God bless you ... and me too

“God bless ‘em.”

Wonderful saying, especially if you live in the South. You can say anything you want to about someone as long as you follow it up with a sincere, “God bless ‘em.” The key stipulation is the “God bless ‘em” has to be sincere or else the conversation is classified as spiteful gossip.

This tradition started with two women talking over a fence post in Folsom two hundred years ago. It had to be women that started it because they have more etiquette than men, God bless us. Of course, men quickly learned the benefit of a good “God bless ‘em.”

Asking God to bless someone is an act of brief prayer requesting the good Lord to help this person overcome the awful affliction or deed that is so disturbing it has to be discussed behind their back.

Of course a good “God bless ‘em” also absolves, in the speaker’s mind, any guilt associated with spreading innuendo and hearsay. It sounds like this:

“Tessie got stuck in the toilet when the seat broke. You know she was skinny as a rail in school, but never could take off that baby weight when her last kid was born. It looks like she put on another twenty sympathy pounds before her grandson was born. God bless her, she was stuck in that toilet for two hours before her husband got home and called a couple of neighbors to help pull her out.”

Here’s another one I heard a few years back:

“That home made dye job always turns Sallie Mae’s hair a gosh awful shade of light blue. God bless her, she’s so colorblind that she thinks it’s a pretty silver. I will have to say though that the lady at the dress shop does a great job of matching outfits to her hair.”

Some people even throw in a “Praise be” to start that last sentence. “Praise be’s” are a discussion for another day.

If you think it’s wrong to invoke God’s grace into such a conversation, you can always fall back on and, “it ain’t their fault.” Of course, “his” or “her” can be injected in the place of “their” as necessary.

My best recollection of a good “it ain’t his (or her) fault” is when Pork Chop Jones’ mama started talking about his girlfriend one day.

“Now that Mary Jo is nice and I know you boys can’t see past her caboose, but she’s got one big ole honker of a nose on her,” Mrs. Jones blurted out. “It’s none of her fault, really. Have you seen her daddy? His nose is so long and wide that you could have a tent revival under that thing.”

Pork Chop couldn’t see past her nose after that and broke up with Mary Jo two weeks later. Mary Jo went to a plastic surgeon a year later, had her nose cut back, was voted best looking in her senior class, and won three Spring Break bikini contests while she was in college. Turns out that sometimes you can fix an “ain’t their fault.”

Over half of the “It ain’t their fault” statements are usually blamed on a bad gene pool or parental neglect like:

“You know his daddy and mama have the same uncle. That’s why he looks the way he does. It ain’t his fault.”

Or, “It ain’t his fault every ground ball hits that boy in the eye. He’d be able to catch’em if his daddy took the time to bounce a couple toward his face in their backyard.”

There’s also the combination when somebody does something so bad that they need both a “God bless ‘em” and a “it ain’t their fault.”

“Bobby Joe cheated on his wife four times. He deserved it when she shot him in the backside with rock salt. It ain’t all Bobby Joe’s fault though. His daddy - God rest his wretched soul - he cheated on all six of his wives before that last one killed ‘em. God bless Bobby Joe, and especially that sweet wife of his and their three kids. I’m hopin’ that rock salt unlearned what his daddy taught ‘em.”

Then there are the folks that don’t use either the “God bless ‘em” or “it ain’t their fault” like an ole friend of mine named Joe.

Joe’s been around a while, is plainspoken, sometimes ornery, and always truthful. A while back we were standing around a couple of guys when he told me that he had something he wanted to ask me later. When we got outside he said he didn’t want one of the other guys to hear what he was saying.

“He’s got a chip on his shoulder and always has to throw something smart into a conversation,” Joe said. “Sometimes I have to bow up when he tells me what he thinks.”

I must have been looking cock-eyed after he said that because he felt the need to explain.

“I like him well enough – we eat dinner together a couple of times a month,” Joe continued. “That’s just what’s wrong with ‘em. I’ve told him so, but there’s no sense to keep pointing it out. He can’t fix it.

“Heck, everybody’s got something wrong with ‘em. I got plenty of my own faults. So do you. I know a couple of your’s and you know some of the others. That’s just the way it is. The last guy that was perfect got hung up on a cross.”

Smart man, ole Joe. God bless us each and every one.