of two Florida laws:  The Right to Carry a Concealed Weapon and the Stand Your Ground law.

Some people think the murder of Trayvon was a hate crime (there is some confusion as to whether there was a racial epithet said to the 911 despatcher by Zimmerman just before he shot the son of the Martins) and some people think it was what my peeps like to call “Walking while Black.”*  My gut tells me that it is an extremely complex situation with both racial overtones and thoughtless gun laws that go a “bridge too far” for our volatile and fragile society.  We won’t know just what motivated Zimmerman until he can stop hiding behind the gun laws and be honestly investigated.  We do know that in Zimmerman’s zeal he had called the police department over 46 times to report “incidents” that never came to fruition.  But one thing is for sure, the murder of this child better be a “come to Jesus” moment for our nation and our love affair with guns, because next time it could be any mother’s child or grandchild, no matter what the race and no matter what the place.

President Obama’s comment today, March 23^rd

“I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” Obama said. “And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.  If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”  The Washington Post

“Walking while Black:  A Cautionary Tale”

*I am discovering that “Walking while Black” is something that every black child used to learn at the knees of their parents or caretakers.  It means that you must always assume that most (not all) white people will think you’re up to no good when you walk through an all-white neighborhood, therefore, you must walk with hands exposed, a pleasant expression on your face (even if your dog just died), you mustn’t wear anything that obscures your features, you must answer every rude white person’s questions in a polite manner (even if what they ask is none of their goddamn business), and you must never, ever, ever run!   I’ve been married to my man, WW (“White and Wonderful”), for almost 33 years and because he has always made decent money, for years we lived in all white neighborhoods.  In the beginning of our marriage, I was a long-distance runner and, like clockwork, the white Po-Po (police) would stop me mid-run to find out what I was doing in the neighborhood I lived in.  So I started wearing make-up, pearls, and diamond tennis bracelets (it’s a wonder I wasn’t robbed every other day), and the latest fashionable jogging attire so that my persona screamed “I’m a corporate executive’s wife, so if you mess with me, you’ll have hell to pay.”  That worked for a while until I moved to a different location further south.

By the time I arrived in Virginia Beach, Virginia (a beach town with a church on every corner and a military pit stop), I was no longer a runner but did enjoy a morning constitutional of a brisk walk or two.  Out of concern for my safety, WW made me promise to only walk in our neighborhood and only with a couple of neighborhood women who had befriended me.  So three times a week for six months the ladies and I walked the same route (it never varied) through our neighborhood (at the same time), while wearing the same thing (jogging wear and a head wrap/scarf, full makeup and dripping with bling), and life was grand.  But one day both of the white ladies, whose husbands were in the military, had an event that required their attendance, so I went out alone to walk the same route, at the same time, in the same outfit I’d worn for six months.  Within ten minutes, a car with two white women in their fifties pulled up alongside me and the driver angrily demanded to know who I was, what I was doing in their neighborhood, and why were my hands in my pockets?  I started laughing because I thought they were joking.  “Ladies,” I said.  “You must be pulling my leg—haven’t you seen me pass your house every other day for six months?  I’m your neighbor for God’s sake!”   They did not think me humorous at all and as I looked up and down the empty street, I realized that if these women shot me, no one would believe that I had been minding my own business and was just out taking a walk.   As I “slowly” pulled my hands out of my pockets to show them that all I had was a Walkman and a couple of tissues, I’m not ashamed to say that I did a “Step-and-Fetch-it” (servile persona) routine with a toothy grin plastered from ear to ear as I said:  “Aw, shucks, Ma’am, you knows how it is with us womens of certain age—we’s gots to keep up our constitutionals or we’s will turn into little porkers, and we’s can’t have that, now cans we, girlfriend?”

The saner of the two women forced the angrier woman to move on as she shouted, “I’m watching you; I can tell you’re up to no good—you better not be here when I get back.”  I slowly walked the “one block” back to my home (forcing myself not to run)—back to my babies, my sweet, precious white husband, and I thought, “I must spoil the garden of racial equality that I’m raising my girls in and tell them what happened to me today.  I must tell them about what it means to be ‘Walking while Black.’  I must warn them.”  And I wept!

I didn’t end up teaching my children about “Walking while Black.”  I just couldn’t bring this evil fruit into their lives.  In fact I never told them this story because hope springs eternal, and WW and I decided to rear the children to be color-blind (which they gloriously are as adults today), but I often wonder if we blew it by not warning them of certain perils so that they wouldn’t be blind-sided.  Because I now have a grandson who looks the spitting image of Trayvon Martin at three-years-old, and I am concerned that that survival technique will not be passed on because I naively thought we were headed for a brave new world in America by now.  Maybe Trayvon thought, as my children still do, that color is irrelevant—heart and character are the defining motivators—and given that, he probably thought he would have had nothing to fear simply walking to get a bag of Skittles and an iced tea.

Author: E.L. Tomczyk

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.