Monday, June 08, 2015

My bottlecap magnet

I have a bottlecap on my fridge that means the world to me.

It is full of sparkles, wee sequins, and glossy resin. A tiny magnet is glued on the back. It had lived on my fridge since the moment I came home from a spoken word tour.

See, we were performing in Ashland, a lovely town between Portland and San Francisco. The restaurant / pub / coffeeshop was full of lovely people, and we later ended up sleeping on the floor in a punk pirate house around the corner. (Tours are weird.) We passed the hat for gas money, as we do, and a few of the scruffy hippie kids appologized for not having any cash. As always, I told them that the most important thing is that they came out to support performers, so thank you very much!

As we were about to leave, a young punk/hippie girl came up and said she was so very sorry that she didn't have any money for us, but she wanted us to each have a lucky magnet that she had made. She said maybe we could put them in the back of the car to bring us safe travels and good luck?

A gift of good wishes is always worth more than a few dollars of gas money. I thanked her profusely and assured her that they would be put directly into the back window of the car.

I wish I could tell her - I still have it. I still smile every time I see it. That little glittery bottlecap is a charm to me – happy thoughts from a stranger, and performance art bringing absolutely all sorts of people together