[QUOTE=Sampiro]
“Don’t you know that good cooks—like anything else that’s good—are born, not made? Concentrate on what you were born to do.”
[/QUOTE]
Can I add this to my list of mottoes? (sp?)
The others are:
“we do what we can with whatever’s available” and “the sooner we’re finished working, the sooner we can go watch a movie”
Ya know, Cousin Luna may be a little whacko but I’m sure what she said was straight from the heart. You have to love her for that.
I think SampiroBro and other Luna did outstanding jobs. Especially other Luna. That was a very moving tribute.
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
And the music starts as the walls of the law firm like office and the blue pleather chairs transmogrify into a seedy French tavern and Miz Beebee’s hair turns red and her wrinkles disappear as 200 pounds of fat appears and her purple dress turns to a tattered filthy barkeep gown and the oily evil man who appears out of nowhere sings to the chorus…
*Welcome bereaved, set yourselves down
And meet the best morticians in town
As for the rest all of ‘em suck
embalming the corpse with cement and muck
Seldom do ya see
Old bats like Bee-bee
Senile farts with dusty hearts
Who are content to be
Master of the house dresser of the dead
She’ll tip Chiron a buck and see Cer-ber-us is fed
Charge ‘em for the box Extra for the locks,
Ten percent to inoculate the corpse for pox
When it comes to grimly reaping profits
There are lots of tricks we hunt
And how it all increases Miz Beebee’s bits and pieces
Jesus! What a wrinkled soulless cu*
[/QUOTE]
I hear this sung by Danny Elfman in his FORBIDDEN ZONE’s “Satan” character.
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
BTW- I can’t tell you, Friar, how much I appreciate being called a magnificent bastard- that is TOTALLY going on my next business card! 
I don’t look much like Rommel but perhaps I can at least wear an eyepatch or a beige jacket in the picture next to the new title.
Coming Up: INTRODUCING COUSIN LORNA THE GHOST HUNTER
[/QUOTE]
You know, I had absolutely no idea where the term “you magnificent bastard” originated. I just know that when I saw you in that CS thread, my first thought was “That bastard just snuck back unannounced.” Then “you magnificent bastard” surfaced in my mind & that became the title of the OP (which I only started in the pit because of using “bastard”.)
As is obvious, I do not have your style of wordiness. G
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
but essentially he’s my brother and he’s the one this generation who has kids and in the interest of potential future kidney needs all around we have a civil relationship,…
[/QUOTE]
Boy if that doesn’ that hit the nail right on the head for a lot of family relationships. Keep em alive for the sake of the transplant team.
Magnificent writing, just magnificent.
Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!
George S. Patton, upon defeating Rommel’s forces in Africa, referring to his adoption of Rommel’s tactics, and Rommel’s publication of his tactics previously.
Sampiro, you magnificent bastard, WRITE YOUR BOOK!
[QUOTE=E-Sabbath]
Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!
George S. Patton, upon defeating Rommel’s forces in Africa, referring to his adoption of Rommel’s tactics, and Rommel’s publication of his tactics previously.
[/QUOTE]
Cool- that I didn’t know, that Patton had literally read Rommel’s book. I wasn’t aware he’d written one, I thought Patton just meant “I figured you out”.
I read part of a book in college that was interesting and always meant to read the entire thing. It was for a U.S. Intellectual History class and we were studying the U.S. Civil War, and the book (I"m sure I could google it but can’t recall it’s name at the moment) was about a Civil War historian in the 1940s (I can’t remember if he was amateur or professional) who in studying Rommel’s campaigns noticed strong similarities twixt his tactics and those of Nathan Bedford Forrest. (It’s now historical knowledge that Rommel admired Forrest immensely and considered him one of the greatest generals of all time.) The historian alerted military intelligence and supposedly this had something to do with the formulation of the Allied Counter Strategy. (Of course there’s no shortage of accounts of how a guy with a pomegranate on a street in Utah or some old lady in Baltimore knitting a khaftan was responsible for Allied victory but this I think had a bit more documentation than most.)
Lou Ida says that the man she was to marry and raise a family with was killed by a landmine in Korea. My father, who knew the man, said it would have been news to him that he was engaged to Lou Ida for nobody else seemed aware of it and the two had only been out together once or twice and that a year before he went to Korea. Lou Ida said that she saw it as divine providence that her life was to be spent in the service of others. My father saw it as divine providence that the unfortunate GI’s “left foot stumbled onto a happier fate than his return to Alabama would have brought if that old heifer is indeed telling it right” [a cigar puff] “…which, of course, she isn’t.”
Lou Ida was called, mainly by Lou Ida, my father Garland’s “twin cousin”. She was the daughter of Gene, my father’s uncle, and she was born two weeks after my father; her mother nursed my father when his own mother was unable to due to total selfishness. (Grandmother, if I’ve never mentioned it, was best captured by the two word phrase “evil bitch”.) Her family lived on 40 acres of the family homestead that they were deeded by my great-grandfather around 1910 and as Lou Ida and her sisters and brothers were the closest thing my father had to siblings and playmates he had a special feeling for them, that feeling being “contempt”.
All save one of the family were members of the same bizarre religion that infected my great-grandfather. While I won’t mention it’s name I’ll just say that their prophet’s chief hobby was frequently and erroneously predicting the Apocalypse, usually stating that his prayers and those of his followers had effected a stay of execution on the morning it was to happen. For now. The new date the world is to end is >>>>>>, 19>>>. They also do not celebrate Christmas or birthdays, believe only 144,000 will go to heaven (and those 144,000 know who they are) while the others will reanimate and people an Earthly paradise (to quote my father: “I always defined Paradise a little differently, as in a place without millions of idiots running around leaving tracts that would embarrass a damned five year old on your door”). They are particularly vehement in their hatred of blood transfusions, which has affected that branch of the family a number of times.
When my father returned from World War II he paid a visit on his cousin Burl. Burl’s wife, a plump and stupid woman who Burl probably never knew had once seduced my father (which wasn’t difficult as my father was a 17 year old farm boy at the time) was then visibly pregnant (by Burl) and spent the reunion climbing stairs and jumping off of her porch. After she repeated this a few times my father noticed a pattern and politely asked what the hell she was doing. Burl’s perfectly rational response: “I know you don’t agree, but that don’t mean it ain’t so… end of the world is coming in two years and children under 7 won’t be eligible for resurrection so they can’t join us in The New Earth. She’s tryin’ to miscarry so we won’t get attached.”
Burl was distinct from Lou Ida in that he was “one of the normal ones”. Aside from his kooky religion, an addiction to soap operas and his monomanic obsession with the notion that every single crisis, crime and casus belli in the history of the world is ultimately attributable to “a bunch of boys tryin’ to get ‘emselves some dope” (including, and I’m not making this up, the JFK assassination, Civil Rights movement and Challenger explosion) he actually is okay. He’s friendly, supported his family through a successful farm, well read (took several newspapers per day) and consistently an early adaptor in technology. When I was a kid he had a small fortune in Ham radio equipment, at 70 he owned the first computer I ever saw and more than 20 years later, until antiquity and Alzheimer’s reduced him in the past couple of years, he was the webmaster for his church. Lou Ida, like his other sisters, is just plumb nuts regardless of the topic.
(Actually there’s another brother, Wilbur, the black sheep, who is actually the most normal. Whether it’s a cause or effect of his having left the religion he’s generally sane and not prone to discuss religion at all. He was a radio executive whose only real oddity was [and according to neighbors who know him still is] an ability to divert every single conversation to the topic of his flowers, a subject he can discuss for HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS without tiring. I made the mistake once of asking him to tell me about his experiences as a paratrooper on D-Day and somehow went from the problem with Nazi snipers in Normandy to the problem grafting cacti and century plants in central Alabama river soil in less than a minute and, no exaggeration, complete with photo albums and the offer of a slide show. Wilbur’s wife is legally deaf and it’s wondered if this was caused by accident, a genetic condition or a sanity preserving adaptation.)
Lou Ida never attended college but she was feisty and determined enough to never let that stop her from practicing medicine, which got her into some trouble in her late twenties. In anticipation of a sunny career and in return for some dropped charges she moved to Denver for a number of years where she was licensed as a chiropractor (this was when that was essentially a 1 year apprenticeship instead of the college and post-grad work it is today) and employed by a man she was convinced wanted her “to lay with him” (her phrase- she also uses harlot, sodomite, temptress, idolater, the way of women and other Biblical euphemisms and obsolete terms in routine conversation). Her boss never said that, but she could tell, and it led to a lawsuit in which his wife got a restraining order and Lou Ida applied for one using the actual phrase “a duo of atheistic fornicators intent on unnatural relations with my person” which I know because my father, usually the stingiest of men, tacked on a side-trip through Denver when we went to Texas for vacation one summer strictly because he wanted to read the transcripts and counter balance Lou Ida’s version.
Anyway, she ended up working as a clerk on a military base, ultimately the only person in her division to have a private office. This was, of course, motivated by persecution for her beliefs of exactly the sort prophesied in the End Times. Around the time I was born she returned to Alabama “because I felt it was my duty and my need to take care of my parents in their declining years” and, to quote my father, “the fact she got fired for proselytizing on base and kicked out of her apartment just before she decided to come back just kind of worked right in to the Almighty’s plan for the crazy cow”.
Lou Ida returned, found work for the dietary departments of various hospitals over the years (though invariably she had to end up working for either a “dope fiend” or “Satan worshipper” who ended up firing her as part of that nationwide plot to persecute her). Though the requirements to practice chiropractic had changed her willingness to do so certainly hadn’t and so she was always there to give us a quick adjustment whenever she felt we could use one even though all she got for it was satisfaction and repeated screams to please stop.
One of the most famous stories about Lou Ida is the dead mule. (Dead mules are a major factor in several family stories, but this is one.) While driving home from work one day she plowed her car, one of those 1960 something Impalas that if they came with mounted gun barrels would save the government billions in tanks because they’re just as large and twice as indestructible) into a mule that had gotten out of its pasture and collapsed onto the road, either dead or waiting for Lou Ida’s euthanastic adjustment mobile. The crash injured Lou Ida, killed the mule if it wasn’t dead already and totalled the car. She filed suit against the mule’s owner for the full value of her car (about $300) and a few thousand more in pain and suffering.
On the stand a deputy testified that there were no skid marks in front of the mule and that Lou Ida’s car could not have been going more than 30 mph. He further testified that the mule was completely on the right hand side of the road and that there was ample room to drive around it. Lou Ida agreed that both of those statements were correct and that yes, in fact, she did see the mule in plenty of time to drive around it.
“Why then, Miss Lou Ida, did you NOT drive around the mule rather than slam into it?” asked the prosecutor.
Lou Ida: “Because the mule was on my side of the road and I wasn’t gonna break the law by driving on the left side!”
Verdict: the defendant was ordered to pay the value of her car, which he had offered anyway, but nothing else.
Lou Ida has (or, the last time I was in her house, which admittedly was twenty years ago, had) probably a dozen bookshelves ranging from the cinder-block/board ones on the porch to the nice heirloom ones, all crammed full of books. And every book is a romance novel.
Not a historical romance of the Fabio variety, mind, but a Harlequin or its equivalent, the kind that invariably center upon a woman with “limpid pools” for eyes torn between the “turgid shaft” of the man she’s engaged to marry or the “throbbing manhood” of the man she really loves. She not only reads them obsessively but remembers them, almost as if there’s a difference between the plots. She loaned some to my mother to read when I was a kid and my mother basically left them in the bag a suitable period of time then returned them, only to find that Lou Ida wanted to discuss them as if they were each WAR AND PEACE.
At the same time I remember her once coming by the house when DUKES OF HAZZARD was on television and the Duke boys were both standing shirtless and in skin tight pants working on the General Lee. I was paying extremely close attention to the scene due to a youthful interest in carburetors and orange paint. Lou Ida dropped in, watched a bit of the series until the Duke boys put their shirts back on, then stated “It’s just not meet the media should rely upon any device to uncover a man’s nakedness.”
My mother: Well, they’re two boys in Georgia working on their car outside in summertime. I think taking off their shirts is reasonable.
Lou Ida: I think there should be laws about removing shirts anyway. Modesty is the Biblical ideal. Those boys are blatantly enticing fornication.
My father: I agree. I always preferred subtle enticements to fornication.
Lou Ida: I have the feeling you’re joshing Cousin Garland, but those are the temptations the men of Sodom would have gorged upon.
My father: Hmm. I didn’t even know Sodom had television. Show must be a lot older than I thought.
Lou Ida: When your daughter and your sons come home to you with illegitimate babies, I wonder if your tune will change.
My father: Probably. My current tune of choice is Stonewall Jackson’s Way. By the nine months it would take ‘em to produce my bastard grandchildren I fancy I’ll be on an Acuff kick.
Above all else Lou Ida was the mistress of the inappropriate and highly embarrassing (to all but Lou Ida) comment.
Examples:
Lou Ida: You know when Daddy was dying and his mind was starting to slip he was just the world’s worst about wanting to fondle my breasts.
Daddy: Who would you estimate was the world’s best about it?
Lou Ida: I’d say ‘Daddy don’t you do that… I’m your daughter, not your wife. Mama’s dead and buried and she wasn’t a [member of our religion] so you won’t be seeing her on the New Earth, you’ll just have to get remarried or go without.
Daddy: Well, he was 85 and senile and had a bunch of strokes and diabetic and incontinent so I don’t think remarriage was really in the works.
Lou Ida: That’s what I told him. But he just kept on sliding his hand right up my shirt and into the bra and caressing my nipples.
Daddy: You wouldn’t think an 85 year old senile multiple stroke victim with diabetes would be able to do that very fast.
Lou Ida: Oh it took him a while, but once I figured out what he was doing I told him to stop it.
Daddy: You think he was looking for change at first?
Lou Ida: I thought he had me confused with his own mama and was trying to suckle at her breast again.
Daddy: Mmm… I wonder if… no I don’t. Let’s talk about the war.
Lou Ida: What war?
Daddy: Pick one.
Lou Ida in her early 50s to my mother (then in her early/mid 40s) and my painfully shy sister (then in her late teens) in front of me, my brother and my father: You know I didn’t think my menstrual flow was still going but I had a period just this week! And it was a particularly bad one. Blanche do you still get your period?
Blanche: [ahem]… I…uh… yes.
Lou Ida: As you get older do you notice any change in the texture of the blood?
Blanche: [ahem] I… uh… no, not really…
Lou Ida [to my sister]: Honey, when did you start menstruating?
Sister: I… [ahem]… Mama… I… I was about 12 or 13 I guess.
Lou Ida: Have you noticed any change in the texture over the time?
Sister: I… don’t know.
Lou Ida: Oh you’d notice… you know…
My father: This is not information I wish to be privy to.
Lou Ida: Oh… it embarrasses him… I’ll ask you about the clotting when Garland leaves.
Lou Ida (to my aunt Carrie, then in her mid to late 90s): Aunt Carrie I’ve wondered. What did you and Aunt Kitty use for female hygiene back before tampons and Playtex and all? We just used rags when I was growing up.
Carrie: Rags.
Lou Ida: Did you ever use straw or anything? I’ve heard some women used to use straw…
Carrie: None that I knew.
Lou Ida: Well it seemed to me it would be itchy…
Carrie: Seems to me I never want to talk about it again.
My personal favorite, and I swear on the altar of Og it happened-
Riding in the Cadillac with my father, Lou Ida and my grandmother when I was just old enough to know what masturbation was and consequently blushing like a nekkid choir boy at High Mass fearing I was going to be drawn into the conversation:
Lou Ida (to my grandmother, her aunt by marriage): You know when I was a girl we used to be able to hear the boys in their room masturbating. And we’d all call out to them, ‘That’s a sin and you’re all going to burn in hell!’ You grew up with a lot of brothers Aunt Sybil. Did you ever hear them masturbating?
Grandmother: Yeah. I used to hear ‘em sometimes. Not very often.
Lou Ida: What’d you used to do?
Grandmother: I’d tell your daddy to go quiet ‘em down. It was damned embarrassing.
Lou Ida: You mean your Daddy, don’t you?
Grandmother: Why would I ask my Daddy? They were your goddamned brothers!
Lou Ida: No… I meant your brothers…
Grandmother: Why the hell would I get my damned brothers to go tell your damned brothers to stop masturbating! My brother Tom was in Palestine and the others were in crazy hospitals or grown and working…
Lou Ida: No, I meant did you ever hear your brothers masturbating…
Grandmother: I just told you one was in Palestine and the ones at home did it in the woods or in the outhouse like sane people I suppose. How damned loud you think my family was?
Garland: LET’S CHANGE THE SUBJECT! NOW!
Lou Ida: I was just curious.
Grandmother: You always have been that.
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Cool- that I didn’t know, that Patton had literally read Rommel’s book. I wasn’t aware he’d written one, I thought Patton just meant “I figured you out”.
[/QUOTE]
Infantry Attacks - Wikipedia contains most of his shock tactics, while Panzer Greift An - Wikipedia was never published. Not surprised about Forrest. Genius calvary commander, and Rommel was smart enough to study the American Civil War. Well, really, the German War College was smart enough to study the American Civil War.
[QUOTE=E-Sabbath]
Infantry Attacks - Wikipedia contains most of his shock tactics, while Panzer Greift An - Wikipedia was never published. Not surprised about Forrest. Genius calvary commander, and Rommel was smart enough to study the American Civil War. Well, really, the German War College was smart enough to study the American Civil War.
[/QUOTE]
On the point of nothing in particular, one of those “Damn! Where did I read that?” things that I’ve tried to find a cite for was Rommel’s advice to his son. It was while he was getting ready to go with the escorts for his “brain seizure”, having cooly and calmly explained to his son that he was going to commit suicide and have a hero’s funeral in order to protect his family and friends, and it was something to the effect of “If you become a soldier you’ll one day have to choose between criminal stupidity and treason… the best way to avoid this is don’t become a soldier”. I’ve even heard this referred to as his last words to his son, though in his son’s account his last words were something to the effect of the less profound “Please put Hildie in the study”. (Hildie was a dachshund pup he worshipped who he was given while recuperating and who was raising hell with the generals there to take him away; Rommel had dachshunds for most of his life but Hildie was the first he’d become really attached to since the war began.)
In other news, an odd coincidence: I went home for my dinner break and had a message from my brother on my voicemail that my cousin Burl, mentioned above, is dead. He was 93. (No sympathies please as I haven’t seen him in 20-odd years, my only contact in that time was a couple of genealogy related emails and I was never at all close to him, but I just thought odd the odds he should die on a day he was written about on the Internet [and particularly a day his youthful self-enjoyment was written about].)
On Halloween I woke up and in my morning writing (which is often a ‘let’s see where this goes’ thing) I ended up writing about my cousin Ralph who died ten or so years ago and who I hadn’t even thought of in some while. (He was a colorful rotund old bachelor who had travelled the world as a musician and sold “World Famous Barbecue” and tended…
I digress. The odd thing is that I looked him up on Social Security Death Index to find out exactly when he was born and died and found to my surprise that Halloween 2006 was his 100th birthday. I remembered this at the time, his occasional comment “I came out on the same day as the rest of the spooks”, but still an odd coincidence.
Putting it all together, my cousin Ralph sold great barbecue including excellent smoked sausage he made himself. Dachshunds are occasionally called “sausage dogs”. Rommel loved dachshunds (and probably sausage) and was an admirer of Nathan Bedford Forrest to whom the Alabama 51st Cavalry was assigned, and one of its privates was M.B. Cotton who was the grandfather of my cousin Ralph who sold sausages (and dogs, actually) and of my father and his cousins Lou Ida and Burl, and Burl is dead just like Rommel and Forrest and the pigs that made the sausage. Weird how everything is so connected.
I wonder if in light of this Burl will get a huge Nazi state funeral. I doubt it, but if he does I bet there’ll be good sausage there.
War and Remembrance, probably? "In the life of a soldier there’s a very difficult line between military loyalty and criminal stupidity. "
“FriarTed, you have had a muddled and occasionally controversial career on the SDMB. What would you say is your greatest accomplishment?”
Starting the “Sampiro, You Magnificent Bastard!” thread.
This so freakin’ rocks! Thanks for coming back, Samp!
Thanks again, Sampiro. These stories are great. If you do publish them, add me to the list of people who will run out and buy a copy.
All I can do is add to the chorus of thank yous, Sampiro, and I will happily buyanything you have to offer up to your own teeming millions.
How lucky we are to have Sampiro as one of our Dopers. Sometimes I’ll be thinking of something in his writing and wonder “now what book was that in” until I wake up and remember the source.
I wish I could give Cassaroles for the Dead as Christmas gifts this year.
Welcome Back, Sampiro…! Its good to see you posting here again.
“Lou Ida’s just a silly old maid who has sordid sex on her brain… I’m sure she’d rather have it on a mattress or a bale of hay or a car roof or somethin’ but her brain’s the only option.” My father on his “twin cousin”, ca. 1980
My father never liked Lou Ida’s father, his uncle Gene. Part of it was he thought Gene was generally shiftless and way too convinced of his own intelligence and worth for a man who relied most of his life on handouts of cash and food from his mother and brother and sisters whenever times got tough which was pretty much every year. During the Depression the twins Kitty & Carrie chopped cotton and gave most of the money to their brother to feed his family, the only exception being the money that they spent on a radio for my father. The big reason though was that when my father was about 14 years old- the eve of WW2- he had saved $12 from his paper route. Gene was behind in his mortgage and broke as usual and when he learned his 14 year old nephew had this he begged to borrow it. More than thirty years later he had not paid it back and denied ever having borrowed it and my father had no respect for him at all.
The rest is some tedious land purchase trivia but helps explain my mother’s reanimation and brief return to wrestling many years later:
When “Ma”, my father’s grandmother (Gene & K/C’s mother- her given names were Louisiana Talitha Cumirah incidentally) died not long before her 100th birthday my father decided to buy the home place, build a house there and take care of his aunts and his mother (he lived in Montgomery at the time but was spending more time with the old ones that with his kids). There was no will and my father inherited only 2/7 of the place (his father’s share and a share his father had bought from his married sister during the Depression) so he had to buy out the other heirs. Kitty & Carrie gave him their share of course (bringing him to 4/7), an uncle who was doing well and living near Mobile and very thankful his nephew was willing to take care of the twins happily donated his share to the cause (5/7) leaving Gene and Arlington. Arlington was a VERY well to do miser who had moved to the mountains to await the apocalypse more than 60 years before, had no interest in the homeplace and had a mountain of cash (though he lived in a shack) but named a ridiculously high figure for his 1/7 that was eventually negotiated down to a more reasonable amount (about $2,500) that was a bit inflated but ultimately doable. In a completely separate negotiation blind to the deal he was cutting with Arlington Gene, who was in debt to his twin sisters and his dead brother and his nephew for an amount he never intended to pay and that had long since been written off, agreed to sell for $1,800, retaining the 40 acres his father had deeded him around 1910. Papers were drawn and signed, but when Gene learned his brother was receiving more than he was he refused to honor the agreement and threatened to fight it in court and yadda yadda blah, and even though he didn’t have a leg to stand on my father struck a new deal with him. This time he paid him around $6,000, half for his 1/7 of the homeplace and the remainder for 36 of his 40 acres. (It seems low in today’s terms but at the time it was fair market value plus the 1/7th purchase price.) It wiped out my father’s savings but the place was his.
Over the years my parents loaned Lou Ida money several times. They took care of her (or rather, my mother did) when she was sick. When her boyfriend from Denver (a man with the mind of Gary and the body of Junior Samples who she would not marry until his ex-wife was dead for she was at least somewhat consistent in her Fundamentalism) visited we let her stay at our house each night so her “reputation would not be besmirched”. She dropped in so frequently at dinnertime that my mother always made extra (“For thirty years I never knew if I was gonna be cooking for 2,5,7 or 12 so I always went for 10”). In exchange for this Lou Ida… well… nothing really.
She did occasionally try to save our souls by converting us to her religion. And she was always good about telling people my mother was an overly permissive mother with a pretentious materialistic family who henpecked her husband and that my father was nowhere near her own (Lou Ida’s) intelligence and his degrees were from secular colleges and thus counted for nothing. And she was nice enough to give us adjustments (which she also gave to the guy who had a wreck in her front yard once she pulled him out of the car, without which the paramedics assured us he never would have… had that adjustment). When she came by once as I was dressing as a vampire for a haunted house at my school she was nice enough to explain why I was going to hell and when I participated in little theater she warned me it was a bastion of sodomites and harlots (I’ll give her that one). Otherwise, that’s about it.
She’s not one of my favorite people. She wasn’t one of my mother’s. But giving my mother her due, the histrionics she occasionally unleashed on her immediate family behind closed doors and gates were never vented on her in-laws and were a ledger to be kept of favors one to the other there’d be a significant amount of red in Lou Ida’s column and black in my mother’s.
Two weeks after my father died (when Burl drove on closed and frozen roads to retrieve his body in a horse trailer but that’s another story) my aunt Kitty burned to death. (Technically she caught fire two weeks after- she lived another week, defying odds of less than 1% by doing so.) Lou Ida took in Carrie. For a week. Then deposited her at our house where she remained for the next several years.
Reminder: Lou Ida was Carrie’s biological niece. She and Kitty had chopped cotton for $.03 per pound in the Depression to feed Lou Ida and her brothers and sisters. She and Kitty had fed Lou Ida’s family for months on end when her father’s crops failed once again or he was having an “illness” for an extended period of time. Carrie was also (unlike her mother and like her father) a member of the same crackpot religion as Lou Ida.
And to show her loyalty Lou Ida visited Carrie at least every other month, sometimes for an hour. She promised to take Carrie for a visit to her house twice when we went on vacation and both times reneged at the last minute. And as Carrie grew incontinent and our house became saturated by the odor of urine and when Carrie ruined our sofa with feces and urine as she declined further it was Ida Lou who replaced it for us by selling us one of her own. For the low low price of $200 (exactly the same price she’d advertised it for in the newspaper). While at least her dinnertime drop-ins were less frequent we could have seriously used some help with the near centenarian old lady as she became increasingly feeble, enamored of drop-ins by ghosts, Sandy Duncan, Vanna White, Emmanuel Lewis, etc., or at least just a day’s break of not having to listen for her to stop breathing or helping her with bodily needs.
(The question may arise why we didn’t put Carrie in a nursing home: there were several reasons. One is, ironically, that my mother was an in-law and I was a grandnephew and as such neither of us had any authority as legal caregiver due to a [since changed] law, and because of a less practical reason: Carrie was absolutely horrified of the prospect of a nursing home. And money: we had none, nada, flat broke, and thus the only way she could have been admitted to a nursing home was through Medicaid/Charity and the only ones that accepted that for payment were notoriously 60 MINUTES expose caliber bad. So she stayed with us.)
One day some members of Lou Ida’s religion came to visit us, having no idea whose house it was- just one of their knock and annoy hit’n’runs to sell their newsletter and tell you that hell was in fact the grave but you were going there as of 1938 when their leader had determined that fact. Since Carrie was lonely and never saw anybody other than the two of us we invited them in and asked them to speak with her. They did, and after Carrie told them about her twin sister a dim bulb (probably an amaryllis) clicked in their minds and one said “Oh, I know who you are! You’re sister Lou Ida’s aunt! This must be Lou Ida’s house!”
When informed it was not and who we were, one of them told us how wonderful we were. “It’s great that you’re helping Lou Ida out by taking her aunt for a while… that poor woman so needs a break.”
Suffice it to say that by early 1987 Lou Ida was officially removed from my mother’s list of garden party invitees and “best friends 4ever list”. And that’s the year when the 60 year old bitch also became the only person ever physically evicted from Locksley Hall or any other residence of my mother’s, but it was 19 years before she became the only 80 year old I’ve ever cursed out in the most sexually explicit imitation yet done (to my knowledge) of my father’s stentorian voice.
Next episode: The Return of the Blue Angel and Her Penultimate Half Nelson Bitch-toss.
One further Lou Ida story, this one about her curiosity and attention to details:
She once arrived at Locksley Hall on a day when, a true but long story I won’t go into in interest of time, I was standing on the roof of the house in a white face (stage makeup) wearing my brother’s toga brandishing a stage gladius and reciting Mark Anthony’s soliloquy from JULIUS CAESAR. She gets out of her car, I call out to her, she looks up and without so much as a single-and-a-half-take says “Is your mama home?”
"Yes, she’s over here by the chimney’ I tell her and my mother walks up from the rear of the roof to the roof over the porch and looks down. “Here I am” she says.
Lou Ida: “Blanche, do you have any shortening I can have? I just realized I’m out and I don’t wanna drive all the way into town. I called your number but they said it was disconnected.”
Mama: Yeah it is. There should be plenty of vegetable oil in the cabinet over the sink.
“Thanks.” She walks into the house, my mother and I look at each other with a “I wonder if she’s wondering why I’m in a toga and whiteface and we’re both standing on the roof?”
She came back out a moment later with the shortening and said “There were two bottles, so I poured most of this one into the other bottle. I 'preciate it.” She cranked her car, starts to drive out the driveway, then puts it into reverse, backs up for the tenth of a mile or so, gets back out of the car and says, still no change in expression:
“Blanche, I’ve just got to ask… why’d they say your phone is disconnected?”
“I didn’t pay the bill. Money’s tight right now.”
And yet one more Lou Ida story:
She retired in 1986. The year before she retired she decided to buy a newer car. The one she drove was the 1971 Impala she bought with the money she got from the lawsuit settlement when she ran over the dead mule. She was excited- she was going to have a newer car so that this one would last her a lot longer.
You guessed it: the newer car was a 1972 Impala. “But with 10,000 fewer miles” she noted.
If anything I’m whitewashing and “normalizing” Lou Ida. She’s really much weirder than this.
Yes, I know I’m biting at the hook, but why were you on the roof in a toga reciting Shakespeare?
[QUOTE=jayjay]
Yes, I know I’m biting at the hook, but why were you on the roof in a toga reciting Shakespeare?
[/QUOTE]
Heh! Here I sit thinking, well, it is the south, so why wouldn’t he have been on the roof in whiteface and a toga reciting Shakespeare?