Aug 19

CALLING ME OUT MY NAME

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
As a kid, my mother would take me and my siblings shopping for clothes in local department stores. Anything my mother, a home economist and a bit of a tailor, couldn’t make for us, she’d buy when we had the money. I remember how excited my mother was when women were allowed to have store charge cards linked to their husband’s money. My mother’s first store charge card resembled an army dog tag. It was rectangular, made of metal, and smaller than the plastic encrypted credit cards of today. Hers had an assigned number. Her card also contained her first and last names along with her address, stamped into the metal face of the card. Whenever my mother used the card to pay for something, a salesclerk stuck it into a small manual charge machine face up. Then the clerk placed a small, rectangular, handwritten paper invoice with triple carbon layers on top of the charge card. She slid a roller-like attachment over the invoice and the card so my mother’s information would appear on the invoice. The salesclerks were always white women (back then, the sales staff wasn’t integrated) and usually a great deal younger than my mother. When […]
Aug 05

102 YEARS OLD. She’s over a century.

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I don’t normally do five essays in a month. I also don’t dedicate any of them to somebody’s birthday either. This month, I decided to change what I normally do and make an exception. My mother turns 102 years old on the second week of this month. She doesn’t do Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Instagram or Snapchat so she’ll never read this tribute. I thought I should do something special online for her, sort of a permanent digital record that she existed on this earth for the last 102 years. I read somewhere that the number of folks over 100 isn’t so rare nowadays and the number of centenarians is actually increasing. Try as I might, I can’t imagine what she’s seen during her lifetime. I know she missed WWI but lived through the depression. She spoke about how she and my aunt sold bread and cookies from a wagon. My stepfather lost a janitor job during the depression but tried to make up for it by setting a home bakery because he loved to bake. My mother said she got to practice subtraction and addition as she and her sister sold bread and rolls my step-grandfather baked. She watched her […]
Jul 29

WHY I WROTE: What’s Love Got To Do With It?

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
In this day and age of social media, short-term relationships and instant gratification, I wondered what a long-term, lesbian friendship of 20 years looked like. How did the women meet? What would the women involved be like? Would they be saint-like women? Once these saints were engaged or married, they never ever looked at another woman and thought. “I want me some of that!” Or would the two friends be devilish women who wanted to sleep with every woman they saw? And tried to do so. What attracted the two women to each other in the first place. Why did they decide to become friends? The two women in question dated 20 years ago. They became friends when the dating thing didn’t work out for them. One of the women, Bianca was an attractive, charming single philanderer who loved women and lots of them. She dated Ernestine who later became her best friend and several other women simultaneously. Bianca’s unfaithful behavior hurt Ernestine who believed Bianca was the marrying kind. When Ernestine discovered Bianca’s infidelities, she decided she couldn’t trust another partner ever again. She became lucky in business but distrustful in her life. Meanwhile Bianca never wanted to be […]
Jul 15

THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
When I was still working for city government, I formed a great friendship with a female co-worker. We used to talk about everything. She knew I was gay and accepted that fact. She also knew years ago that I’d been through a nasty divorce just as she was going through one currently. We exchanged notes about how bad my ex-husband or her soon-to-be former husband were. We spoke about our husbands’ idiocy about misusing our children’s affections or playing games with child support, hoping if things were bad enough for us, we’d come running back to them. We shared the difficulties of raising children as single working mothers. On the job, we also wondered why this unqualified, lazy so and so was promoted or given a raise when we had more qualifications and better service records, but we were not considered promotable. We had typical girl talks. While I liked all the things I had in common with my good friend, what really fascinated me was our weekly discussions about televisions programs we watched, which sometimes led to political discussions. My friend convinced me to watch Sleepy Hollow. I truly loved idea of a young Black as a romantic interest […]
Jul 08

SUCCESS MEANS LEARNING TO FAIL

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
The picture above is a view of the Riverside Drive’s Park between West 144th Street and West 142nd Street. The strip park run along Riverside Drive and follows the Hudson River. Parts of the drive mingle with the West Side Highway and so the park overlooks the highway or 12th Avenue. Other parts of the park disappear and reappear further uptown and end somewhere in Inwood. The park still has uniquely antique elements. Note the water fountain, the cobblestone made of bricks, and the old-fashioned street-lamps that really work. What’s most interesting to me is the way one main road separates into two paths. It reminds me of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. For the past six months, my niece and I have grown particularly close. One reason is that my sister, who was also her mother, died six months ago. I’ve always considered my niece like a daughter and so this was a natural progression of things. Another reason we’ve grown close, I’ve been giving her some advice about jobs. Lately, my suggestions have been geared towards her new promotion. A little more than a year ago, she took a job as an entry level employee with a […]
Jun 24

WHY I WROTE LOVE WITH STINGS ATTACHED

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
How guilty does it feel to suddenly learn the kid sister you loved and is your only family, was murdered by her abusive boyfriend. You knew he was abusive. He was the last in long-line of abusive men she made babies with, creating three children. You knew he was abusive because she took the children and came to stay with you for a short-time before the last child was born. You knew he was abusive because he struck her in front of you once and you threatened to kill him if it happened again. Now, your baby sister is dead. You wonder why you didn’t kill her murderer years ago when you had the chance? You wonder what her last moments must have been like as she suffocated while he held her down and assaulted her. What do you do now? Where are your niece and two nephews? How do you protect them? Are you paranoid thinking that the killer might try to kill the children because they are the only witnesses? I explored those questions and more when I wrote LOVE WITH STRINGS ATTACHED Connect with BL Wilson at these links: Blog: https://wilsonbluez.com Facebook Business Page: https://www.facebook.com/patchworkbluezpress Goodreads: http://bit.ly/1BDmrjJ […]
Jun 17

COMING OUT AT 47

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I read this article from a worried parent years ago. I found the question interesting enough to write about. The mother says, “My sixteen-year-old son told me that he is gay. What should I do about it?” Today, I’d add my own experience of coming out as a lesbian. I wasn’t as young as that mother’s son was when he said, “Guess what, Mom? I’m gay.” Nope, that wasn’t me. I was forty-seven years old before I finally admitted to me that I was gay and then I admitted it to my family. Question: Isn’t 47 a little old to discover one’s orientation? Shouldn’t a person know before they reach 30 who or what they like? At 47, a person has lived over half her life in the shadows and maybe with the wrong gender as well. How is a major life change possible at that age? Permit me to explain my particular situation. I’m a Baby Boomer. When I grew up, young women were just beginning to flex their muscles. They were thinking about working in non-traditional jobs and considered living non-traditional lives. Most of the women I knew when I was a kid wore traditional clothes to represent […]
Jun 10

RIB BONES & MY FATHER

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
That’s a photo of my father in 1953 when we lived on Douglas Street which no longer exist as I knew it back then. My mother likes to tell two stories about me. One shows or purports to show how creative with the truth I was at a young age. As for the second of my mother’s tales, I’ll save that one for another time. I think I was five at the time. Apparently, we—meaning my parents, my sister who was seven, my brother who was three and I were enjoying one of my favorite dinner meals. We were seated around the dinner table in the dining room of our old house on Douglas Street. I should say right now, I don’t remember experiencing this tale myself, but I’ve heard the story so often, I could tell it in my sleep. Knowing my mother, the home economics teacher, believed in balanced meals, I’m sure we had string beans, a green salad, a starch—baked potatoes or something like it, meat or fish, milk for us kids and coffee for her and my father. My parents believed social graces at the dinner table. That usually meant my father would ask my mother […]
Jun 01

Love With Strings Attached

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
Dr. Lena Johns is an excellent but stubborn surgeon who finds herself at-risk for a malpractice suit, rekindles a tumultuous romance, and receives devastating news all in the same short period of time. To add to the stress, she has inherited three children, and the father of the youngest is on his way across the country to possibly kill them all. Can Lena raise three orphaned children alone? Will the surgeon accept help from her medical friends, especially her ex-lover, bossy nurse Eugenia Martin? Will raising the children bring the doctor and the nurse closer together or split them apart? And will the law apprehend a dangerous fugitive before he catches up with his only witness? It all comes together in Love, With Strings Attached. Love, With Strings Attached is available now for pre-order on Kindle. The release date is 6/02/19. ASIN: B07SL9PY1T (Kindle Version $2.99) ASIN: B07S86J864 (Print Version $13.99) Here are the links for: Love, With Strings Attached Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SL9PY1T Kindle Print: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07S86J864 Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/941673 Book trailer: https://youtu.be/R2OyK3-Oxd8 Ask David: http://askdavid.com/books/10892
May 27

DECORATION DAY & MY UNCLE HERBIE

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
On this Decoration Day, also known as Memorial Day, I wanted to honor my uncle, a Black veteran who fought in Germany during World War II in some small way. The photo you see above was taken in 1989. I’m not sure what my son and my uncle are looking at. My son was probably grinning at my younger sister, who was taking the picture. I imagine Uncle Herbie was thinking about his big sister, my Aunt Sadie, who had just died. I tried to find a photo of my uncle alone and in uniform, but I couldn’t find one. When I was a kid, I really admired my uncle because he was s-o-o different from my father the medical doctor, who was also his big brother. Uncle Herbie was the only surviving uncle that I had. My father came from a very large family of nine kids, but only three survived to adulthood (my father, my uncle, and my aunt). He was the first one to attend college and went on to get a medical degree. In contrast, my uncle worked in a factory. I’m not sure whether the factory produced tires or automotive parts. We lived in Akron, […]
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