And They Said

As a child we had our jokes. Oddly enough I often was at the end of many of them. There was the song by Ray Stevens. It's probably not politically correct now, but we weren't smart back then and we laughed because we thought things were funny.

The song was 'Ahab the Arab, Sheikh of the Burning Sand'. It involved Fatima, and an unknown admirer, and 'Clyde' the camel. I was the designated Clyde.

When Cousin Coco and I played (Coco was of the 'first best in everything and all that jazz' fame) she got to be Zoro and I was 'Sergeant Garcia', she was Scarlet and I was Melanie...

One that my mother thought was clever was the train joke. I could do brainless things, being rather a clutz, and she told me on occasions, 'When God was passing out brains you thought he said trains and since you weren't going anywhere you didn't get any...'

A few years ago a doctor was trying to get my family medical history—which there isn't any of since my family did not frequent doctors. And then I told her I didn't know my father's family, my parents being divorced when I was three months old—

She asked me, 'How did that make you feel?' I was startled by the question. 'It didn't make me feel anything', I told her.

Maybe I should feel something, but, like most everything in life, I never questioned. I accepted things the way they were.

Good, bad, that was the way it was. My life was full of people—good and bad—full of love, laughter, sad, and bad it was what it was. Real people, real time.

I had a tussle with an inferiority complex for years. At one point another clever saying of mother's was 'you're as good as the best and better than the rest'.

Well, now coupled with the brains and trains thingy do they cancel out? I write that laughing because...

Someone told me several years ago that she was 'as good or better than most people'. I told her when people look down their nose at me, I figure maybe they know something I don't.

In the end who is the judge? I also figure it doesn't matter. God is my judge. He knows my good and bad. He knows my struggles.

1 Corinthians 15:10 "But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me."