Welcome to Heidi!

If books were attractions at DisneyLand, Heidi Clement’s book, Welcome to Heidi” would be Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Her experiences are hand-picked from the kind of blog posts that make us realize how exciting, exuberant, and downright entertaining life can be – if you gaze at it through kaleidoscope-colored glasses.  Let’s focus today on Chapter Three, the one I like to call the “Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puffs” Chapter.

 

There are times in everyone’s life when they need a psychic. 

Okay, maybe it’s just me and it’s not need in the same way that you need to have a drippy chocolate doughnut or someone’s going to lose an arm, but you’d really like to know how events around the corner are going to play out, and could sure use the wisdom of someone who can peek into the future and tell you if leggings will go out of style before you lose 50 pounds.

Or if the shoes that are the perfect match for that “I Got a Promotion and You Didn’t” day are going to go on sale before platform pumps become passé.

Life challenges are just part of the fun with Heidi Clements in her hilarious book, Welcome to Heidi, when she takes us along on her long-term relationship with Letty, the psychic.  At thirty-seven bucks a pop, that’s a relationship even I could afford.  

Heidi also checks out her life prospects with Tomo, a Trance Channeler. With all the indecisiveness spread around these days, it’s helpful to know someone who can tell when me when the control-bot I’m dating will try to accessorize my outfit with a gun to my head or that my dream date was once my brother. 

At times like that, hitting the yellow pages for someone like Tomo makes perfect sense. That’s better than confiding in my Aunt Edna who tells me, “Marry a picky eater. You’ll never have to cook.”

Turns out Letty the Psychic hits the bullseye on all the major topics:  Happiness, Money, and Mean People. 

Want to put that old flame who broke your heart in his place? Bam! Need to press the mute button on your neighbor who put the the “psych” in “psycho” and who takes out her hostilities on your  dog who’s a buddy, not a biter? Heel, please. Or else!

 

Need Letty’s help with a career change?  Heidi’s got the right idea.  “If a chicken has to die in order for me to get the job of a lifetime or the man of my future, then so be it.” 

A breast and a thigh is a small price to pay for peace of mind.

I once had a drunken neighbor who used to sleep in the driveway and kept a goat chained to his heat pump so he wouldn’t have to mow the lawn.

Wonder if I can get Letty’s number.

Is The Shoe on The Other Foot?

Our postal workers are off the hook. Apparently the going occupation for the overstressed and ethically challenged loner career person in the South these days is mortician. I’m not talking about the solemn, well-dressed individual always ready to pull out one of the appropriate condolences he keeps handy in the breast pocket of his morning coat, and who is associated with a fine institution that has served us faithfully since the days when our granddaddies perished from reckless driving in the family wagon.

No, I’m referring to the type of guy whose day is so full of drinking clear liquid out of a mason jar and cleaning his ear with his pocket knife that he just doesn’t get around to cremating that day, so, as we all do, shoves his work aside says “to heck with it” and goes out to play in the sunshine. Unfortunately his work, having been dead for an uncomfortable length of time already, gets pushed to the corner of his desk and forgotten.

What’s a poor mortician to do? Why he simply pops the customer in a convenient hole out back until he gets a chance to do the proper thing. Sort of like filing, funeral director style. That’s what a mortuary in Georgia did a while back, and although it made the news when it got around, it sure saved a ton of money on matches.

The newest headliner is a thrifty South Carolina mortician who was faced with an untidy problem of a too-tall customer. Or a too-short place of eternal rest, it’s hard to say. Anyway, our handy free-thinking guy took matters into his own hands. He sliced the final resting feet off just above the ankles, tucked the whole package neatly inside the casket. Sort of an assembly-required overnight express delivery for the Pearly Gates.

The whole thing would probably have disappeared over the horizon like flexible bangle bracelets, Earth shoes, and any television program I vow to watch regularly, but in a small town a tale of removable tootsies is going to travel like it has winged feet, which is probably what this guy had once he got to heaven.

The rumors flew, authorities got involved, and the body was exhumed. There inside the casket, like a Mr. Potato Body with interchangeable parts was the customer. And available separately, were his feet.

Now that’s what I call thinking outside the box. From the inside.