My car’s tire is almost flat.
I’m leaning over, peering at it with disbelief, while my sister Polly whimpers.

“Oh no. Oh nooo,” she’s whispering. I have to be in El Cajon at 4:30 for a hair appointment and I’ll never make it.”

“Call the woman and explain,” I say.

“I can’t remember her name,” Polly says. “I can’t remember her number and I can’t remember the name of the shop!”

“And you’re the smart one in the family,” I retort.

My sister and I have come down the mountain to buy bathroom fixtures for my house re-model. We’ve accomplished that and I’ve convinced Polly to give me about 20 minutes more at Home Expo to look at lights and mirrors.

“It’s got to be only 20 minutes,” Polly says firmly, “because you have to drive me back up the mountain to get my car for an important hair appointment.”

Well. Now here we are, an hour from home with an almost flat tire.

“I’ve got road service,” I say. “I can call them.”

Polly almost cries as she says, “I don’t have time for road service.”

Polly is not making sense. I know that with some women our hair appointments are more important then money and men, but this is silly.

“We can’t,” I say, as I shake Polly’s shoulder and look in her frantic eyes, “drive home with an almost flat tire. It’s way too far.”

We’re both groaning. What to do? What to do? Two women in a strange town and an hour from home with a bad tire.

As I lift my drooping head to look around me I can’t believe what I see. We are parked and disabled right in front of a Discount Tire Store!
How sweet is that?

I grab Polly and trot with her into the store.

Oh my gosh. There’s a long line of people waiting to have their tires attended to.

We get in line and the minutes tick off with Polly mumbling some more about how she almost took that woman’s number with her when she left with me today, and what is she going to do now?

Finally, I get to speak to a Tire Man at the counter.
His hair is black and it stands straight up in the air. I wonder how it does that.

Tire Man leads us outside to take a look at my car’s tires. Polly is filling him in about her difficulties with the time element and the hairdresser.

“You’ve got a nail in here,” Tire Man says, as he fingers the back rear tire.
“It’ll take an hour to patch it and let it dry.”

My sister almost collapses.
“I don’t have an hour,” she pleads.

Tire Man pulls a little thinger from his pocket and checks all my tires.
“They’re bald,” he says. “Lady, you’re driving on bald tires!”

My mind starts clicking. My Car Man told me three or four months ago that I would need new tires by the end of the summer. It looks like my ‘end of summer’ has come a bit early.

I start to talk price to Tire Man and how my Car Man has told me to go to Cost Co to get the best price on the kind of tires my car needs.

Tire Man assures me he will get on the computer and compare Discount Tire’s prices to Cost Co’s.

Polly is still acting badly.
“I have a terrible headache,” she tells Tire Man. “I can’t just not show up at my hairdresser’s. I told her I was desperate and she made a special appointment just for me.”

She tugs on Tire Man’s dark blue sleeve.
“Can’t we just drive home and get Venus’ tire fixed up there?”

Tire Man is horrified. “Lady! You’d have a blow-out on the freeway. Can you imagine how terrible that could be?”

“Polly,” I hiss, “he doesn’t understand about hair appointments. You’re just going to have to adjust here.”
………
Inside the office, Tire Man shows us the tire comps on the computer. It looks good.

“I can get you four new tires in 30 minutes,” he says.
He looks at my little white haired sister who is obviously not doing so well.
“I’ll put you ahead of all these other people who are waiting. It’s the best I can do.”

“Do it,” I say.

Eeeh gads. Another huge sum of money, but what is that compared with all the piles of ‘cash’ I’m spending on my house? I’ve become giddy with borrowed money.

Polly sits down outside the store on a concrete bench.
“My head is hurting so much,” she says, “that I can’t bear it. I need chocolate! I’m going across the street to get some.”

Twenty minutes later, she’s back. As she plops down on the bench with me, she says, “It’s weird, but my husband just called on my cell and he’s about 5 minutes from me, just driving around! He came down the mountain today he says, just to tool around. He’s going to pick me up and take me to my appointment.”

“This whole experience is weird,” I say.
“We have a flat tire right in front of the Discount Tire Store instead of having it out in nowhere or on the freeway where we could have been killed.
Then, I had been planning to take the car down the mountain in a month or so for new tires and that would have meant waiting for hours while the place got around to putting them on the car. Instead, look at this, I get our lives saved, get new tires and it’s all done practically instantly and it’s cheaper. It’s perfect.”

I glance at my car which has just been lowered on the rack.

“See you later,” I say, as I go inside the office to inquire about getting my car.

“I think my car is ready,” I tell one of the Tire Men at the counter. “Should I just go outside and wait for it?”

“Sure,” the Tire Man says.

“Or,” a good looking young guy standing by the far counter calls out to me, “just come over here and wait by me!”
He grins, showing his perfect white teeth as he looks me up and down. He shakes his head ‘yes!’ and winks.

Eeek. I have indeed just had a Perfect Day!

The massive wooden gates slowly open and we drive into the courtyard.
My daughter, her husband, my two grandkids and I turn around and watch through our car’s windows, as the gates creak and slide closed behind us.

We’re visiting my ex-husband, Summer’s father. He has personally built and lives in a large circular concrete block house with an inner courtyard. This ‘palace’ of sorts, is situated on ten acres, in the desert. The outside of the compound consists of walls that reach to the top of the inner buildings. Inside the walls, the courtyard displays tiled surfaces and tall palm trees.

Ken’s home, I think, looks like something that might be found in the Saudi desert.

The place is a marvelous work of art in progress, but from the inside of the house and from the court yard, we notice that there is no sweeping view of the majestic desert this movie set rests on. We can’t see the spread of spiked cactus, the joshua trees, the miles and miles of sand and the imposing black shale mountain we know sits to the west. There is no view at all. We are walled in; confined much more then the hordes of pesky rabbits that plague Ken’s gardening attempts and who manage to get into the compound, somehow, as do various mountain lions, at night.

My ex-husband has his quirks. At 62 he is still a handsome, brilliant man, but those quirks were, and I imagine still are, hard to live with.

After a tour of the splendid place, I ask Ken, just because I’m nosey, “Are you still burying your money in the back yard like you used to do?”
He grins and leads us to his work room where he pulls a long plastic container off a shelf.

“My gosh, Ken,” I say. “You’re putting stuff in those? After you’re dead, your kids won’t even be able to use a metal detector to find your loot. I hope you’ve drawn a detailed map of all your land so the kids know where to dig.”

He grins some more.

Summer tells me later that there is no map.

From my past life with him, I am pretty sure that Ken has utterly no idea where his treasures are buried. If anyone thinks they might assault him and demand he start digging for gold, they would surely have to move in with the man for 10 years while the entire property is shoveled over. And, in the end, his treasures may not be what we would consider fine and useful.

Still, I envision the aftermath of his passing: Every weekend for years, or maybe into eternity, the family drives out from the big city, a good 2 hour drive, to dig up the ten acres of inter-locked spiny cactus, looking for “Bumpa Ken’s” hidden treasure.

After several hours in Adventure Land we prepare to leave Ken’s walled compound. As we walk to the car, with some ceremony, he gifts his granddaughter, four year old Lexi, with a piece from one of his desert collections; a dried and carefully shellacked mound of mountain lion poop.

…………………..
This year as Father’s Day approaches, Summer instructs Lexi to make her Bumpa Ken a (Grand) Father’s Day card.

Here is the email Summer sent me about that attempt:

“Hi Mom,
I asked Lexi to make my dad a card for Father’s Day as he is coming for lunch with us on Sunday.

So, Lexi drew him naked.

I said, ‘That won’t work.’

She then drew him as a hairy monster.

I said, ‘That wouldn’t be nice.’

Next, she drew him angry.

Finally, I said, ‘Draw him as a king!’

So. She drew him as a QUEEN and informed me that he is a boy who likes to wear women’s clothing!

Then, we got into an argument and she ripped all the cards to shreds.

My father won’t be getting a card from Lexi this year.”
………………………….

When I tell my mother this story she says, “Lexi is a lot like you, Venus. But more so.”

Summer agrees. “Sometimes I feel like I am raising my mother. I feel like I am sandwiched in by you two on both sides.”

Lexi has four plus years of history with us now, and I have lots of astonishing and continuing stories about her behavior that I re-count to my family and friends.

At 9 1/2 weeks she verbally copied me as I said, “I love you.”
Summer and I both clearly heard her say ‘I love you’ back to me, four times.
No one else believes us, of course, but we were there.

She loves and hates with passion.

She has driven off her nanny and regularly wrestles the little boys at preschool to the ground and puts them into choke holds.

She has two boyfriends and insists that she will marry both of them and have two husbands.

Recently, in the grocery store she commented on the walnuts. “Get those BaBa. They’re good for your heart.”
An older man who heard her, came up to me, his eyes wide. “What did she say!?”

She whines, talks almost continually, has no tolerance for small frustrations and has thrashing tantrums.
But, she also says “I love you!” and “I will always love you,” and snuggles close.
A few days ago, after playing with a young girl she had just met in the park, and will most likely never see, again, she said to me, “I will always like her, forever.”

She feels great compassion for all beings.

She says, out loud, what people are thinking which throws the person involved into shock.

Lexi utterly exhausts her parents and me with her strong personality and field of quirks.

Summer says, “I look at parents now who are dealing with willful, whining, brilliant, demanding and emotional children and I no longer think, ‘What’s wrong with those parents! Why don’t they control that child.? I don’t blame them for anything, anymore. I just feel for them.”
…………………….
With kids, you have probably noticed that you never know who you will get. Some kids are easy to raise, some are hard. Some are little goody-two-shoes and some are born to trouble.

Because of what The Beings have told me, I believe that people come the way they are to experience a particular ‘life’ as God wants it to be. And, keep in mind that all of us are the One Being. We are all God experiencing and expressing, so how can we blame another, (who is us in other forms!) for perceived faults or strangeness? If we do, we point the finger at ourselves.

Life with ourselves and others is easier if we keep in mind the words of the Beings. “Accept Your Nature.”

Even with all it’s quirks.

I’m personally finding it’s best to accept everyone’s nature. Including my own. That acceptance cuts down on a lot of worthless stress, worry and judgement and opens the world up to lots of comical interest.

Like with Lexi. And, with her grandfather and his quirks.

Because of Lexi’s quixotic nature, Summer and I are getting to practice non-judgement and acceptance of an unusual nature, every day.
It helps us to see it that way. It even makes it fun.

(And, who said we were ‘normal’?)

Almost every day, Chuckie, my ‘Contractor To The Stars’, asks me to make a big decision, immediately, about something I know nothing about.

“I need to build out the space for the bathroom vanity,” he says. “What do you want in there, how long is it and how wide and do you want this wall over here torn down or left half way up?”

I don’t know.

“And where do you want me to put the bathtub and how big is it?

I’m stumped.

He persists. “What size toilet are you going to order?”

Toilet?

I find I have a new, consuming interest in life: Public rest rooms.
Wherever I go-litterly-I’m leaning over toilets to read the names of toilet manufactures and noting toilet design.

My sister, Polly, tells me not to get a round seated toilet. “Get the elongated one,” she says. “People have bigger butts then they used to have and they can’t fit them in the smaller toilets.”

This revelation about people’s butt size is of interest to me. I note with satifaction that I haven’t had any trouble with toilet seats.

In department stores, service stores, restaurants and friend’s homes I am noticing plumbing fixtures and getting down on my knees to stare at and touch the flooring in various bathrooms. I carry sanitary hand wipes in my pocket as a matter of course, these days. I’m obsessed, but I have to be. Whatever choices I make may well stay with me for the rest of my life.

I ask Chuckie for a small fire-watch platform on my roof where I can peer at the en-circling mountains for the re-current fires that trouble, worry and occasionally terrify all of us in Southern California and sometimes destroy good sized parts of our valley. And our homes.

The little fire-watch platform has now mysteriously become a deck that is approximately 1/8 to 1/4 of my house in length and width.

“Might as well,” Chuckie and my sister say. “It costs pretty much the same to make it bigger and you can sunbathe naked up there.”

That does it.
My sunbathing habit has caused a lot of commotion in my life, which I will tell you about in another blog.

Right now, my mind is busily trying to figure out what is happening on my back patio, the one off the new art room.

This is because one day Chuckie says, “Venus, I got to keep the two workers busy. I’ve run out of projects for them for awhile. Can you think of anything else they can do?”

“Oh? Why not extend the back patio, a bit,” I suggest.

Two weeks later, the patio is ripped out and extends way back into the weedy bank by the row of oleander bushes and the workers have shoveled the new patio down to China.

I need a retaining wall in front of the bushes and I ask that it be stucco, so Chuckie says, “Got to dig deeper for that.”

Now, jack hammers on hard dirt have been my house music for days.

I’m turning the retaining wall into a rounded wall that curves around the new patio. I plan to paint the stucco some shocking color and hey, a small outdoor gas fireplace built into the wall with a rounded top and a big rounded stucco seat would be sensible and mosaics inserted wherever would be fun and the patio floor might be stamped or stained concrete.

So, naturally, now that I am thinking about concrete I have to take a contractor’s concrete seminar. Chuckie is going to one for training. He tells me, “It’s all day, it’s free and they give us lunch.”

I want to go. I’ve been reading Chuckie’s Concrete Design magazines and because I am an artist I am all excited. I wheedle and beg and Chuckie finally says OK, he’ll take me with him.

I’m delirious with excitement. I’m thinking of how I might stain my new concrete patio, or work nice designs into the concrete and oh let’s be truthful! I’m also thinking about spending all day, as possibly the only woman, at a concrete seminar with what I imagine to be a beefy horde of muscled, helmeted contractors; Alien beings in my personal world. I’m drooling and sucking air with anticipation.

As my sister Candy has always said, “Working men are really into sex. All their male parts work and keep working. When desk workers have lost interest and ability, the blue collar men are just revving up for more.”

She should know. She married Smiley, the tall, blonde Viking god that we call The Gold Plated Plumber as he won’t touch our mundane plumbing needs. He only touches the new stainless steel and pounded copper of the mansioned rich.

Anyway…..I got off track here.

You may be saying, “Where does a single woman without a Real Job (like 9-5) get the bags of money that keeps that ‘Topsy’ of a house and patio of hers, going and spreading?

I borrow it.

That’s what I do. This borrowing thing is new for me. I was scared about borrowing money and going into debt for my house remodel but what The Beings say to us about death changed my mind about a lot of things:

‘Always keep your bags packed,’ They told me, ‘as the train pulls into the station and picks up it’s passengers at odd hours.’
This keeps reverberating in my head.
Their words have made me want to hustle and enjoy the life I have, now, which at this point in time includes my house.

Yesterday, at about 8:45 AM at the end of my lane where it meets the main road, a man in his 30’s lost control of his car and wrapped it and himself around a giant oak tree.
Firemen spent almost two hours cutting the man out of his car while the Life Flight helicopter waited silently in a hay field with two curious horses and a goat.

Neighbors who crept down the road and looked in at the man and at his crushed car said to me, “There’s no way he could live through this. It’s horrific. Don’t go down and look Venus.”

I stayed in my house and thought, ‘This man got up a few hours ago from his night of dreams. He stretched, looked out the kitchen window and said, ‘it’s gonna be hot, again,’ had 2 cups of coffee, no cream, climbed into his shiney red car and headed for work.

He was listening to the radio and maybe he was humming and thinking about his little kid who’d grabbed and squeezed him around his neck the night before and said, ‘I love you, Daddy.’
And, as he’s thinking about this, perhaps a cat or a loose dog, runs across the road and the man, being of kind heart, turns his wheel to miss the creature….and meets that train that comes…that always comes…to pick us up, everyone of us and some of us at odd hours and unexpected times.

Later, reviewing the day of death and car drama with my art friend Antonia the Ceramist, she fingers her brilliant necklace of yellow topaz and quartz and says, “Always use your good dishes, Venus.”

And so, I am.
I’ve re-financed my house and taken my best blue and gold teapot and cups from the locked china cabinet and soon I’m going to be sitting outside in a nice chair by my new rounded fireplace on my new concrete patio with a cup of tea.

Or, maybe not.

Maybe I will be sitting naked on top of my house, drinking white wine and talking to birds.

And I will be listening.

I will be listening hard because way over the rock studded mountains, past the valleys and plains full of houses and humanity and running along the coast by the blue-bottle sea, far, far away…….sometimes……… when the wind is right, I can hear the sound of a train, blowing it’s long, errie whistle. I imagine it slowing to a stop to pick up passengers…..then I hear it, again, the sound of the horn and I picture the train moving fast along the tracks, heading into the white coastal mists; going SomeWhere.

Hello my friends.

Yesterday, my sister Barbara and my mom and I were having iced tea and cookies at our mother’s house.

We were gathered around the round rickety table with the bent legs. Mom has had this table and chair-set since Barbara and I were kids and that was a looooong time ago. The furniture was called Danish Modern back then.

The three remaining chairs with their yellow plastic chair backs and cushions hang in strings from all the cats scratching them through the years.
Barbara was sitting on the chair that occasionally jerks and loses it’s plastic seat and flips you onto your knees into the center of the room.
I don’t sit in that chair too often as I have taken too many floor dives from it.

As we drank our tea we talked as we always do, about all the family members and the latest news. We have a lot of family members so there is a lot to talk about.

At one point, Barbara turned to me and said, “Wenus,” and caught herself.
We all laughed at the turn she had accidently given my name and then she said, “Remember when we went to Mexico City and everyone there called you ‘Benus?”

“Yes, I remember that,” I said, “and did I ever tell you about this really handsome, rather famous man I met once, at a party and how I accidently got him interested in me?”

“Let’s have some more cookies,” my mother said.

“So, I went to this business networking party,” I continued. “You know, where you go and meet new people and talk up your business and other people talk up theirs? You all wear name tags and everybody is networking and looking for clients, or whatever. Anyhow, the place had a nice buffet table of food set out and I was walking by it, putting things on my plate.

I happened to look up at one point and across the buffet table from me was this tall, dark-haired handsome guy putting shrimp on his plate. His name tag said ‘Peter’ and of course, my name tag said ‘Venus.’

Maybe I was nervous, I don’t know, but I got mixed up. I looked at the man’s name tag and then looked at him and said all bright and bouncy, “Oh! You must be Penis!”

The man’s head shot up from looking at the food and he looked right into my eyes. He was stunned. I was stunned, too. I couldn’t believe I had called the man ‘Penis.’

I heard some giggling around me so I guess I must have shouted out my greeting to this unknown man.

The man and I just looked at each other. What do you say next after an opening like that?

I realized I must have gotten his name and mine mixed up; transposed the ‘P’ onto Venus, but I didn’t trust myself to try and explain. I could have made things worse.

The rest of the story is that the man was instantly transfixed by me. He hadn’t noticed me until that moment, but apparently I was such a shock to his system that I had entered his heart forever. Or, entered something.

He pursued me for years. I have happy memories of sitting with him in many restaurants by the ocean, drinking white wine and eating scallops in butter sauce.

We could have had more than just the eating and drinking and flirting, but ‘Penis’ lived with a wealthy woman who traveled. He was well known for being a big participant in the environmental movement and volunteered his time for a number of important charities; all of which he would have been unable to do, without the life style his lady friend afforded him.

And so, I preferred to keep ‘Penis’ as a slavering friend.
……………………..
ADVICE FROM VENUS:
I know a lot of women (and some men) who have made a job out of finding the right man (or woman.) It has become a loathsome, burdensome job; a full time career that they really hate, but feel they have to do.

If you’re looking for your True Love, consider stopping that frenzied internet hunt for at least awhile and just physically get out and about in the earth world. Think of this time as a vacation from ‘work’ and be your real and relaxed self in every situation and see what comes out of your mouth. Your inner self might call out to someone and bring you Big Love; or, at least some excitement or a few glasses of wine by the sea with a panting, lusting companion.

Hello my friends.

He’s big, strong and blonde and he builds for the Hollywood Stars.
I am speaking about my contractor, Chuckie.

I am delirious with joy as I seem, at this moment in time, to be flowing in a strong, good energy WAVE for house renovation.
My house repair past is littered with sleazy and inept contractors, ignorant handy men and un-sound and ugly work, so I am stunned and grateful for this turn of events.

Chuckie, about forty years old, (the nephew of my brother in law, Dr. Meyers, who I mention often on my show,) drives an hour and a half to get here, early, 5 days and week, and drives another one and a half hours back home to his wife and family at the end of the day.

He has an even personality, is open to sudden and even stupid and un-workable design changes, keeps everything spotless, can repair and build almost anything, is totally trustable and is a fine craftsman who builds things right and builds them to last.

Recently, I asked him about a previous job remodeling a mansion for a certain very famous, sexy, beautiful Hollywood female Star who you would recognize in a moment if I mentioned her name; which I won’t. I had heard the story from my sister Polly about why he left the job with her but I wanted to hear it from his perspective.

Chuckie stopped hammering, wiped the sweat off his protruding stomach and looked at me.

“Well,” he said. “Along with all the rest of the work I was doing, she had me building her a bunch of pantie drawers for all her panties and that was all right with me. I’ll build anything.”

He paused and looked at me.

“But, dang!” he said.
“Then she wanted me to take all her panties out of all the old drawers and arrange all her panties real nice in the new drawers…hell, I just quit. I can’t be doing that. I have to draw the line, somewhere.”

I don’t want to lose Chuckie. I won’t be asking him to re-arrange my pantie drawers or anything close to that. It’s clear, the man has his principles. That’s why I like him so much.

“I ate a dog cookie the other day,” my almost 85 year old mother said.

I leaned back on her ratty, dog and cat hair infested sofa and said, “You did?”

“Yes. I was taking my nap and when I woke up, there on the bed beside me was a big chocolate bon bon. I thought your sister Polly left it for me while I was asleep. So, I ate it.”

“Ewwarrgh,” I said. “How was it?”

“Well, I thought it needed more chocolate and it was a bit dry.”

“Did you eat the whole thing?” I wanted to know.

Well, yes she had.

When Polly stopped in later to see Mom, my mother said she thanked her for the chocolate truffle.

Polly was surprised and said she hadn’t left any candy for her.

A bit of detective work identified the gifter. It was Becky, Mom’s dog who had apparently taken a dog treat up onto mom’s bed and left it there for later.
………………………….
A few months ago, Mom was at my house and I was fixing us dinner. I happened to glance up and saw my mother at the table, nibbling something from a small dish.

“Eeeh gads! Mother!” I yelled. “You’re eating cat food!”

My mother said she thought it was some kind of appetizer.

But, listen…my mother has had a lot of health problems but nothing has killed her. As one of her doctors keeps saying, “You should be dead!!”

I think she keeps her resistence up by exposing herself pretty regularly to questionable foods. It’s a proven fact that being too antiseptic isn’t healthy for a person.
So stop worrying so much about eating only what ‘The Food Police’ say is good for you to eat and start grazing more widely.