Okay, so I just had to share to this because my mind just won’t allow me to erase the following image:
About two weeks ago I was in my car delayed by a traffic light at the corner of Flatbush and Parkside avenues. If you are familiar with this part of Flatbush then you know there is a bus top and Duane Reade at one corner and a Popeye’s Chicken on the opposite side of the street. As I waited impatiently for the light to turn from red to green, I couldn’t help but to notice the rather large woman whose gold earring fell from her ear as she was crossing the intersection. In an attempt to rescue and retrieve her precious belongings, the overweight woman -like any other woman-stopped dead in her tracks and bent down in the middle of the street to pick up the golden earring…
PAY CLOSE ATTENTION THIS IS WHERE THE STORY GETS INTERESTING, ACTUALLY IT GETS QUITE DISTURBING…
As I remained stalled in traffic by the red light (I know…this is a pretty long light) I had a front row seat and was privy to the action taking place in front of my 2003 Pontiac Vibe. The woman bent down to retrieve the earring and to her dismay and mine-lets be for real it was probably just to my dismay- the obese woman could not touch the ground! Not only did she try ONCE…she tried TWICE and unfortunately it was to no avail. The physical action that most of us take for granted -because we perform it several times a day with ease- as we salvage the items that slip from our finger tips onto the ground was painstakingly hard for this woman, who was no more than 35-38 years of age.
IT GETS WORSE…
At this point I felt sorry for the woman. I clearly am not 38 (I have about 10 years to go) but I think we all agree that 38 is still relatively young and if you take care of your body then it can still perform simple functions like RECAPTURING OBJECTS FROM THE GROUND!! Unfortunately this woman like many Americans (especially black Americans) had become a victim of obesity. Her weight was so debilitating that she was unable to perform every day tasks. As I watched from my car I could see the frustration on her face and then…she accepted defeat. The woman left the golden earring in the street; operation “Retrieve Earring” was now officially over.
I sat in my car and thought to myself; damn…she really could not touch the ground. I don’t ever want to get that big. It was at that very moment that the INSANE occurred; as I re-focused my attention back on the overweight woman who was now apparently moving on with her life, obviously forgetting what had just transpired 30 seconds ago, I watched and recoiled in horror as she continued to cross the intersection at Parkside and Flatbush avenue. Originating on the side of the street where the bus stop and Duane Reade are located the large woman had now made it to the other side of the street where she proceeded to walk into POPEYE’S CHICKEN AND PLACE HER ORDER!
WTF??!!!
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R U serious.....lol.....I would of clearly asked for help...her earring meant nothing to her lol.....u will never get that big Rabiyya....u wont let that happen to urself
ReplyDeleteSmh.....This situation may seem funny, but it is rather disturbing. It clearly shows just how little Africian Americans care about their health. Now, is thst due to our own ignorance, or the lack of healthy eating establishments in MY neighborhood?
ReplyDeleteexactly my point Kerron...it seems funny but this is cleary something distrubing about the health issues that plague our community.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. This sounds like the makings of great Grimm’s Brothers’ Fairy Tale “The Fat Lady and the Golden Earring.” Well, to her credit at least she did attempt to bend down and she could walk –or amble -- across the street. Everything is relative and there’s always someone with even worse problems –like those 700 to 1,000 pound obese guys who live their entire adult lives in bed and can’t get out of their house. Wasn’t there one who had to be lifted or hoisted out of their house by a crane when he was sick or dying? These cases are probably related to the modern un-nutritious American diet which contains lots of genetically modified food – you know dangerous additives like Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) and Human Growth Hormone (HGH). Didn’t H. G. Wells write some sort of prescient science fiction book entitled Food of the Gods about some food additive which made farm animals grow gigantic? But back to fairy tales there might have been an occasional misfit living in the forest of Central Europe in medieval times who had become so grossly obese and misshapen that he or she couldn’t make it thru the cabin doors, and that might have been the stuff of legend.. . . “The Ogre Who Lives in the Woods” or some such grim/Grimm title. Then again there used to be Fat Ladies who were freak show attractions in the Barnum and Bailey circuses in days of yore. They were Side show attractions along with midgets, the man with three legs, Siamese twins, the dog-face boy and other “human oddities.” So, all in all, when it’s all said and done losing an earring due to obesity might not be the worse fate in the world. But I must admit she kinda reminds of the Thing in the first Fantastic Four movie -- his fingers were so fat he couldn’t pick up the engagement ring that his ex-fiancée threw at him!
ReplyDeleteCongrats on your blog, Rabiyya!
Daddy.
(Ooops, sorry now the secret is out. . .your readers now know where you inherited your writing talent and passion!)
First of all, I love your blog CONGRATS!!!
ReplyDeleteClearly she was wrong on so many levels. But she is like many of us! If it's not issues with food it's something else.
I can compare her frustration to not being able to perform a regular task due to her weight to several other situations. In our society we seek things that give us a thrill or pleasure all the time not necessarily caring about the repercussions. Clearly her over consumption of food is destroying her health and causing her to be unable to perform everyday tasks that we take for granted. Yet after being frustrated and even embarrassed she immediately turns to the very thing that is enabling her...food. Bad food at that..Popeyes.
She is no different than the person who gets frustrated about not having enough money and not being able provide the the basic necessities yet they will go out and buy a new Fendi bag with the rent money or buy rims for a 89 Honda.
My point is the things we fear and the things that can ultimately cause our demise we gravitate towards them.
The man who complains about having to pay child support for a bunch of illegitimate children yet he's promiscuous and constantly humping around.
The person who is frustrated because they cannot have a meaningful relationship yet they are constantly cheating and doing dirt behind their mate's back.
You get my point right!
www.karamokokouture.com
You go girl!!! Congratulations on your BLOG, I wish you much success. LOL, now about this poor woman was obviously hungry...she was too weak to pick up her hearings...SAD…!
ReplyDeleteBisous
As for dropping irretrievable objects (the irretrievable earring) I remember sitting in the Tompkins Park aka Von King Park a couple of summers ago, engaged in watching one squirrel vicious chase and bite another because the first squirrel had buried a nut and the second one dug it up stole it and ate it. [Squirrel stories are worth a whole blog entry in and of themselves, they make a distinct chirping sound early in the morning which I used to attribute to some bird until I realize it was coming out of the larynx of these mammals. Then there was the time I also saw a squirrel get attacked by a hawk. Luckily the hawk missed him, and did not mpt anything further as the hawk only captures prey in its talons while on the fly. It was the first time,though, that I ever saw a hawk in a city park. And the squirrel ran for cover on a tree branch and was chirping nervously for the next half hour after its near brush with death, the nervous chirp was probably also a warning sound to all the other park squirrels of impending danger). But I deviate, while fascinated by the squirrels fighting over the pilfered nut, a lady seated on a nearby park bench inadvertently dropped her keys out her lap and down into a drain pipe with a tiny grate covering. I tried to be a good Samaritan and help her retrieve them. Well, we fished for those keys for an well over an hour without luck. I even went to the 79th preceinct down the block and asked if they had some sort of pole with a hook on it to retrieve stuff that falls down the sewer (maybe I shoulda went to a fire department as I have seen the device somewhere) but they said they didn’t have any such device. So the lady was locked out of her house for the duration of the summer afternoon until her daughters came home.
ReplyDeleteRoom for one more irretrievable object story? As a child (we are talking like 1960 when I was all of ten years old) I lost a $1 telescope –probably costing five bucks in today’s dollars. My family –mother , father, self and two younger brothers -- was making its once a month Sunday afternoon visit to my paternal grandmother who had been paralyzed by a stroke and was wheelchair bound and a resident at the Byrd S. Collier hospital on Welfare Island which I think might be renamed Governor’s Island these days—or maybe it just sunk into the bottom of the sea like Atlantis or something. Any way in 1960 there used to be a place called Welfare Island somewhere between Manhattan and Queens and my grandmother, “Gransy,” was a hospital resident there. So one fateful Sunday when we had concluded our visit, I was running back to my daddy’s car when my brand new sea-green colored $1 telescope fell out of my coat pocket and rolled on the ground and under the iron railing that bordered the rocky shoreline of the island. There it was I could clearly spot it about five feet down a small cliff which rose up from the Atlantic Ocean. Well, I wanted this telescope real bad as it was my new pride and joy and sometimes I would play like I was an astronomer with it and at other times I was a pirate trying to spot land while aboard my Jolly Rogers ship in the South Sea (a kid’s imagination!). So, logically of course I tried to climb over the iron railing and retrieve my telescope off the rocky cliff along the Atlantic shore (with tidal waves licking the sides of the cliff) that is, until my angry Dad stopped me, with some admonition like “Are you crazy, boy?” My response “Well if you won’t let me climb down and get it, can you climb down and get it for me?’ to which of course he answered “No, just forget it. . it’s lost and you can’t get it back.” My next questions was “Well can the police come with a helicopter and get it for me?” To which my mother responded “What’s the matter with you boy, don’t you have any sense?” Well after finally resigning myself to my sad fate that my telescope which was in plain sight, was never gonna be mine again, my heart sunk deep in my stomach. It was a bad day in the life of a kid. So bad that I still remember it 49 years later! (And the worse part was I never had another telescope for the duration of my childhood, because the store were we brought it didn’t have any more).
Okay, daughter, if I keep responding I may steal your thunder, so good luck and see ya later.
Haha Bebe on your Daddy's posts...too funny
ReplyDeleteI really have to stop and wonder if it was just her weight/health, etc.
Sure, she may not be able to bend over and touch her toes. I know thin people who aren't active that can't perform that task. However, thin people can kneel (and probably would have). So it leads me to think that this woman was overweight AND lazy! (And hungry, too.)
Also, this happened during a traffic light, roughly 3 minutes. We'll never know if there was a RECON Mission to retrieve the Golden Earring!
Congrats on the blog, girl. Get your WRITE ON!
I have to give the woman credit for trying to retrieve her earrings. However, the fact that she walked into popeyes after she unsuccessfuly tried to get her earrings is rather disrturbing. Her feat should have been indication enough that she should not walk into an establishments which aids in the promotion of her health demise. I guess she will not learn until either she can no longer move out of her bed or she closes her eyes to this world because she continued to eat unhealthy. Then again let me be the devils advocate and say, she may not normally eat fast food and has a health problem like her thyroid or something and just like anyone else had a craving that day. Fortunatly you happen to be in the right/wrong place and 1)saw her earring fall of which she did try to retrieve and 2)her going into an establishment which aids in the promotion of her terrible physical state of being. We will never know if given more time at the light would she have continued trying to get the earring, no matter how painful and embarassing it maybe. At least she did not pretend to not see that the earring had fallen. But as I said, we would never know will we.
ReplyDeleteCongrats on your blog. I heard about it and now I have finally seen it. Continue the good work. Brooklyn does have a lot of things booth seen and unseen that needs to be exploited. Thanks for doing it for the rest of us Brooklynites. :)