Just got an E-Mail from my friend Liz the phone psychic, she wants me to escort her to yet another one of her sisters weddings. This will be the fourth in as many years. She’s near despair–just when she thought she was out of single sisters and friends for whom she’d have to attend the showers and weddings of, now there are second marriages to contend with.
Sidebar:
I have a nutty aunt millie. Everybody on my mom’s side of the family is a bit on the nutty side, but aunt millie is a full-out filbert. Aunt millie once spent an entire afternoon explaining her theory about slot machines to me. She’s one of those old ladies who makes a yearly pilgrimage to Las Vegas in a charter bus full of septuagenarians and plunks some of her pension into the nickel slots over a long weekend and has kitchen cabinets chock-full of those plastic cups casinos stack by the slot machines for people to hold their change in. So anyway, I’m sipping kool aid from one of those big casino tumblers (I’m nine at the time) and aunt Millies telling me how to read the slots. She’s like one of those mystics who toss bones and rocks in a circle and try to see meaning in the patterns they fall in:
“Well, you have to keep to the machines nearest the isles, the casinos know which machines pay and which don’t, and they keep the loose ones nearest the isles so when they do pay off it’s in a real visible area, so folks get the impression more people are winning than really are. Oh, and keep an eye out for these patterns, lemons and bars, bells and stars, stars and sevens, but no cherries! Cherries are the kiss of death, honey…”
I bring this up because, along with a fuzzy toilet seat cover that was so fuzzy it prevented the seat from staying up, Aunt Millie’s bathroom had this doll that covered a spare roll of toilet paper, it had a long flowing, layered gossamer dress in the ugliest aqua-greenie-blue color…
Exactly the same dress poor Liz had to wear when she was a bridesmaid last year!
Oh, I almost forgot to mention. I’m engaged! Yep, Liz and I are getting hitched.
Seems like I’m always the last to find out about these things. Apparently Liz told her mother the wonderful news a good six months before she got around to telling me (probably slipped her mind, what with having to reserve the church and the seating plans to make and all).
I’m not kidding. The very last line of the E-mail said “P.S. Forgot to mention, were engaged now.”
If it turns out she isn’t a joking expect it to be a loooong engagement…