GOSSIP!

Last week this lady was telling me all about how the folks in Davis, America, know everything about everyone.

She was telling the absolute gospel truth. In a small town being nosy is not a sin and that’s the first step in gathering good gossip. We live in one of those hears all, knows all, tells all places that can spread gossip faster than a snow cone melting at the front gates of hell.

It’s the very thing that makes us check to be sure that we’ve got on clean underwear before we drive seven blocks to the grocery store. Most accidents happen within a mile of home and heaven forbid if we were taken to the hospital with underwear that were faded in a blotchy shade of blue because Mr. B washed them with his jeans.

And the gossip! Lord, love a duck…it would be horrible…Dotty’s Granny was a saint on earth and they can’t even let poor old Dotty look at the Pearly Gates. I’m not even sure Dotty was her granddaughter. Not if she didn’t have enough sense to bleach those under britches before she wore them. (This is said with a hand over the gossiping lady’s mouth) I wonder if her mama had an affair with that boy who had a pony tail and hung around the café where she worked back before she married the woman’s daddy. It’s beginning to look more and more like a possibility.

By morning, it’s all over town that Dotty does not have the same DNA as the man listed as her father on her birth certificate. She has the same color hair that that boy did who hung around the café forty years ago. And she wears it in a pony tail so there’s proof positive.

It’s been said that the three main ways of communication are telephone, television and tell-a-woman. For the life of me, I’ve never understood why they classified television with the other two. By the time television got all their anchor men and women together, decided who had the prettiest hair and the nicest voice, plus had their makeup just right and got all their equipment in the van, telephone and tell-a-woman would have joined forces. Whatever television had to say would be colder than last night’s macaroni and cheese.

Back before good romance novels, soap operas, R-rated movies and even before the telephone perfected the art of good gossip, there was always the need to tell someone a secret. We all know the only way for two people to keep a secret is if one of them is dead.

So here sits two folks with strong hearts and only slightly elevated blood pressure. Neither one is ready to visit the undertaker but they both have itchy tongues.

So they go out and tell just one person to ease that heavy feeling in their chest and lower that blood pressure. “You’ll never believe what I just heard. You can’t breathe a word of it because I promised it would never leave my lips but I know I can trust you.”

At dawn the next morning everyone knows the story. Only it’s not that the story that the first itching tongue whispered. It’s been reformed, remodeled, added to, subtracted from, multiplied, divided three times and embellished upon. It is now worth of a contract for a new television series that should never have to worry about being discontinued.

The dictionary says that gossip has something to do with folks meddling in other peoples affairs. I’ve heard it called small town politics. Whatever it’s called it’s the same old BS. And in a small town like Davis, America, everyone knows whatever everyone else is doing, when they did it, who they did it with and whether it was before or after breakfast.

 

And we all read the local newspaper to see who got caught!