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The Kennedy Half Dollar

This would be one of those stories that I forgot if it hadn't gotten a postscript recently.

We are doing a spell by assignment. The assignment is for us to do a spell with an intention that we can all agree upon, something bigger that any of our personal or romance problems, something that we could perhaps see results of later on. We are united for just this event, and our ways will part after this class is done.

We decide to do a general prosperity spell for Austin. Layoffs, recession, lots of people looking for work. We don't want to attract huge corporate development that turns our city into Anywhere, USA. Our spell will create prosperity and jobs for Austinites by encouraging local investment and consumer loyalty to locally owned business. That way, we get the jobs we want while still keeping Austin wierd.

A map of Austin is spread between us. We light green candles for prosperity, and throw all our money onto the map. Working in a clockwise rotation, we push, pull, pass and stir the coins and bills around the map, chanting,

Locally we shall invest
North and East and South and West
'Cause we love Austin best
We have jobs, we have prosperity,
And Austin keeps its own identity.

When we had a whirlpool of motion such that coins were splashing off the map, the spell was done!

One of the women who was party to this intention could not be there that night, so I had thrown down a special coin for her, a Kennedy half dollar, and after the spell was done, I retrieved it, intending to give it to her so that she could help us with phase two of the spell.

Let me tell you something about Kennedy half dollars. While I don't think they are really rare, nobody spends them. After about five years in cash register running retail business, I had seen, oh, like ZERO Kennedy dollars coming through our register, hey? They really are special coins.

In phase two of our spell, all of us would go out and spend the money from the spell at some local business, get that spell money into circulation ASAP. So I collected my share of the pot and headed downtown with LM. At a local bar which makes its own homebrew, I was easily able to reintroduce the charmed silver into the local economy.

As we were returning to LMs car, all drunk and happy, we were spanged by and older homeless man, a VN vet. I told him that the only money that I had left was this Kennedy half dollar which I was supposed to give to a girlfriend, but I guess he should have it, since it was a prosperity charm. He was excited to get this particular kind of coin, and he said he had loved JFK and how the country had really been on the right track back then, and if it was "magicked" that was cool with him. So we were all very happy with this exchange which was all of 50 cents worth of currency involved!

Next morning, I woke up, mildly, pleasantly hungover and opened the shop. And I shit you not, it was not the first sale, it might have been the second, but surely no later than the third sale of the day, the customer paid part of his purchase with, you guessed it, a Kennedy half dollar.

With my eyebrows disapearing above my hairline, I told the customer about how I had given my "lucky" Kennedy half dollar to a homeless man the previous night, and he said that sometimes that good karma money came back real fast.

So that WAS the end of the story until recently. I will tell the sequel of the Kennedy half dollar story later, once I'm sure the spell can't be jinxed by the telling.

Use the currency you value, whether it be of silver or spirit!

Cherry Lime Collins

"What are you drinking?" asked LM, and I asked for something cold and fizzy, with vodka and lime and cherry juice. Here is what he made for me:

1 part (two shots) Vodka (He uses Tito's and I use Monopolowa)
2-3 parts Club soda
1/4 of a lime juice plus the rind
Big splash of Maraschino cherry juice and 2-3 cherries

This drink is not fussy about proportions. Just make sure you can taste the cherry juice. Very refreshing in hot weather! Girls love it!

Hail Mary

I was officially a Catholic from 4th to about 7th grade. There is a lot of beauty, grace and magic in Catholicism, and more than other religions it seems to harbor multitheistic diversity even when these subcultures are officially shunned by the orthodoxy of the Church.

Eventually, it was the demons, misogeny and antisex positions of the Church that drove me to Atheism for a long, very healing time.

Someone who I really missed from Catholicism was Our Lady of Guadalupe. Upon renewing my religious devotions, I was pleased to find the Catholic Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Virgin and Mother, very welcome in modern Pagan witchcraft.

One of the sweet spells taught to us by the Catholic nuns was to say the Hail Mary whenever you heard ambulance sirens. It just seems like the Christian (or Pagan) thing to do, to say a prayer for a stranger in need. I found myself doing it even in my atheiest of days.

Here is my Pagan/feminist rewrite of the Hail Mary prayer, employing very few subtle changes that hopefully even a real Catholic could appreciate:

Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Power is with thee.
Blessed art Thou as Woman,
And blessed is the fruit of Thy womb.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray with us mortals
Now, in the hour of our need.

Amen

Say this prayer whenever you hear StarFlight, an ambulance or fire rescue siren, or feel in danger yourself.

Persephone's Promise

Persephone's Promise

This one is much simpler than my other drink recipes!

2 jiggers vodka
4 jiggers pomegranate juice (we prefer POM Wonderful, but it's expensive!)
5 shakes of Agostura bitters

Serve over lots of ice.

Variations:
Substitute orange juice for some of the pomegranate juice.
Or/and add Club Soda for a lighter, soda pop version.

Grief Is a Spooky Monster

My dear friend Spooky Monster died Memorial Day weekend. It is the end of a Great White Cat. I do not know why he died, I just found him curled up in the back yard. It is very painful not knowing what did him in. He was healthy and happy as far as I could tell. If any of you psychic types get a read, let me know what you think. Spooky was a friend and companion of mine for about nine years.I sure will miss my Spooky Monster.

About a month before he died, I was petting him during full shedding season, and that cat shed year round. I got this huge wad of his snowy, pure white fur, and it seemed too beautiful to throw away. So I started stuffing it into a glass jar. Over the month or so, it filled up, a jar full of clouds, like angel hair (if you didn't know him). So now I have a reliquary, a jar of Spooky's fur, with a small vial of tears in it. He died the Weekend of May 30th, but I'm still occasionally adding tears to that vial.

I have a lot of friends, who, being our age, now have cats who are fifteen, seventeen, nineteen. My cats have never lasted that long, but it was my dearest hope that Spooky would die of old age or I'd have to put him down at age 17. It was a vain hope, because if cats have nine lives, it is certain that Spooky had burned through his in a hurry, with his tough guy hard living. But at nine years he was just beginning to relax into his middle years. He hadn't gotten into another fight since February, and I had hoped that he would continue to act his age.

After losing Twister just last year, and helping quite a few friends bury their pets in recent history, and even burying a (probably) stray cat killed next to my shop, I have come to call myself a Priestess of Dead Animals. LM has commented on how I move through grief in huge gulps that other people couldn't stand to experience in a short time. It is astonishing to me how much grief I can sustain for my cats. It makes me want to never accept another stray foundling into my life, for the heartbreak sure to come. Every day when I come home I am temporarily filled with dread that Emo will be dead in the street because he is black and cars can't see him.

There is no way to look at this process as other than some emotional/priestess training on how to grieve and cope with loss and minister to each other for the loss of a human loved one. How many weddings can I priestess before I do a funeral? I highly recommend a book which LM let me read, called Swallowed By a Snake. It is written by a man to help men understand men's ways of dealing (or not dealing) with grief, but of course there is more than enough for a woman to understand from this book. I do not mean in any way that it makes death and loss and grief easy. It's not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be acknowleged, ritually honored, and moved through.

Here is my ritual song for burying a dead animal:

Go, (___________), go-oh-oh
Go, (___________), go-oh-oh,
Into the Earth,
Into the o-ther wor-rld,
Go, (___________), go.

Sing it in a slow dirge over and over until the grave is filled.

It should work for burying a person, too.

Fourth of July Arachnophila

On the 4th of July Austinites by the thousands conglomerate around Zilker Park for the fireworks display, jockeying for good open sky positions and assembling in whatever tribal units they choose or get invited to for the occasion. Sunburns cool off and potsmoke rises as if offerings to the masters of pyrotechnics. The show is usually great but it always seems too short.

People who live near the park try to help out the parking and gridlock situation for their friends, and you want to make sure you have one of these invites at least for parking purposes.

LM and I had two invites between us, one from Trailer Park Girl who assembled a sizeable clan of the Kingdom of Slack conveniently upstream from "Barking Springs," (the spillway from Barton Springs where you don't have to pay to get in and you, your kids and your dogs are welcome, except for the "NO SWIMMING" "NO WADING" and "NO DOGS" signs which we all ignore until at random calendar intervals the bike cops come and run everybody off, issuing tickets to the slowest runners. REMEMBER - always run!)

After hooping it up with the KOS crowd and catching some cold water at the spillway we moved up the hill to Triplewide's place. Good company was had, met a friend I had lost track of years ago, ate B's wicked grilled jalapeno poppers (never again), and, here is where the story began.

While I was out unloading my hoops, just in case, I heard L calling to her kids, "Hey, kids come look at this huge spider in the street!" Her boychild, C, obviously got the arachnophobia gene from somewhere, I know he didn't get it from his parents. "No, Mommy, I don't like spiders!" But naturally she coaxed him over, trying to get him comfortable with the critter. "I sure wanna see a big spider," I piped in, and joined them. Well this was a Texas Brown (or Tan?) Tarantula, easily 3 inches+ of leg span. "Hey, C, do you dare me to touch it?" as we crowded around our specimen, which froze. "No, don't touch it!" wailed C. "I'm gonna touch it..." I teased. Knowing that this species was gentle to a fault, I was still daring myself to touch it, and... I did, gently, on the rump. It sprang into motion, scuttling out of the street and onto a grassy curb just over a little creek drainage where perhaps it kept its web tunnel. "See, C, it was more afraid of us than we were afraid of it," explained L.

Shortly thereafter we all walked up the hill to the elementary school to see the fireworks which didn't last long enough, and I didn't have any potsmoke to offer and nobody made the offering for me, sigh.

On the way back, neighbors and their friends were streaming back into the neighborhood, like after some rock concert. LM and a few of our gang were in the lead, and what did we see, but the same tarantula in the street, next to the creek! Fearing that it would be accidently stomped, or become a victim of arachnocide, we endeavored to return it to safety. Being the least arachniphobic, most bug-loving of most any group of people, I tend to take the lead on things like this. I tried to shoo it towards the grassy curb, but it resolutely end-ran me back into the street. These critters like to warm themselves on asphalt, but gee, its the 4th of July in Texas, eight-legs!

People were streaming around, and some were encouraging us, and I attempted to block Tarantula's suicidal mission by blocking it with my feet. The creek was just 8 feet away!

JUMP! It jumped from between my feet and ran up the back of my right leg, and stopped for a rest on my thigh just below my shorts. Okay, I got a big fucking spider on my ass now, and people are staring. Now what do I do? I wasn't in a hurry since this was a good chance to do some important PR work on behalf of Arthropodia. I let people look, and see that a girl wasn't afraid of spiders, and that spiders, at least this kind of spider, was harmless.

"Get over to the creek," says H, with a Daddy's authority. "Shake it off over there." At least somebody wasn't spellbound. So I moved slowly to the curb, and as I stepped off the street, Tarantula climbed up my butt, up my back and came to rest on the top of my right shoulder. I looked back over my shoulder towards the gawking onlookers, and pretended to give the spider a kiss. I felt completely honored, and H had had enough of the spectacle. "Let me help you," he said, climbed up onto the weedy curd
and brushed the tarantula off my shoulder into the (dry) creekbed.

So I could feel chosen by a new animal guide, and get myself a new pagan name. I have always felt more called to the enigmatic microfauna as opposed to all the folks who go by Wolf and Bear and suchlike. The meek Rough Green Snake twines around my ankle, but most of my allies have been plants. Maybe it is yet again another excuse for a dream tattoo, a tarantula on my shoulder!

One possibility that it has led me to decide against is keeping a spider as a pet. I have often thought that a spider would be a very cool addition to my limited menagerie, and that vet bills would be less than for a cat, and maybe that grief would be comparitively less expensive for the eventual death of a spider.

Maybe. But again I came down with the moral bottom line for me which is: wild creatures are not pets. They belong in the wild.

Even if it is in the Wild of the streets of Austin.

Fare thee well, Fluffy!