More Maya Angelou, on Men
She also had this to say, Ms. Maya Angelou, when that same interviewer from TIME magazine asked “Did you inherit your mother’s fondness for guns?”“I like to have guns around. I don’t like to carry them," said Maya.“Have you ever fired a weapon?” asked the person from TIME.“I was in my house in North Carolina. It was fall. I heard someone walking on the leaves. And somebody actually turned the knob. So I said 'Stand four feet back because I’m going to shoot now! Boom! Boom! The police came by and said ‘Ms. Angelou, the shots came from inside the house.’ I said ‘Well, I don’t know how that happened.’Well now we know that It’s wrong to feed falsehoods to cops - of course! - but the way I look at it, those two cops were probably guys and it's really is never a mistake to keep a pretty tight hold on how you communicate things to a guy. “You want to control the information when it comes to your man,” said my very own mother-in-law regarding my relations with her own darling boy. “Timing is everything,” she added, nodding her head in emphasis.I believed her. Hadn’t she just recently told me about the time when, driving home from HER mother-in-law’s house carrying on her lap the extra platter of the eggplant parmesan that she'd made for the family, her own young husband patted her knee and said while it had tasted perfectly fine, really it just wasn’t QUITE as good as the way his mother made it? And hadn't she in response and on the spot opened the car window and tipped the whole drooly platter out into the street?Yes she had, indeed she had.I love stories like these two, told by Ruth Payne Marotta and the wonderful Marguerite Johnson AKA our Miz Maya Angelou. They inspire me and make me want to also say to any men who mess with me: Stand back four feet now.Son.And get ready for what’s comin’ at you now - and you'd best HOPE it's just a platter of eggplant. :-)