THE HIGH BEINGS DRINK COFFEE?
My brother, Art The Jeweler, his wife MaryEllen and I are sitting in the local coffee shop. We’re hunkered up to a very high table in very high chairs which makes our legs hang well short of the floor.
A youngish fellow with brown hair that skitters from the back of his skull toward his forehead, sits with us. He has been chatting (shouting interminably, actually) about his mother, his concern for her health and hers for him, little snippets about his odd life and gem stones. Suddenly, he says, “Wait a minute! I’ve got something in the car.” He drops off his chair and races out the door.
Art and MaryEllen look at me and they both say, “50/51.”
“What?”
“50/51,” MaryEllen repeats. “That means he’s 50% here and 51% not. A little bit not right…you know?”
“Oh. I’ve never heard that one. Got it.”
The young fellow is fast. He pushes the door back open, jumps up onto his chair and slams a small brown suitcase down on the table. He flips it open. It contains rows of brown, sparkly cut gem stones.
“I found these out in the back country,” he says. “Can’t tell you where. They talk to me.”
They do?” I squeak. I am intrigued. “What do they say?”
The fellow leans back a bit in his chair and says seriously, “I’m directed by The Inter-Galactic Beings. We converse.”
Oooohhhh.
He goes to get a drink of water.
I lean next to my brother, ready to whisper some catty remark, but I jerk upright and stop short, just in time.
“Oh my god,” I say, “I talk to the Beings, too!”
Along with cell phones, people like this fellow…and me...you really can’t tell who’s ‘crazy’, anymore.
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A ONCE IN A LIFE TIME CALL
You know I’m trying Match.com. It’s only been about two weeks, but I am already rather overwhelmed by it and it’s making me tired. I finally decide to call one of the men who proffers his phone number. I email him and say when I will call.
I’m nervous as I dial the number. A gruff male voice answers saying, “Hallow!”
Eeek.
“I’m Venus!” I shout. I’m nervous, remember?
“What?”
“Venus! I’m Venus! You know….”
“Venus?”
“Yes. Venus. Is this a good time to talk?”
“You’re Venus?”
The man sounds kind of chokey and strange. Ah oh. I get it.
“Oh! I’m so sorry,” I say. “I must have the wrong number. Well…too bad. Good-bye.”
As I am hanging up I hear, “Wait! Wait! Wait!’
The next day, I’m laughing and laughing at my art class. I’m telling my art teacher, Stan, and my friends Regina and Carol, about the phone call.
“Can you imagine,” I say, “out of nowhere this poor lonely man who’s sitting in front of the TV in a dingy tee-shirt with a can of beer, minding his own business, gets a call from Venus! And, he suddenly realizes it’s Venus! The Goddess of Love calling him and already she’s hanging up because he wasn’t quick enough on the uptake and he’s shouting, ‘Wait, wait, wait’ and she’s gone!”
Stan is doubled over. He’s wiping tears from his eyes.
“He will think about this and talk about this, forever,” he says. “Even now he’s telling all the guys at work about how Venus called and he lost her! Time will go by and he will still be thinking about his loss and will want to beat himself with a stick.”
…..Yep. Sometimes you just have to grab something good when it shows up, and don’t waste too much time thinking about it…..
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HARD TIMES AND BIG LOVE
The rain is hitting the windows, hard. My mother and my sister Polly and I are sitting together, talking about the economy. Mother says, “Remember when you kids were little and your father and I lost everything raising turkeys?”
“Yes,” Polly says. “There were eight of us living in that old 900 square foot house and we six kids slept in the garage.”
“The feed company couldn’t take our house because your father had homesteaded it. But, they took everything else. They came in and took away everything on the property. Everything. They carted off everything we had.”
We’re quiet for a moment, remembering that time.
Then, Mom says, “I didn’t care what they took. I thought, ‘Oh well.’
“By that time, you Polly, had lived through what we were told would be a fatal illness and I was grateful and glad that I had you and all my family. I was so glad just to have all you kids and your father. I didn’t care what anyone took from me as long as I had you. Material things don’t matter.”
“And Mom,” I say, “remember when you had to sell all the furniture in the house to feed us kids?”
Mom says she does remember that.
“I told my radio audience today,” I say, “that I think what is happening in the economy and all the various corrupt systems being brought down, (and they will be!) is exciting. I’m glad to see us sweeping out all the decay. I told my listeners that I am caught up in the money problems like everyone else, but that if I had to live on the streets with a shopping cart, I could seriously do it. Now, I see why. I was brought up to know about these things!”
Polly adds, “We just all have to hang together and everyone has to help everyone else. Family members have to help each other and so do friends and even people who don’t know each other have to help. It’s a big circle of holding together and helping. It’s good for us. This is a good time in so many ways. We don’t need all this material stuff we think we need. We just need each other. We need to just all love each other and extend our hands to everyone who needs us.”
“When we reach out and pull someone up, someone may also be pulling us up,” I say. “But, I am not afraid. I feel comforted by all the real love that I feel happening between people and surrounding me, too.”
Polly hands us some chocolates. We feel even better now.
It’s dark outside and I get up to go home.
“I’m just worried about the animals,” I say. “That bothers me. They are caught up in all this and are left to fend for themselves. People abandon them. Shelters are too full to take more. We need to put out our hands to the animals.”
I’m talking to the choir. I have a cat that was found in the road and I have many ferrel cats that have been fixed and have a home. Mine.
My dog is a mixed mutt.
Mom has a cat, Sassy, that was abused. She has a found dog named Becky and I found a little black kitten crying in a field on one of my walks and hauled her over to my mother’s house. Her name is Josie.
Polly is The Queen of Found and Abandoned Animals. She has separate rooms in her house for them and they have their own doors for their personal comings and goings.
I hope you, my friends, will take the rest of the animals that need our help! We are full up over here.
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WHAT REALLY GOES ON IN KINDERGARTEN
My grandgirl, Lexi, has turned six years old. To celebrate, she and her mom, Summer, take popsicles to her school. Lexi tells her dad that the kids were eating them at the break, when Nick, five years old, with thick rimmed glasses and a buzz cut, turned to her and said, “You look as good… as these popsicles taste.”
Wow. Nick is only five years old and Lexi has just turned six.
Summer and Charles know this is just The Beginning.
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TOO MUCH SEX AND NOT ENOUGH SEX.
A friend calls me, wailing. Her forty three old Minister brother, has just called her from the airport. His wife has kicked him out of the house and he doesn’t know where to go or what to do.
The wife caught him in a naked and telling situation, with the church secretary. The church fired him immediately and his wife than threw him out of the house.
“What about the girlfriend,” I ask.
“Oh, she doesn’t want him anymore, either,” says my friend. “And, his teenage kids won’t speak to him.”
Her brother’s entire life has changed in moments. And his dick did it. His dick brought down the house. Got rid of his job, too.
…..
Another friend, a woman who has been married for twenty some years and has five children, confides to me.
“My husband quit sex the day we got married. The very day. It was over. In fact, the first time I got pregnant, I thought, ‘how did that happen?!’”
“Of course, we’ve had sex since then; we do have five kids…but, it’s maybe only once every six weeks or two months. I’m tired of this kind of marriage. He’s a high powered, well thought of business man but he gives me no attention. Talking to him about it changes nothing.”
She sighs. “I just keep reminding myself about how it was when I met him, how crazy I was about him, how great the sex was, how much I loved him. I still love him. I don’t know what to do.”
It’s strange. The minister’s dick did too much and this man’s dick won’t do anything. Dick’s can be very troublesome. They have lives of their own.
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THE CRYING WEEK
It’s 9:30 at night and a woman friend calls. “Venus. Are you OK?”
“Of course.” I set down the book I’m reading. “Why.”
“You weren’t at the dinner party. You were the only one who didn’t show up. Your place at the table was the only empty one.”
“Oh no! I missed the dinner party?! Oh no! I forgot! That was tonight?”
“It was and we had a wonderful, wonderful time.”
I hang up the phone, sit on my bed and cry. I so wanted to be at that dinner party. I have waited three weeks for it and I got my days mixed up. I missed all that fun with my friends. I am devastated. I know it’s a small thing, but I am so sad. I cry some more and go to bed and I don’t sleep.
….
It’s several days later and my hairdresser calls. She too is crying. She has her own tale of woe. And, now her woe is mine. She’s had to move to Oklahoma! And, she is never coming back. She’s crying and I am crying. I love my hairdresser and now because she is gone, I will never be lovely, again. No one can cut my hair like she does and no one can color it like she does. She is an artist.
I think about all the terrible, terrible hair cuts and mangy colors I had before I met K. And now my friend K. has lost her home and has had to move far away. This is even worse than missing the dinner party.
I am so selfish and so sorry for myself but I am also laughing. I am so lucky, I think, that this is the worst that has come my way, recently. It’s a silly, silly worseness.
I am sorry for K. and I am sorry for myself, but I know that K.’s life will be better. She wispered to me a few months back that she had had a dream where she had to move to Oklahoma where she met and married a wealthy rancher.
Sometimes the worst things turn out to be the best things. Maybe K. will get married and loll around in a shortie nightie and eat sugared grapes and I will find a hairdresser even more fabulous than K.
Well..it could happen. You never know in life, now do you? It’s just not a good idea to kill yourself, or to give up and into despair until you round the next bend in the road. And, than, you had better wait until you see what’s around the next bend in the road, too, and the next, because…you just never, never know when you will be struck by The Goddess of Good Lightening, just waiting for you, just waiting to poke you with her Wowzing Good Luck Stick when you least expect it.
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ASTROLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY
One of my brother-inlaws is a wonderful photographer and astrologer. (He also plays the wild drums for a troop of belly dancers!) Here is his website.
www.skyword-mountain.blogspot.com
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WINNER OF A FREE 15 MINUTE PHONE SESSION WITH VENUS: *Kim Commons. Offer valid through Dec. 20th, 2008. After that, null and void
Hi, I thought you might like to see some of my family. Sparkle the cat is here, too. She doesn’t seem to like the camera.
“THE FLOWER THAT LOVES AND LISTENS TO YOU”painted by venus andrecht www.godisalwayshappy.com
“LADIES AT THE BALL” painted by venus andrecht www.godisalwayshappy.com