Foxy Lady

A red-blond fox just walked across the street in front of my home.  He walked onto my neighbor's driveway and stopped to look back for a moment, then went on to places only he knows.  It was 12:30 in the afternoon, broad daylight.  We don't normally see foxes in the middle of the day - they seem to like dawn, dusk, and the night better.


Tonight is a Rusty Z kind of night.


I have known my friend, Jim, since I was in 9th grade.

He was the guy that walked the halls of our high school while playing a finger piano, long before I knew what a finger piano was.

He was the friend who wrote a song about me when my knees were a source of constant pain:  "Louise has a disease in her knees".  Don't ask...

He and another friend came to my house one day when we were probably 16 years old.  They asked me to come out and walk to the park with them.  As we were walking, they pulled out a bag of green stuff and said that we were going to smoke it.  I was the unblemished, naive girl who had only moved here from small town Kansas a few years before.  Still, I have to say that my friends' over-acting was enough to cause suspicion in anyone, and I finally got the truth out of the young men:  they were testing my reaction by tempting me with a bag of thyme or basil or some other herb of the non-getting-high-type.

Anyway, after that long introduction, I want to say that Jim now goes by the name of Rusty Z., and Rusty Z has a really funny hypno comedy act (much funnier than a bag of herbs) that I bet he can bring to your local comedy club or office party, if you ask nicely.   (Okay, it might take a lot of moolah in order to get him to the U.K., but ya never know!)

Rusty Z will be doing his thing at a local comedy club tonight and Mr. CfP and I will be in the audience.  I could use a good laugh about now...


I'll call him Tom.

We barely knew each other while still in school, but we "re-met" at our tenth high school reunion and became friends.  After both of our marriages ended, we dated for a year or so.  There was a lot of messiness in our relationship - I won't bore you with the details.  Our friendship didn't survive our break-up and I have held some not-so-comfortable feelings around our relationship for over 16 years.

A few people from high school days will be in the audience at Rusty Z's act tonight - Tom will be one of those people.  My first reaction when I saw his confirmation on my Facebook page was: I can always cancel our reservations.  But some wiser part of me recognized this as an opportunity for healing (plus, if I canceled, I'd be embarrassed to tell Rusty and others the real reason why I canceled).

So I asked myself some good questions and I waited to find out what the answers might be.  The worst part of the process was when I realized that the real reason I had icky feelings was because of my judgments about myself and how I handled the relationship.  OUCH!  Did NOT want to go there!

But I did it anyway.

And now I realize that all that happened ended up leading us to where we are today and today is GREAT!  So, I look forward to seeing Tom.  I feel a lot of warmth for all that he contributed to my life and who I am now.


Back to the fox.

We have a pile of "Medicine Cards", cards with different animals on them, and a book that describes the "medicine" that each animal can bring to us.  I don't remember exactly how it works - maybe you're supposed to pull out a card and then read the "animal medicine" for that card.

Anyway, I like to look up the "medicine" for any animal that I happen upon in my day-to-day life.

According to this book, the fox has to do with being invisible, needing to step back and be the observer.  And if you find that the card is upside down when you pull it out, that could be about the possibility that you have been too invisible. 


I tend to be the invisible type and it would be easy to want to be an invisible observer tonight when Tom walks into the room.  But instead, I am going pretend that the message that the sweet-looking, beautiful-coated fox intended me to have was:  "It's safe to be seen.  And forgiving.  And grateful."

Just call me "Foxy Lady"!    :-)