Day 1 - As she was taking
her luggage to the trunk of her car, she happened to glance at a magazine on
her coffee table. What she saw stopped dead in her tracks! The magazine had a
picture of a celebrity on the cover of it. What grabbed her attention was the
lack of bags that had always been so prevalent under the celebrity’s eyes. She got
the chance to notice a light teal blue background and a word that started with
the letter, “N.” Then her husband shouted for her to come on because they were going to be late picking up a couple who
lived 2 hours away, but were going to make the trip with them back to her
husband’s hometown for the yearly class reunion. She thought nothing else about
the magazine…
Day 2 – When she walked
into her husband’s old school place, she immediately started looking for
changes in the way that things were set up this year. She noticed that there
were not as many vendors selling their wares as last year. She also noticed
that someone had taken old photographs and had blown them up and pasted them on
the walls on stars. She watched people laugh as the reunited with their former
classmates and tried to figure out whose picture was who. She did notice a lone
vendor set up in the lobby with books on the table. While her husband was
talking to some of his classmates and guffawing over some of the clothing
styles from back then, she walked over to the table where the lone vendor was
selling her wares. When she got to the table, she exclaimed to the vendor, “Here
this is again! What is it? You know this is the last thing that I saw yesterday
when we were leaving home. What made me notice was this celebrity on the front
of the magazine…” She went on to recount to the vendor about noticing the lack
of bags under the celebrity’s eyes. The vendor, subsequently, explained what
the company was and a little bit about it. The vendor then mentioned that she
was having a get-together at her house the following day. She promised to be
there, etc.
Then
she absentmindedly picked up one of the books that was lying on the table. She was
talking to the vendor and abstractly thumbing through the book. Then she
exclaimed 9-1-1! What is this about? She told the story of her husband a year
earlier, falling out in the kitchen and having to have mouth to mouth resuscitation
done on him to save his life. She recounted how, though she had taken the
course years ago, she could not remember what to do and how she remembered that
her neighbor had recently taken the course and had done quite well in it. Since
she was a big talker who never met a stranger, she told the story about how she
called 9ll and all of the drama that came with the emergency call. She ended by
saying that every time she heard or saw something that said 911, it reminded
her briefly about her husband’s incident.
Well,
the vendor a mite loquacious herself, told the story of the poem, Momma (from AVIA (poetry book) by
Alma L. Jones) Then the vendor read the poem, with all of the embellishment
that poets put into their poems, when they do get a chance to read them aloud. When
the vendor finished reading the poem, the lady had gone strangely silent. When the
vendor looked up, she saw tears swimming in the lady’s eyes. The lady said, “This
book got my attention by having me open to 911 and that poem happens to be what
happened to my step-sister and she has yet to get over her mother’s death and its been over 8 years.” The
lady said, I am going to buy this book from you because you have a poem in here
that is written under identical conditions that my step-sister found her mother
in. She then looked at the vendor and said, “I don’t believe in coincidences;
do you?” To which the vendor replied, “No ma’am, I do not! Then she looked at
the vendor and said, “What time did you say that you were going to be having
this get-together at your house tomorrow evening” The vendor told her and she
promised to be there…
Day 3 – She, her husband,
her sister-in-law and her husband’s brother had been out of town shopping and
finished the day off with catfish with the trimmings, chocolate cake and tea at
one of the well-known catfish eateries. When they got back to her sister-in-law
and her brother-in-law's home and had just sat down to an expected evening of
board gaming, when her sister-in-law exclaimed, “Look there is this certain
celebrity and where are the bags under her eyes?! Where did they go?! I need
her secret!” Then the lady sat up and screeched, “What time is it?!” Her
sister-in-law told her and she said, "We have got to go!”
Her
sister-in-law said, “Go where?!” She told the unusual series of events to her
sister-in-law and to their husbands, who were thoroughly interested by then. Then
both men chorused, “Go!”
Well, they called the vendor and asked if they
would be too late if they came on. They explained that they were only about 20
miles away. The vendor said that she would wait and she did. The evening turned
out to be pretty successful. The ladies got some product that they were
thrilled about, the vendor sold another book besides the orders that were
placed with Nerium, had her intrinsic questions about the quality of her poetry
answered and had her question about her 7 up cake answered all in the
affirmative as to how good it all was!
All
of this came about because a lady noticed a celebrity’s picture on a magazine
cover. That says to me, “If Jesus is for you, it doesn’t matter what anybody
else says.
Woo!
You know me! I feel a song coming on!
Be
blessed!
Doing
What I Can, While I Can
Alma Jones 
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