Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Guest Writer Linda Bethea – Pass the Chicken Please or Fowl Friends

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

Pass the Chicken Please or Fowl Friends

We went places and saw people that most people would never encounter. Daddy had heard of somebody who lived back in the woods about four miles off Tobacco Road who had something he might be interested in buying. He had to check it out, driving forever down muddy roads that looked like they might disappear into nothing. Finally we got back to Mr. Tucker’s shack. Mr. Tucker was wearing overalls and nothing else. While Daddy and Mr. Tucker disappeared into the tangle of weeds and mess of old cars, car tires, trash, old washing machines and other refuse behind their house, Mother and the kids sat in the car. It was hot. Daddy was gone. It got hotter. Daddy was still gone. We opened the car doors, hoping to catch a breeze. It got hotter and hotter. The baby was squalling. Mrs. Tucker…

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Are we all racist and discriminatory in some way or the other?

Himanaya

Being an Indian, I often find people living around me accuse the Europeans and the Americans to be racist and hostile towards our ethnicity. Of course there are some people who are racist towards our ethnicity.The recent example being the whole T-Series vs Pewdiepie saga where people have turned aggressive against Indians calling them names and stereotyping them.When asked why do they do so, they say its just a joke. I want to tell them that being racist and disrespecting a certain ethnicity just cannot become a reason for laughter. However, I believe that such people constitute a very small amount when compared to the whole.

However, we Indians ourselves are racist in some way or another. For instance people living in Northern India are racist towards those living in South and vice-versa.People living in one part think that people living in the other part are uncultured, dirty and egoistical…

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Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Guest Writer Linda Bethea – #Family Talk

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

I think we all have “family talk” that outsiders don’t get.

A much-used phrase in our family is, “I don’t like what I wanted.”

It was first uttered by my little niece, Chelsea. She had a quarter and spent the morning begging her mother to walk her to a nearby store to put the quarter in a vending machine for a prize. As soon as her afternoon nap was over, off they walked for her prize. Upon popping her quarter in, a capsule with a lizard dropped in her hand. She hated it and smashed it to the ground.

“Chelsea, you’ve been wanting a prize all morning. Why did you throw it down?”


”I don’t like what I wanted!”

That line comes in so handy. You can use it referring to a car, a man, a job, or the new shoes that cramp your toes. We use it…

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Hair of the Dog

My son is gifted in the hair department with more growth in his eyebrows than most men have on his head.  I can’t wait for the ear hair to start.

Anyway, he didn’t know his sister’s phone number had changed and he sent her this photo of his beard progress along with several other outrageous texts last week.  Some poor state worker  who was assigned her old phone must has thought the Devil was stalking them.  They may have even turned over a new leaf and gone to church today.

 

Mama Milk My Goat

lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

Mama Milk My Goat

Whenever anyone in my family was feeling sorry for herself and expressing it to a point where it was noticeable, another member of the family could be counted upon to use the family saying for such occasions, “Well, Mama milk my goat,” we would say, and if the person’s nose wasn’t too far out of joint, they might snap out of it.  Or, alternatively, stalk away to seclusion where they could fully feel the full extent of their misery without anyone trying to dissuade them from it. Why did we say this? Because my mother had told us all that it was what my grandmother, her mother-in-law, used to say.

My grandmother, a master at martyrdom, used to say it with a small uptake of breath, in a trembling voice.  I can remember hearing her do so, although it may be that sort of childhood memory…

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Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Guest Writer – Farm Life: Gotta Have Guts by Linda Bethea

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

Farm Life: Gotta Have Guts

Daddy loved home remedies and dosed us and the livestock readily. Mother ran interference on cow chip tea and coal oil and sugar, but did let him load us with sulphur and molasses for summer sores. We never got summer sores, probably because we reeked so badly we were rejected by mosquitoes. I do appreciate Mother for putting her foot down when his more toxic ideas. No telling what kind of chromosome damage she saved the gene pool.

The livestock weren’t so lucky. They got coal oil for pneumonia, distemper, to bring on labor, and as a tonic, should they be so foolish as to look puny. Daddy hung ropes with black oil soaked bags for cows and horses to rub against as protection against insects, which they gladly did. When an unfortunate cow bloated from green hay, he inserted an ice pick in her…

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Excerpts

Look what Andrew has been up to.

Andrew Joyce

The reflected firelight flickered across awestruck faces and mirrored in the eyes of those who listened as stories were told of yesterday’s indignities and tomorrow’s aspirations. The look in those yearning eyes spoke of hopes and dreams. The laughter heard around the fire conveyed a sense that somehow it would all work out. For a few short hours, on Saturday nights, in the deep woods of a place none of them had ever heard of before, the constant fear that lived within their hearts was banished from their lives.

In time, they would prevail. Their sons and daughters would one day stand straight and tall as proud Americans, as proud as their fathers had been to be Irish.

*****

We rode in under a cloudless, blue-vaulted sky that seemed to go on forever. I glanced toward the arroyo. Sunlight glistened off a dozen rifle barrels. The sight of those guns…

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Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Guest Writer – Linda Bethea – Grandma and the Coat from Hell

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

It is time to catch up with Linda Bethea and her extended family…and this week her well-meaning Grandma and her sometimes unwelcome gifts.

Grandma and the Coat from Hell by Linda Bethea.

Since there were five kids in our family, Grandma did her best to help out when she could.

Sometimes I still hate her for it. Once she went to the Goodwill Store and bought me the ugliest coat in the world. I didn’t have a problem with Goodwill. It was ugly that bothered me. It was a knee-length brown hounds-tooth wool dress coat of the style not seen since movies from the 1940’s, trimmed with brown velvet cuffs and collar and huge brown buttons with big rhinestones in the middle. I had hoped for a parka with fake-fur collar like the high society girls in my class. I turned to Mother, hoping for salvation. Mother was ecstatic, probably…

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Smorgasbord Blog Magazine Christmas Celebrations the Ninth Day of Christmas with guests Linda Bethea and Sandra J. Jackson

Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

So pleased that the Twelve Days of Christmas are bringing some pre-festive enjoyment and thank you to all of those who have reblogged and commented. My special guest today is Linda Bethea who recently joined the blog as a regular guest, with her entertaining family dramas. She is joined by author #Fantasy Sandra J. Jackson who will be sharing her most favourite Christmas gift.

My Christmas Past.

On this ninth day of my own memories of Christmas I have moved on from 1977 when I was not sure what the future would hold for me to the Christmas of 1979.

I had left the school in Sussex where I had been Housekeeper/cook for 18 months and moved in the April 1979 to Wales to be Assistant Manager at a hotel between Dolgellau and Barmouth on the Mawddach Estuary in the stunning Snowdonia National Park.

I was by this time in…

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