Excerpts

There are three rules every Southern girl has hammered into her consciousness, and they shape you and haunt you until the day you die.Cardinal Rule Number One: Mind your manners. This is of course the most important rule, especially early on in your upbringing, as it applies to everything from 'watch your mouth' to 'mind your elders,' and encompasses all forms of behavior from 'elbows off that table rightnow' to 'do not look at me in that tone of voice.' As you get on up in years you learn to mind your manners by not pitching a hissy fit when a smile and firm but pleasant tone will do, and by always being strong and kind, and of course you never smoke standing upright or while wearing your sorority pin. Because that is just tacky. Cardinal Rule Number Two: Make the best of a situation. When delivered by your Uncle Truman or a male teacher or your softball coach, this rule can sound like 'Keep your chin up' or 'Put your game face on.' Sometimes there's a bait-and-switch approach, where you may have (in a moment of weakness) confessed some sad or upsetting thing to a willing human listener, and they reply back with a long, often horribly detailed story of the so-and-so girl who faces a far worse and more disastrous situation than you yourself could even imagine, which I suppose is meant to make you feel better about your own pathetic sob story but on me has the opposite effect. Cardinal Rule Number Three: Always wear clean panties.This particular gem was amended by my mother when I was sixteen, as she warned me in no uncertain terms to always wear clean panties and keep them on.These rules presented for me a dilemma of decorum at the best of times and a true test of character at the worst of times. My comportment was once again in the crosshairs on the day this story begins, a day like any other, really, a completely normal day. Although I was a married woman of thirty-three years of age living in cosmopolitan Los Angeles, California, and working in a downtown skyscraper (I work at a bank, but it sounds more glamorous to say downtown skyscraper), quite a remarkable departure from my small-town roots, I was now facing the trifecta of Southern Cardinal Rules, brought on by a rather strange and airy sensation in the back regions of my gray pinstripe skirt. I felt a draft. Back there.Today, the day of my inconvenient new rear-facing air-conditioning system, was a day of precarious underwear selection. While I had every intention of going home that very evening and facing Mount Washmore, the laundry pile in my bedroom closet, I was currently Making The Best Of Things. The wash-day panties I was wearing were nothing more than a string holding together some cotton, and not only was it an unfortunate thong-style contraption, it had the novelty of being green and red because I was on my Christmas undies. I had not embarked upon any lunchtime calisthenics, or lobbed kung fu kicks on my coffee break, or done anything, really, aside from si Excerpted from Crazy Aunt Purl's Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit after He Split by Laurie Perry All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.