Mid-town Ma Belle's

One, well four to be exact, of the great pleasures I have is spending time with my very best girlfriends; Cookie (Queen Mother), Donna, Patti and Sheila. These four women and I form what the “Red Hatter’s” call the Mid-town Ma Belle’s. We all used to work together in Mid-town Atlanta for AT&T, hence the name Mid-town Ma Belle’s. They are four of the best girlfriends a person could ever have.

We have shared a lot of ups and downs with each other over the past 20 or so years that we have known each other and we always seem to have a good time together. I had the extreme honor of working with each one of these ladies during the course of my time spent in AT&T’s Engineering Department which is where we all met.

I guess the first one of these ladies I met was Donna. We worked on the same floor of the Summit Building together, but not in the same District. We always seemed to meet at the copy machine which was in a central location for the whole floor. As we were talking one day at copy central, I was telling her about my desire to find someone to carpool with from my side of town. That’s when she introduced me to Sheila.

Sheila was the District Secretary for Donna’s organization and was located on the floor just below us. As the carpool evolved, so did my friendship with Sheila. We spent many days meeting at the Lee Road Park-n-Ride and tootling Downtown together. We shared stories of our families, our likes, our dislikes and just things that most friends like to talk about on our trek to and from the city. Donna, Sheila and I became great friends. We spent most of our lunch hours either down in the cafeteria dining room which was in the Atrium of the building, or we walked to some nearby establishment like J.R. Crickets or the Varsity.

One day at lunch, Sheila brought a new friend, Cookie. She used to work with Sheila at another AT&T location and had just transferred into Sheila’s District. Great a new friend….she also lived on our side of town and wanted to join the carpool as well. Wonderful, not only a new lunch buddy, but another driver for the “Pool”. Cookie is the oldest of our group, kind of the “Mother” figure if you will, so it was kind of like having our own Mother in the car with us to give advise or listen to our perspective of whatever was going on in our lives at the time. She is so unique in a way that is refreshing and uplifting.

There was hardly a day that went by that you didn’t find the four of us, along with some of the guys from the District, going to lunch together. It was great to have such close friends to hang out with during the stressful work days Downtown. One day, Sheila, Donna and I decided that we were going to see a palm reader, Madame Belle. I don’t know exactly why Cookie didn’t go with us. Maybe it was that she didn’t believe in them and didn’t want to waste her money, or that we just decided not to tell her we were going. I made the appointment and the next day at lunch we went to see her.

Madame Belle worked out of a house just off of Piedmont Road. I was the first to see her. She was an older lady, kind of heavy set like me and was kind of dressed like you would imagine a gypsy woman to be. I had taken my wedding ring off early that morning so the lines from my band wouldn’t show on my finger, but it didn’t seem to matter to her. She knew I was married, that I had a young daughter and that I had a darkness in my life. Darkness, what did that mean?

I knew I wasn’t always the most pleasant person to be around. I had things in my closet that I was sure others had as well, you know, things from my past. She told a lot of things about myself, that I knew to be true and I wondered how this woman that I didn’t even know, knew them. Had she somehow done a background check and found out all of these things just based on my first name (that was the only name I gave her for the appointment)? Did she have a crystal ball like the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz?

Perhaps she truly was one of those rare people who could see into the future, or past, just by touching the palm of your hand. Which ever the case was, she had seen the “darkness”. She also told me that for an additional sixty dollars that she could remove the darkness. I told her, “I didn’t have the extra money, I had only come to see what palm reading was all about”, but she told me that she liked me and that she was going to remove the darkness for me, free of charge. OK, cool, I thought. What could it hurt.

I think Sheila was the next one in and then Donna. Nothing extraordinary for either one of them, certainly not an exposed “darkness”, but Madame did tell Donna that she would meet a talk dark, handsome man and settle down. Nothing much was ever discussed from our outing to the Palmist that day, but I can tell you that a few years later, Cookie introduced Donna to a tall dark, handsome man named Harold and they have been married now for about 14 years.

As for my “darkness”? Well, our outing took place in about 1990 and two years later, my Dad got very sick and passed away over a period of about five or six months. On the very day that Daddy went home to be with the Lord, I gave my life to my Savior, Jesus Christ. On that day, I felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted off of my shoulders. There were things that happened in my past between me and my Dad that you could call “darkness”, I’ve always wondered if the Palm reader had kept her word.

Patti and I had worked together at the Summit Building on the 31st floor in the same work group and didn’t even realize it until years later. She and Cookie and Donna were part of a “breakfast club” at the Promenade building where we had all moved to when AT&T decided to relocate all of it’s Engineering Departments from all over the United States to Atlanta. Sheila and I joined the “club” some mornings as time permitted and that’s when Patti and I discovered that we had both worked in Bob Wing’s group at the same time. To paraphrase Disney, it’s a small world after all.

Patti was the first one to leave, taking early retirement in July of 2000. I was the next one to succumb to the cuts of AT&T in July of 2001. A few short years from full retirement so I am still in the working class. Cookie's retirement came next as AT&T offered packages and incentives to decrease their work force. Donna was the next in line to receive her incentive package and a few months after that, Sheila was given her exit package as well.

So here we all were. Retired or semi-retired from one of the largest employers in the United States, separated from one another by the distance that we lived from each other. We didn’t have lunch or the “breakfast club” to catch up on our days anymore; life as we knew it ceased to exist.

One day Patti and Cookie had been talking on the phone and mentioned to each other that it would be nice if we could all get together and have lunch. After several phone calls and emails, we planned a date and one Sunday afternoon in October of 2004, we met, had lunch and made plans to see each other at least once a month when our schedules permitted.

So far, we have been successful at meeting that commitment, with few exceptions. We have had some great outings to different places all around Atlanta and the surrounding area as well as two long weekend trips to the beach; Panama City Beach, FL and Isle of Palm, SC.

We have included the husbands and even the kids on some of those outings and have had a ball whether we have the whole families with us or it’s just us girls. It is truly such a blessing to me to have such wonderful, close friends to share my joys and sorrows with. I leave with this final thought….a poem by Karin Schaefer:

The Gift of Friends

There are days when

bubbling from us comes

the innocent child within,

who giggles at the little things

and wears a silly grin.

There are days when

melancholy comes to
visit for a while;

the mind feels tired,

the body weak;

we have no strength to smile.

There are days when

joy abundant

grabs a hold of you and me;

wraps us up in all it's splendor,

lifts us up and sets us free.

There are days when

sorrow wraps us

in its cloak of grief and fear,

'till our hearts ache to the breaking,

till our eyes can't shed a tear.

There are days when

love bestows us

with its wonderment and light;

with its beauty and its mystery,

its power and its might.

And there are days when

life rewards us

and seems to make amends

by granting us a marvelous gift,

the precious gift of Friends.

To the Mid-town Ma Belle’s……I love you all!

Make a scrapbook - it's easy!