Salutations, dear reader. My name is Gertrude Finkelstein and I am a woman with a rather important story to share with you. I was born in the City of Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1977, to a Jewish American family of German and Polish descent. In the summer of 1995 I moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to study at Northeastern University. I earned a Master's degree in business administration, and spent the next two decades working for Grant & Cantwell, one of the largest companies in all of New England.
As luck would have it, business and romance awaited me in the City of Boston, crown jewel of New England. I busied myself with work the moment I entered the corporate world. I met a tall, handsome man named George Beckford in the summer of 1999 and we got married in 2003. We divorced in 2009, a few months after I caught George in bed with another man. That man was none other than Dylan Rhodes, a family friend of ours, if you can believe that.
I consider myself a fairly open-minded woman and I would have accepted George had he disclosed to me that he swung both ways but he chose to cheat on me instead. I don't think there's anything wrong with male bisexuality or homosexuality. After living in Boston for ages, I consider myself fairly liberal and a major supporter of same-sex marriage rights and GLBT families. Hell, I'm one of those women who enjoys watching gay male porn. The reason why I left George is because he cheated on me. I simply cannot abide a liar, ladies and gentlemen. Simply not how I was raised.
In the winter of 2010, I got let go when a company called Tiburon Enterprises acquired Grant & Cantwell, and decided that they needed a fresh crop of executives. Apparently, as a tall and large, soon-to-be middle-aged white woman, I wasn't what they were looking for. All the incoming executives were young, male for the most part, and racially diverse. After searching for work in places like Boston, Hartford and beyond, I packed my bags and decided to return to my hometown of Woodward, Oklahoma. A place I hadn't set foot in for more than two decades. More than twenty years ago I left rural Oklahoma behind and didn't want to get back. Sadly, fate had other plans.
I returned home, and moved into the house that my parents, long since dead, left for me. The only place that would hire me was the Saint Catherine Library, which serves pretty much all of Woodward and a few of the neighboring towns. The place is run by Jack Stanwood, the guy I went to the Senior Prom with in 1988. He's married to Kimberly Prescott, the tall blonde bitch whose guts I absolutely hated in high school. Seeing the two of them together sure brought back some memories. I didn't mind seeing my first love with my former enemy, though. I moved on since then. I guess time truly does heal.
I am doing my own thing, as they say. Settling into my new life as a small-town librarian, wondering what else life has in store for me. My new existence is dull and uneventful, and four years went by uneventfully. I was basically living a life of quiet desperation...until Abdullah Osman came into my life. The tall, dark and handsome young Somali man from the International Student Program of the Northwestern Oklahoma State University simply took my breath away the first time I laid eyes upon him. He was so different from just about everyone I knew, and carried himself confidently in a way that small-town African-Americans are loath to do.
When Abdullah Osman walked into the Saint Catherine Library and asked the clerk how to go about obtaining a library card, everyone stared at him. Like most places in Oklahoma, Woodward is a mostly white town, with a few Native Americans, African-Americans and others. Even in the Age of Obama, certain things haven't changed. Foreigners always attract a lot of attention and a bit of xenophobia in small towns. With his golden brown skin, shaved head, beard and Islamic clothing, Abdullah Osman was an exception with a capital E.
Everyone in the library was staring at the tall, oddly attired young black man but Abdullah Osman either didn't notice, or he didn't care. Seeking to prevent an incident, I volunteered to help him, and he smiled but politely refused to shake my hand when I finished printing his library card. When I asked him why, Abdullah nodded respectfully and told me that the men of his culture and religion didn't dare touch women they were unrelated to. Jummah Mubarak sister, Abdullah said to me before bowing slightly and marching out of the library.