Sexed up Great-Grandmothers - Rated R

Sexed up Great Grandmothers

By

Imari Jade

Yes, the title does come with a story, but I have to set it up first. Happy March 1, 2011 everyone.

Today’s blog has an R rating. So if you’re easily offended please stop here.

I left work early so I could go buy my bus passes for the month and like most of my life nothing goes as planned. I had to go get the money out of the ATM machine and of course, it was broken, so I had to use another machine and pay a fee. I’m not bitching about the dollar fee, but doing so made me miss the bus I was supposed to catch. So I had to wait on another bus for 25 minutes on the first hottest day in March, carrying a coat because it was in the 50’s when I left home this morning. And wouldn’t you know it I had on something black again today and it felt like the sun was only beaming on me and no one else.

Here’s the deal. I live in one parish in Louisiana and work in another. This means I need two different types of public transit passes. You would think they would sell them at some midpoint, but no. So first I had to ride the Saint Claude bus up to Canal Street, get off, and walk two blocks to Walgreens to buy the bus pass for New Orleans. I had to wait for the cashier to call a manager to bring one up to the registers. Neither woman was very friendly. Neither one of them smiled and I felt like I was bothering the cashier but she had no problem taking my $55.00 for the pass. The entire transaction took about five minutes but it felt like a life time.

I left Walgreens and walked back two blocks to the Westbank bus stop. I hopped on a Terrytown bus, traveled across the Mississippi River and got off at the bus terminal to buy the second pass. It was so hot in that office I wonder how that cashier could sit in there, but I guess you can put up with anything when you need a job. This also took about two minutes and the cashier was on her cell phone talking to someone and she never got off the phone, she just took my $60.00 and gave me my pass. I left out of the door, looked at my watch, it was 4:30.

I seen the outbound Westbank Expressway bus leave at this time, which meant another one should have been pulling in the terminal going inbound, which was the bus I needed. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed and a lot of busses came and left but no Westbank Expressway. These two little old ladies walked up and started talking to me. I don’t know I think I have one of those faces that says, please come up and talk to me because I don’t know why but people seem to talk to me wherever I go. I didn’t want to appear rude so I spoke back to them.

One of the ladies sat down on the cement bench next to me while the other one stood and continued to talk. The conversation began with her telling me that both of them were Creole and that she was born in Thibodeaux and lived on a plantation. The conversation should have ended there, (it would have if my mother had been with me) and it really should have ended when she told me that she remembered slavery. Black history month just yesterday and I wondered why she decided to talk to me about her heritage. It didn’t seem to matter that I was an African American female and I might be insulted by her talking about sugar cane and watching the slaves worked the fields, but I wasn’t born in that generation, never been a slave and didn’t feel that I had to comment since it didn’t really bother me. So she continued talking. It didn’t take me long to figure out the one next to me was nearly deaf. The standing woman had to ask her a question three times before she answered. Well, the standing one told me she was 89 years old, opened her jacket to show me her slim and trim physique. I complimented on how good she looked and she proceeded to tell me that both of them lived in a retirement home close to where I live and how she hated it because the women were a bunch of gossips.

Somewhere in the conversation we began discussing our kids and she told me she didn’t think I was old enough to have kids. She told me she thought I looked sixteen. I took the compliment but assured her that I have grandchildren. Then I wondered why she would be having a grown up conversation with me if she thought I was a kid.

I don’t know how we got on the conversation about crime and then she told me everything from how her grandchild was molested, how she got mugged and then she started talking about she didn’t like the way the way the young men wore their pants riding down on their behinds. When I tell you there wasn’t a subject we didn’t discuss during this time and then all of a sudden she began to talk about her deceased husband and how he cheated on her and came home with “crabs”. He left her for another woman who lived around the corner for them and they hung out in a neighborhood bar. Apparently she went to the bar and started kissing on some man to make her husband jealous and he got mad. She told me that this other guy was a good kisser, but she wasn’t a flirt. And of course I’m laughing as she telling it to me because I’m figuring she must have been quite a hoot as a young woman. She told me that every time she walked past the cemetery she told him “thank you for the check” (she was referring to his social security check that she now collects) and that’s one of the reasons she was at the bus stop with me was because she had just come from shopping.

Next she started telling dirty jokes. What kinds of foods does a priest like to eat? Answer: Nun. Why is there a gate around a cemetery? Answer: Because people are dying to get in. There was another one about a man telling her how long his penis was. She asked him if it could touch his butt and he told her yes, so she said, “I told him then go f__k yourself.” I could have died at that moment.

Okay, so I’m appalled and laughing at the same time with this old woman.

Then she gets on the subject about going to church and the hypocrites that are in the church with her. She has a problem with how many times they pass the collection plate, especially since she ran into her priest and two nuns in a casino in Mississippi. I told her they were probably putting her money to good use. That got a laugh out of her.

You might have noticed that we talked about quite a few things. We didn’t have anything better to do since the bus was an hour late. When it finally arrived they got on first and I was one of the last to board. The bus was packed with riders. The standing woman patted her lap and wanted to know if I wanted to sit down on it. “No, I’m cool,” I told her as I walked to the back of the bus where I found an available seat. That kind of ended my conversation with them. Ah, senior citizens. You have to love them.

I had just enough time to turn my MP3 player back on before some woman set next to me and crushed me half to death. Ladies, if you butt if bigger than the average sized bus seat down try to squeeze into it.

As you can tell this blog is about characterization and I had a couple of winners today. I could probably use her in a story and might one of these days. Some of my old teaching came back to me. Listen to the people around you. This afternoon I got an earful.

Imari Jade