Welcome to Liz' first blog at As We Are.  For some, this entry may be a repeat.  How can that be?  Liz has offered to reprint some of her most popular offerings from her original personal blog:  Granny Gets a Vibrator.

Hang on to your hats! 

 

I stopped by the health food store today to pick up some flax seed. This isn’t some big fancy-schmancy urban deal like Wild Oats or Whole Foods, or a quaint little hippified organic tree-hugging co-op, or even a bland vitamin chain like GNC. It’s a dark seedy little small-town strip-mall storefront hole-in-the-wall dive, sandwiched in between Curves and Cingular Wireless across from the Burger King, that’s been in business since 1952. Probably without changing a whole lot.

The shelves are lined with dusty old brown bottles with pull-dates that expired during the early Ford administration, containing the sort of stuff that mainly appeals to those whom the medicial-pharma machine has forsaken and abandoned, shrugging its indifferent shoulders as it consigns them to a doomed existence of chronic agony followed by banal death.

But there’s also some ordinary stuff like flax seed and fish oil at a decent price, so I drop by about once a month.

The shop is owned and staffed by a local Pentecostal couple comprising a nosy, affable husband who never ever shuts up, and a dour stern wife who never ever smiles or speaks except to state the price of something. I mean, if you ran up to the counter waving your hands in the air screaming that the horny goat weed section had just burst into flames, she would stand there and glare at you a while, then finally announce, “Horny goat weed: $12.95.”

So when I pulled up today, there were two big ol honkin farm trucks parked out front, Ford F80000s with 5-foot tires covered in mud and manure, trailer hitches the size of basketballs, assorted livestock milling around in the beds, and propagandistic agricultural bumper stickers bearing slogans like “Rice Is Nice” or “I Raise Cane.” (For some reason that whole Atkins thing never really caught on around
here.) I wedged my little Saturn with the “Caution: Driver Singing” bumper sticker right between them and headed inside.

I’ve always loved the cognizant dissonance that hits me in the face the minute I open the door. As soon as I step across the threshold, I’m assaulted by that universal musty health-food-store smell: the nostalgic wafting of incense, patchouli, brewers yeast and tea tree soap, accompanied by the exact same dolphin-droning, windchime-dinging recording immortalized by Gary Larson in “Charlie Parker’s Private Hell.” I could almost be back in Berkeley!

But before my eyes could adjust to the dark, the Pentecostal husband was greeting me in a twangy accent that locals will immediately peg as originating somewhere between Turkey Creek and Pineville (i.e., redneck protestant, not French Catholic). “Well hey there young lady!” he shouted. “How’s that menopause coming along?”

Amidst a barrage of cheerful recommendations regarding colonic hygiene products and some kind of vaginal lubricant made from an herb that sounds suspiciously like it might be a member of the poison ivy family, I groped my way back towards the flax seed section which is tucked in the darkest most obscure corner of the store. And whom should I see when I finally arrived, but what could only be the owners of those monster pickup trucks parked out front: two farmers!

They were dressed in the requisite faded overalls, well-worn cowboy boots, and one of them was wearing a perky feed-store cap that said “Boudreaux’s Butt Paste–It’s Not Just For Diaper Rash Anymore” (which I covet intensely). They appeared to be somewhere in their mid to late eighties, though considering they’d probably been working out in the Louisiana sun since they were seven years old, they could just as well have been 23. One was a white Cajun and the other was a black Creole, and as they sipped their complimentary cups of dusty lemon grass tea, they conversed together in a rapid and archaic French, pausing only to listen attentively when the proprietor launched into a graphic parable about the excessive flatulence that allegedly accompanies menopause.

I could tell they were making the vay-yay in a delightful amalgam of thick regional dialects, randomly mixing Cajun French with Creole French while occasionally interjecting little spurts of the local English-esque patois, and as I rummaged through the ancient bags of flax seed, I strained to eavesdrop over the twangy dissertation on green tea enemas. My command of the French language is somewhat limited, and enema boy and the Vienna Choir Dolphins weren’t helping any, but I think I got the rough gist of it.

Apparently, Butt Paste farmer suffers from painful hemorrhoids and was searching for some esoteric ointment that his veterinarian had recommended for somebody named Beverly, who is either a chicken or his sister in law who lives up in Big Mamou. The other farmer knows a traiteur up the other side of Bayou Courtableau who eradicates tumors (and also repairs vacuum cleaners), but who might have either an auntie (or maybe a hot potato?) that specializes in curing bad hemorrhoid juju. It was all so engrossing (and potentially useful!) that I was sorry when I finally found a bag that didn’t have any holes in it.

“It certainly is a lovely spring day,” I remarked as I set the intact sack of seeds on the counter. The clerk stared at me for a minute then said, “Flax seeds: 7.99.”

As I was heading out the door, I could hear the husband shouting yet another pearl of wisdom: “I tell you what,” he confided to the two old farmers plus half the western hemisphere. “That horny goat weed works a heck of a lot better than Viagra.”

I turned around and raised one eyebrow at his wife.

he gazed back at me for the longest time without blinking, then finally, with just the tiniest telltale twitch of her lips, she said: “Horny goat weed! 12.95.”