Help From My Friends - Caprice

Caprice

She is at one with the world, well, her world at any rate, which includes mystical, magical meditations and chanting to her chakras. Caprice visualizes and sips on potent teas made of organic substances that cleanse her mind and body. Immune building and detoxifying pills are popped with abandon. She meditates deep into her soul on a molecular level. In between meditations and healthful study she smokes. That’s why I like her. And, she drinks wine and gets a tad loopy at parties.

We are on the deck outside her backdoor. It is a beautiful sunny summer day and the sky is the colour of her eyes. Pristine blue surrounded by brilliant while clouds. Her eyes always suck me into her intensity of living life leaving me feeling a little unbalanced when I am around her. Her home-made juice to my juicy steak.

“You must,” she says in her thick German accent filled with hard g’s as she exhales a plume of smoke and jabs her cigarette in the general direction of my heart, “You must see only healthful in your life. Leave no room for the negative. I have studied your problems in the universe and bought you these gifts, come,” she says and opens the sliding door to her home.

I follow her into her living room. Dust mites don’t live there. There’s no sustenance for them. I on the other hand, have a feet-in-the-air dead fly on the window sill of my office that I re-notice every few days and remind myself that I must remove it, and dust…..soon.

Caprice reaches for one of the gifts she has put together for my path to enlightenment and good health. (She has put much time and energy into my situation.) There is a small woven basket in her hand.

“In this box, Laura,” she says as she opens the lid and points inside with a perfectly mauve-painted fingernail, “You will put earth from the ground. This will remind you that you are firmly planted and the earth will help you grow.”

I nod dumbly. To me, being planted firmly in the ground means six-feet under. I take the woven box and stare at the highly woven material.

“This is good, ya?” Her smile is light from above. Her head nods aggressively at my apparent understanding and approval. “Then this,” she leans behind a couch and brings out an overly large, fake-yellow-rose flowered wreath. Joy radiates from her core. I want to be sick. Wreaths of that kind, to me, are akin to the ones my sister buys to put on our parents grave once a year. (That’s when, as I understand it, Cathy talks to the folks. I’m not a cemetery kind of gal myself. I don’t think my parent’s souls are still in their caskets, but that’s just me.)

Caprice goes on. “This, the yellow (fake-rose) is the sun, and the green is also the earth, so you must close your eyes and breathe in yellow and green.” She closes her eyes, takes a deep cleansing breath, holds it a moment, then exhales. “You must see yourself as full of sun and growth. You feet planted in the soil. Keep these where you can see them every day.”

I close my eyes and see me planted firmly in the earth with a big yellow-fake-rose wreath on my grave.

There is also a CD. It is my personal ‘Chanting the Chakras’ CD. I say thank you as graciously as I can. A small pile of photocopied articles and a couple of wellness magazines round out the ‘gifts’ she has amassed for me.

God love her. I know she loves me and if her single power of good will could cure me alone she would do it.

“Come”, she pats my hand and rises, “Let’s go smoke to your good health.”

On the way home Dave asks me what I think. I am holding a little woven empty box knowing full well I have no intentions of filling with earth and looking at it every day. I want to be tactful but the words escape me. “Sorry, but being firmly planted in the ground and having a yellow-fake-rose flower wreath just reminds me of a cemetery”.

“Me too”, he says and gives a sigh of relief.

At home I relent and put some stones, nice ones from the beach, into the box and put it on a window sill that I don’t look at often. I think maybe I should put the dead fly in there too but they are on different window sills in different parts of the house by now. I try to find a location for the wreath and finally decide to hang it outside be the front door. Soon I can replace it with my ‘Happy HO, HO, HO Christmas!’ guy I got at a yard sale. He always makes me smile. I think that was what the wreath was supposed to do as well.