Tuesday, July 19, 2005

C'mon In...Air Conditioning Inside....

I changed the links for Amazon on the sidebar. The link to HerStory is the book one of my short stories will be in. This book is available at Amazon for pre-orders but won't be coming out until October. The book, Alabama, is written by my middle school best friend's mom (her mom was also my English teacher), Kay Cornelius, and she is a great romance writer with several books in print.

My husband is a big coin collector. That's what he "splurges" on. I splurge on books. I'm not sure where I got bitten by the reading bug. My parents are not readers, not at all. I remember when I was a child and they would leave to go somewhere and ask if I wanted them to bring me back anything special, I'd always say, "Buy me a book." Then I'd get a blank stare like they thought they'd better double-check with the hospital to make sure they didn't get the wrong baby. (They never brought me one back, by the way). I was also the one who used to argue with my very Southern parents about why I thought Black folks were just as good as we were. You can imagine how well that one went over. I seemed to always challenge things they just accepted. Children aren't suppose to challenge their parents ideas, especially not girl children, especially in the South. I remember when I told them I wanted to go to college and major in Math. They never did wrap their brain around that. For one thing, no one in my family ever went to college before me. And you know about the "girls" and "math" taboos that many people have.
I guess it was a combination of these rebellious thoughts that caused me to be labeled the black sheep of the family. That and deciding how I acted and what I did was no one's business but mine. I may die the black sheep, but I'll at least be able to say I tried to formed my own opinions and didn't just accept what I was told, and I LIVED my life, even though I spent most of it listening to the part of me my counselor said was "a part that could use some adult supervision."
I've been a member of about every church imaginable. I didn't want to miss finding the "right one" but never did. I figure they all have some good and some bad in them, and God isn't that concerned which building you sit in on Sunday as much as what your intentions are. I've met a lot of different kinds of people in my life and enjoyed listening to their varied interests. I have a friend who's a psychic, one who is the mother of thirteen kids, one who spends most of her time trying to keep up with those darn Joneses, one who could have made a killing as a lady of the evening except she kept forgetting she could charge for it, and one who is an amazing artist. I don't judge people. I just think they are neat to talk with.
My husband laughs about how he sees things in black and white and I see everything in gray. He will find some guy on a tv show and start preaching about how the guy is obviously wrong and I just have to defend the poor soul. Doesn't matter if I think he's guilty or not. It's more important to try to get my husband to see the other side. I like to see both sides of people. We all have good and bad. Some just lean more one way than others.
I guess I'd make a bad gatekeeper in Heaven. I'd say,"Well geez, I guess in your shoes I'd have done the same thing, so c'mon in. We've got air conditioning..."

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