Dear St.Casserole,
Thank you for your phone call last night. It was good to hear your voice and get news of your little family. I'm homesick for you all and hope for a visit soon.

I'm glad you called last night. I spent this morning down at the Auxiliary Club playing Bridge. I don't care to go back. Beulah Lynch's usual Bridge partner, Bertie
Mae Smith Hedgins, has a new great-grand. Bertie went over to Waxhaw to be with her daughter. That daughter, you may remember, is the one who faints.

I agreed to be the fourth at the table and showed up about 9:30 a.m. to start playing. The girls play until lunch. One of them buys lunch for everyone else. It was Beulah's turn so I was glad to go. She owes me several lunches, but I'm not counting.

Everybody at the table began talking politics. I'd rather hear who is doing what with whom but I was a guest. Lillian Jenkins Caldwell announced that Sen. Obama is a Muslim and she would never vote for someone who isn't a Christian. I about dropped my teeth. They all jumped in talking this nonsense. I had a difficult hand at the time and was working on how to bid so I just kept quiet.

Beulah turned to me and said, "Bostick, you wouldn't vote for a Muslim, would you?"

I told her I might vote for a Muslim if one was running for President this term. The girls gasped. I said, "Senator Obama isn't a Muslim, he's a member of the United Church of Christ."

I about got shouted down. I blame those silly emails old people send around to each other with wrong facts and goofy ideas.

I asked the table if they remembered Anne Yates' daughter, Linda. Of course, they all remembered Linda because she was the guest organist every summer when she came to stay with her grandmother in town. I asked if they remembered that when Linda started first grade, they found out she had a learning problem with her letters. It wasn't terrible but it slowed the little girl down while she was learning to read. About that same time, Anne and John moved to their new house over by Clark Road. Anne decided to move Linda to the St.Clavicle Catholic School because she knew the reading teacher there and was near their new house.

Everyone at the table looked confused. I went on to tell them that Linda stayed at that school until 7th Grade. She's grown up now and married to that Baptist preacher.
I asked them, "Linda want to Catholic School. Should she be called a Catholic now that she's a grown woman?" Everybody said, "No!"

I told them that when Sen. Obama lived in Indonesia as a little boy, he went to a Muslim school. That's all they had there, I suppose. Now, he's a grown man who attended a United Church of Christ Church in Chicago for twenty years with regular attendance. His little girls were baptized there. Does it make any sense to call him a Muslim now? The table was silent.

One of them piped up and said what about his name? He has an odd name! I got to giggling then. Good Lord! Like we don't have the strangest names in the South! We have names so strange, we think the names are normal!

I should have held my tongue. I said, "That lady from Alaska you all think is so cute, she named her children 'Trac', 'Trig', and, after an airplane!" "Let's don't discuss unusual names this year."

By the time we finished the last Bridge hand, I was hungry but could hardly enjoy my chicken because it was cooked until it tasted like a dry piece of paper.

I've got several errands to run so I'll stop and put this out for the mail.

Love,
Aunt Bostick