Last week, I posted my interview with "Linda". I have known her forever, at least ever since I can remember and if I were into reading books as Mr. Possum does, then I am sure I would have discovered some philosopher who said that existence is only as long as I am around or something like that. I once thought of being a philosopher, but to it seemed to me to involve way too much thinking. Anyway, I kant even think of the name of a philospher and as you can see I have completely lost track of whatever I was talking about and will have to read back up to the top of the page to see if I intended to write anything that you might want to read but I doubt it since I'm sure that you have better things to do and are only here because of a slip of the mouse which is a funny thing to call that thing which to me looks more like a small rock than anything else.
Okay, I see I was planning on writing a little more about Linda, maybe a story of hers or two. I may have mentioned one of her stories, the one about her Mama whacking a would be burgler over the head with a butcher knife. Well this is how she says it happened.
"Daddy was off visiting some relatives I think. Mother and I were home alone because she couldn't close the beauty parlor. You remember the beauty parlor? It was the congregating place for all the ladies in the commmunity except for the Holiness who didn't do makeup and who put their hair up on top of their heads in buns. Of course, they managed very elaborate buns which may have been more hairdressing than Mother ever did for any of the sinning Baptists and Church of Christers. A lot of people think the old Church of Christers didn't do beauty parlors and makeup, but Mother and I were Church of Christ and she ran the beauty parlor. It would have been plumb hypocritical to run a beauty parlor of you didn't believe in fancy hair and makeup. This was before big hair which I think really came in with teenagers when I was about 14, anyway that's what I remember-the girls with teased hair and the boys with either flattops or Elvis duckass haircuts. Either way, the boys used more grease than a Burger King franchise to keep their hair just so. Mother learned how to do the teenager's hair because she said you couldn't be judgmental about the hairstyle your customer wanted even if they did look like idiots with them. Mother could be a bit opinionated. When I saw the movie. "Steel Magnolias", I thought it must have been writen about Mother's beauty parlor, but then we didn't have any really crazy peope around except for Eddie Lee Parker who was the burgler Mother hit with the butcher knife. Eddie Lee tried to open a window in our house after we had gone to bed. Mother heard him wrassling with the window and got her butcher knife out from under the bed where she kept it along side her little .32 pistol Daddy bousght her. He said later that she didn't take the pistol because when she tried shooting a 55 gallon drum from about 10 feet away, she missed ever time. I tried that little pistol a while back and wasn't any better with it than her so it must be the pistol since I can hit a half-dollar sized target at 25 yards with my .357. Mother said she felt she had a better chance with the butcher knife and when Eddie Lee stuck his head throught he window, she chopped down on top of it and laid his scalp open pretty good. Eddie Lee was a Holiness and wasn't supposed to go to the doctor, but he got old Doctor Carpenter in New Hope up and got hisself some stitches. Sorry about the bad grammar with that "hisself" but it just seems more natural to talk like that when telling tales of the old folks. Anyway a couple of days later, Mother and I were in the grocery store when Eddie Lee came in looking like one of them Mahah Rajas in the encyclopedia what with his head wrapped up in about a mile of bandages. Mother told him that the next time he tried breaking into her house, she would use the point of the knife. He pretended to not know what she was talking about but he and all the other folks in the store knew. That was the last trouble Mother ever ahd with burglers although she did have to threaten to kill a known murderer who scared me one day when I went to get the mail but that is another story."
posted by <"Billy Joe Bob"> at 1:28 PM
