NUMBER 114
I just read on the Huffpost Books about Flight attendants on the weirdest and craziest passengers. Some things passengers have done: need help putting on a bra, freaking out because their turkey sausage touched their scrambled eggs and other crazy things. The one that got me laughing was a passenger told a flight attendant that she has nice legs and then asked if they (probably a man), could lick them. Now that's crazy. Just thought I’d give something think about…now Let’s slide right on in to another set of crazies… the continuing story of, "Drama at Part Time Job in Asylum.”
I have not worked part time in a few years and when on the first day I got home from that job, I was bone tired. My schedule was Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights and I wondered if I would be able to do it, but I knew, I had an agenda and would struggle through. I learned what needed to be done and by the Sunday night, I had everything down. On those weekends, I worked with Jake and he made me laugh. He had a bad habit of flying his hands up in the air and mumbling some incoherent words when a customer ordered something. He fulfilled the order fine and when the customer left from either the front or drive thru, he had a funny name to call them. Cockroaches, runts, etc. I asked him why? They seem OK to me and I didn’t care who or what the customer looked or talked like, I just made sure I was professional and courteous to them. He wasn’t discourteous, he just hated his job. He felt bad that at his age he was working a minimum paid job. He was the type of man who bad mouthed his wife, whom he called a “bi-polar bitch.” He would bad mouth his daughter, who at 18, dropped out of high school, did not work and got hooked on drugs. They also lived in one of those “hotels” where you paid by the week. Not the business type of hotel, you know the one, where displaced or homeless or even students attending one of those “colleges” that helps you get a medical or computer programming certificate. I know about those students because I use to teach at a “college” like that and they lived right across the street in one of those “hotels”. They signed a contract with the school for thousands of dollars. Usually they did have a job somewhere and attended at night. Some students were paid legally, some paid under the table. It was probably easier for so many of them to be paid under the table.
It breaks my heart that we have so many people living like this and working at minimum paid jobs to just survive, but then again, it breaks my heart to see so many people who just don’t care and live day to day on who or what they can get for free.
Another reason I enjoyed working with Jake is that he used to play trivial questions with me. I enjoyed listening to him, when he wasn’t mumbling and complaining about his wife and kid. He made me laugh when he was flaring his arms up and down, showing missing front teeth, wearing crooked glasses, stringy gray hair, but his brown eyes lit up when he played the trivial games. I don’t think he thought of me in a romantic way, but he admitted to me that he liked me from the first time he met me. He had always told me he just had a good feeling that I would fit in and actually work hard and he appreciated that since, as he stated many times, these people who work here are cockroaches, lazy and stupid.
I did not understand at first why he stayed with a wife he loved/hated, but over time, I think I began to understand.
On to books:
EDWIN BALL and EDWINA HARLESTON WHITLOCK - THE SWEET HELL INSIDE: THE RISE OF AN ELITE BLACK FAMILY IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH. It was a National Book Award Winner - $4.97 Paperback. I volunteered at the first of the year Friends of the Charleston County Library Book Sale at Otranto Library. While unpacking boxes of books to put on the tables for the sale, I found this book. Not many African American books are donated to the libraries to sale, so I am always looking for “our” books and I usually find them and put them on display for the smaller group of African Americans who come to the sale. Just got it and have not read it yet, but what caught my eye was South Carolina in the past had a rich black family, the history of Charleston and music. It looks engrossing.
This is the story of the fascinating Harleston family of South Carolina, the progeny of a Southern gentleman and his slave, who cast off their blemished roots and prospered despite racial barriers. Enhanced by recollections from the family's archivist, eighty-four-year-old Edwina Harleston Whitlock, whose bloodline the author shares. The Sweet Hell Inside features a celebrated portrait artist whose subjects included industrialist Pierre du Pont; a black classical composer in the Lost Generation of 1920s Paris; and an orphanage founder who created the famous Jenkins Orphanage Band, a definitive force in the development of ragtime and jazz.
Edward Ball introduces a cast of historical characters rarely seen before: cultured, vain, imperfect, rich, and black; a family of eccentrics who defied social convention and flourished.
My favorite authors with interracial hook-ups:
J.J. MURRAY - I’M YOUR GIRL - $4.47 - - I read this book years ago when I found it while volunteering at the library. The first thing that caught my eye was that the main character, Diane, an African American, is an librarian. Who finds love in a library, I haven’t’, or maybe it’s because I’m stalking people to read more. You think I have an issue?
You will get hooked on the back and forth of Diane and Jack’s relationship. I will give you that J. J. Murray is using the same formula most writers have used over and over again of the “bad-evil mother” who tells the kids who and when to date, even though Diane’s mother danced with a white boy in her youth and has no problems with her other daughter who has three kids out of wedlock. I know I have read this many times before, but I still love the story. I did enjoy Diane’s reviews of books. Sometimes it got in the way of the story and was a bit too long, but J.J. Murray kept some humor in the book with all of the perilous and taboo topic. That’s why I continue to read it and brought his other books.
STEPHANIE MORRIS - STAKING HIS CLAIM - $5.99 - - - Ms. Morris is another I call “kicking it relationship” another. She is a beautiful looking women and her book covers stimulates your “bootylicious senses,” whew! not that’s an eye full.
She is another author I had the honor to meet and talk. She has been a romance writer for many years with very elegant and simple writing descriptions that gets to the point. She talks the way she writes, damn good.
Here’s a recap - Leslie’s life is not the way she wanted it, so, she goes home to family to get it together. You know the story, she meets older white guy, Blake Eaton and it’s on. This was a quick read (My flight was only 2 hours and the second flight was about 45 minutes), but I finished it and it was sooooo! gooood!!! I’m ordering the rest. The guy on the cover looks like some actor from the “Jersey Show,” at least to me or maybe one of the Sopranos actors. You be the judge.
Got to get one in for Black History Year
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT - Alice Walker and other authors speaking about their involvement in the Civil Rights movement.
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