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!