Cloris Bell Struck Dead at Church Supper

I’m so popular, I get more and more mail asking me for advice. This week I got a letter from a woman named Myra who thinks so much like me, I held the letter right up to my nose and looked at who signed it to make sure it wasn’t from me.

She wrote, “Trixie, at the church where I go, some of the people who come to our church supper don’t bring enough food, then they eat up more than their share! I feel guilty getting worked up over something so petty. What’s your opinion?”

Well, Myra, since you’ve owned up to being petty, I don’t reckon it’s my place to deprive you of the designation. And if you’re so hell-bent to make a confession, hire yourself a priest. Who do you people think I am, anyhow, the Pope’s wife?

That used to happen a lot at my church, and one Sunday when we had a congregational meeting to address everybody’s concerns, I stood right up in the sanctuary and complained that there sometimes wasn’t enough food at the family night suppers. “The reason there’s not enough,” I said, “ is half you people that go to this church are too tight to bring your fair share and the other half of you are just hogs.”

I tried to go on to suggest a new bylaw that would allow me personally to shut the door to the fellowship hall in the face of anybody who showed up at a church supper with a half of a canned pear smeared with mayonnaise on a piece of lettuce on a saucer, the way Cloris Bell did, but a couple of the ushers hauled me out the back door before I could get into the specifics.

Believe me, Myra, I know just what you mean. This is a problem that is the thorn in the flesh of church people across this nation, and has more than once made me wish we Protestants had a Pope to raise holy hell over these little things that aren’t covered in the Bible.

I wanted to pinch off Cloris Bell’s head from day one, and not just because she was a skinflint when it came to church suppers. I knew she’d run with the men all her life and dipped snuff and had robbed money from the cash register when she worked at the Picadilly Cafeteria.

Then, late in life, like a lot of folks do when they look in the mirror of a morning and see Death looking back, she joined the church so she’d have a preacher to say words over her, a place in the ground to get planted, and a few people obligated to come to see her laid out.

She never put more than a dollar in the collection plate of a Sunday, when I’ll pinch and save all week and throw in a five. I knew she only dropped a dollar because I made sure I sat on the pew behind her where I could lift my head and see what she put in.

To the first church supper she came to she brought a fourth of a dried-up turkey breast still wrapped in the aluminum foil she cooked it in and proclaimed it a main dish. The next time, and half the time thereafter, she’d dump a can of peaches or pears on some iceberg lettuce, sling some mayonnaise on it and declare it a salad.

Then she’d proceed to bull her way into the line and pile her plate high with everything everybody else had brought.

One time old Ben McLaughlin brought a whole ham he'd smoked, it got all eat up, and somebody found her in the closet where they keep the choir robes, gnawing the last bit of meat off that hambone.

It all came to a head one night when I was helping arrange everything on the table in the fellowship hall. She waddled in the door bearing a little relish dish with some celery sticks smeared with dried up pimento cheese. “Is that all you brought?” I said, loud as I could so everybody could hear it. Heads turned. I heard some snickers.

“I don’t bring much,” she said,’ since I’m such a light eater myself,” and I looked her up and down and said, “Are you for a fact? I guess it takes a while for the effect to show.”

Now, that happened to be the same night that I had made a nice pot roast, potatoes, carrots, and onions. My neighbor Delores had brought a spiral-cut ham from Harris Teeters. My daughter Lou Ann had brought a whole bucket of Bojangles chicken.

I couldn’t even eat myself for just sitting back and watching Cloris Bell, Miss Light Eater, load up her plate. I finally had to give up counting how many times she went back to the table since I’ve only got ten fingers.

Bitterness rose up in me like acid reflux. I knew I was standing in the need of prayer.

I was so got away with I ran down the hall to the empty sanctuary and sat in a pew in the dark and prayed for patience. I was so wrought up, I wished I was Episcopalian so I could get on my knees. “Lord God Almighty,” I prayed, “thou alone art the wellspring of my exceeding generosity! I know that thou art the source of all my good and perfect works, and I know I’m not supposed to be doing all that I do for that ungrateful hog, Cloris Bell, over in the fellowship hall. I am supposed to be doing it as unto Thee.”

I tell you what: Prayer changes things. I felt better for two or three hours. But that night when I got home and went to bed, I dreamed I plucked a drum leg from that bucket of Bojangles chicken and chased Cloris Bell around the fellowship hall and walloped her with it upside the head with a supernatural force available to us mortals only in our dreams.

She died on the spot and even before I was good and awake and remembered it was just a dream, I felt right good about it, and if feeling that way for five minutes was wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Thanks for writing, Myra, honey. I sure hope that helps.

Take a look at my Precious Memories album. I've just got started with it. Click on my picture then run the little hand over each picture for a little note:

Trixie's Precious Memories

Captain Hook's Descendent Gives World the Bird

Get out my flyswat!

This latest development is enough to cause me to give up trying to keep you chickens of mine in the coop!

("Chickens" is what I call the younguns who do what the Google people call "follow" me on this blog thing, and I love those chickens every one, even though every one of them but Amanda and O'Clara are in it for the prospect of inheriting my last dollar, should my last dime ever reach that lofty height.)

I have tried to set a good example for all of y'all, and now here's what one of my prize chickens, Creative Hook, (offspring of the Captain) has created with her own wicked little hand: a little man doing something ugly with his middle finger.

And if that's not bad enough, she named the little man Shiddy!

She calls him "a nasty little creature chrocheted in colors of nausea: pissed-off purple, pus green, and vile yellow. He's the dark force that lies deep within the hearts of all of us!" she says. "Having a bad day? Show the world your Shiddy attitude! It's a great way to say 'up yours' to people who deserve it."

I ask you all: Is that not awful?

I'm so weighed down with shame, I'm wandering through the house right now looking for a wall to hide behind.

Yet, Creative Hook is one of my chickens, one of those whose name is missing from the shid list I keep on the back of the envelope my Duke power bill comes in, and I therefore must also inform you that she also has the prettiest little things for sale, scarves and pocketbooks and hats perched on the prettiest little heads--make sure she throws in the head with the purchase of a hat. And you can see it all right here, including what Creative Hook calls a new, improved Shiddy, complete with a tail and a belly buttom: http://www.etsy.com/view_transaction.php?transaction_id=8153377

And to add to my woes: Amanda left her head in the pantry today and has not yet wrote to inform me if she found it.

And furthermore, Arlene Nix, Missy Hager, and Sarah Owens, who have not paid me a bit of mind for months, plus Ellen McLaughlin and Vicki Hughes who have yet to write a word, be sure your sin will find you out because the Devil comes lookin' for that envelope where I keep score and list all my bitter grudges.

And if you would redeem yourselves, write now and then go forth and spread the word to all the other infidels.

84 Years Old and Pregnant at Myrtle Beach

I'll have to make a new category for this one, y'all. I'll have to call it "Trixie's Believe it or Not."

Look at that picture over there on the left of those two young people from a place called the Ivory Coast of Africa who are traveling and exhibiting themselves all over the world and lately at Ripley's Believe it or Not in Myrtle Beach, SC.

Now, y'all prepare yourself for a shock.

Evidently there are in this world 2,000 fool women who claim they got pregnant after they rubbed that naked man with his ding dong a-dangling and that woman with petrified chocolate kissies for titties.

Now, the women who think rubbing those two got them pregnant have s*it for brains and I'll worry nary a hair nor waste a prayer on them. It's that young couple I'm worried about. They look so stiff and out of place. I think they'd make a right cute couple if they'd loosen up a little bit and try to blend in with the rest of the young people.

Anyhow, the story is those two are traveling the world and stopping off at museums and exhibiting themselves naked for a price, claiming that by rubbing them a woman can get pregnant, and all I can say to that is does nobody have any shame anymore and what a creative way to make do when times are bad, and if my tummy was as tight and my titties as taut as that gal's, I might fly all over the world, letting people rub all over me, too, if I thought it would earn me enough money to get my tires rotated and keep me from having to borrow from the Walmart greeter to pay my tithe.

Now, I have lived a long while, long enough to know that it is nature's way that for a woman to get pregnant somebody--two somebodies and one of them a man--have got to do some rubbing, and I've heard tell that the southeast coast cesspool of sin, Myrtle Beach, is one of the top knock-up capitals of the continent.

So, I figure those two are making false claims, but what would it hurt even an 84-year-old woman to play along, pitch them a few coins, give them a good feel, and see what happens? And you never know: Abraham in the Bible, was it his wife--one of his wives, they say he had a houseful--who was in her mid-nine hundreds when she had her first?

I've always told my own kids if I could start over I'd raise them up another way than what I did, knock some sense into their heads early on, for one thing. And now, some 35 years after my female organs have dried up like leather britches beans, maybe I've got another chance. You don't know.

Maybe I'll hitch a ride down to Myrtle Beach with a busload of Baptists and in a few months' time some of y'all will be throwing me a little baby shower at the Methodist Home. More peculiar things than that have happened.

Steelers Beat Cardinals

That's the kind of headlines that hollered out to me today when, old fool that I am, I chanced to open up the newspaper hoping for a little spot of happy news.

Like I need to hear first thing of a morning that a bunch of steel-workers hauled off and gave some Catholic bishops what-for.

Some folks say there ought to be a law against walloping a man of the cloth, even a man of the red cloth, but where I stand on that issue shall remain a deep and abiding mystery.

Well, all I can do is pray for justice, as I reckon that boy is doing with all his might, the one with the yellow britches and the hardhat on.