Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Yup, your very own favorite brown girl with the fro. Thought you knew?

I’m notorious for meeting people on the internet. The blessing is that I’ve met nothing, but amazing and hospitable people from the net. If it weren’t for my early days on Black Planet I would have never met Mister Brook D’Leau of J*Davey and if it wasn’t for my time in all those Trini chat rooms I would have never been introduced to Dotun, Lily, Nnamdi, CJ, Tayo, or Merlana all in Trinidad. Again, I’ve been blessed.

For my parents (and any parent I imagine) this kind of behavior and way of meeting people raises an eyebrow. To them, for all I really know I could be opening a HUGE can of worms and placing myself at risk and into the hands of a murderer, kidnapper, or rapist. The person on the other side of the screen could be full of lies, reeling me in only to drown me in the tub. Ugh – I could go on, but I won’t. Gruesome acts are committed daily by people who knew each other face to face for years and within families. The nightly news says it all. Mother kills child, father molests nephew, teacher sleeps with student, neighbor murders neighbor – it’s just an ugly world we live in. Does that mean we lose complete hope? Lose trust in every soul on the planet – not I.

Now before I delve into my latest meet-up from the internet let me give you some background info about myself. I don’t consider myself naïve. I don’t accept all offers to meet random people offline. (There are some crazy people out there!) I tend I have a pretty decent method of judging character. Lastly, I walk into every one of these situations with an Angel watching my back and Jesus as my guest.

Okay, so as one may or may not have noticed I’ve been road tripping the last couple of weeks throughout America’s Midwest and slowly heading into the Northwest. While I may have passed through a few areas here and there I never spent any real time in several. I’ll jump right to it – Omaha. Since I knew ahead of time I’d be sitting around in the area for awhile I decided to post one of my cry for help posts on Gadling. Basically, I try to get any of the Gadling readers or Weblogs readers in general from the area to recommend a range of cool things to do in their city. I was surprised at the number of responses to my Omaha cry. Perhaps in the back of my mind I had convinced myself that people in Omaha don’t spend much time on the internet and wouldn’t see my post, but I was wrong of course. The readers pointed me to the local zoo, wildlife attractions, shopping areas like the Old Market and museums. It was a really good mixture of sites and it was starting to sound like Omaha wasn’t so bad at after all, but my story continues.

One of the readers was so excited by Omaha getting mention on Gadling, that they extended a warm invite over to have dinner with him and his family while I was in town. Dinner with a family from Omaha? Was this safe? Was there really a family? We shot emails back and forth enough for me to feel comfortable with the offer, so I gladly said yes and that I’d be there with bells on and bring the wine. Then things got just a teeny bit weird.
Once I arrived in town I gave Tim a ring to let try to set up an exact time and date to come to the house. At this time he then let me in on the fact that his wife wasn’t too thrilled that he had invited an absolute stranger to the house for dinner, so he asked if having lunch outside of the house was cool? This wasn’t a problem for me and I OVERstood. They had two children at home. What if I was psycho and deranged? After agreeing to lunch, Tim then phoned me back to let me know his wife wasn’t okay with lunch either. He hadn’t realized that I was a woman from my name and his wife found the idea of having lunch with an internet woman equally not kosher as inviting one into the house, yet he had convinced her that this was something that was important to him. This was an opportunity to show that kindness does still exist in the world and so his wife gave in.

I started feeling more than a teeny-bit weird now. I started to wonder if they knew I was black or how much of my blogs Tim had read on Gadling? I’d mentioned being and African-American woman before. Would they freak out if I showed up at the door? Part of me started to send a link to my personal site, so they could look and see if I was the type of person they’d want to share stories with over a dinner table while noshing on salad. Something said that was offensive. It’s like me saying, “Hey, I realized there aren’t too many black people out here in Omaha. How do you feel about that? Are you a racist?” I didn’t send the link, but with a prayer I accepted the last offer back to the house once more.

The time slowly and finally came to head out and over. My mother, who was very worried told me to call back and ask his wife what type of wine she would like me to bring. That way I would know there really were a woman and not just some man telling a tall-tale to lure me into his house. When I phoned back I got Tim, or course, and I asked him what kind of wine was their fav. He noted that his wife enjoyed red wine and so it was – I picked up red wine and drove down to the house. When I started to near the street they lived on I noticed the reception on my phone had gone away. The entire time I had been in Omaha I had been getting perfect signal and now it wanted to vanish! Was this a sign?

I walked up to the front door of the two-story house where I was greeted by Tim and his two dogs. We walked into the kitchen where I saw salad and bread on the counter and a stew cooking on the oven. No wife. No kids. Um… It took about four minutes which felt more like 35 for Tim’s wife to make it downstairs and I couldn’t have let out a bigger inner sigh of relief. Thank goodness! The three of us sat down at the table and began to eat and chat and from this moment everything flowed well. Conversation about Tim’s travel and mine were exchanged and his wife told me of many cool Nebraska spots to check out. They were a nice couple and very friendly. The children had gone over to a friend’s house for the evening (probably to ensure I wasn’t a nut-bucket). Having a home cooked meal was great after the last couple of weeks eating out so much. Again, I couldn’t have been more blessed and thankful that in the end all went well. I also, think Tim’s wife started to warm up to me, but perhaps that’s just my being optimistic about things.

Long story short – no one turned out being an axe murderer and I had a great chance to interact with some of the locals in Omaha, Nebraska.

Yeehaw Omaha,
Adrienne