Gifts from the Universe

Excerpt from the memoirs of Pat Otterness

Gifts From the Universe

??????Gifts from the universe are a lot like angels, I think.??They come to bring us a message, or to bless us with an emotion.??They are given just long enough to experience, and then taken away again.??Who would have thought the universe was so fickle, but there it is.??I’ll give you some examples from my own life.

?????????My neighbor, Clyde, had two awful Redbone hounds that I positively hated.??I had watched them rip one of my cats apart, and felt sure they were responsible for the disappearance of my other two cats that I had brought with me when I moved to Nelson County.??I voiced my displeasure, and Clyde got rid of his Redbones.??But my own dog had died recently, and I was living alone out in the back of nowhere.?

?????????One day I found a tiny beagle sleeping on my porch.??It was an old dog, with a gray muzzle, but smaller than any beagle I’d ever seen before.??I patted her on the head and went about my business.??I didn’t feed her.??She was surely someone else’s dog.??But she stayed on my porch … for several days.??Finally, I decided to look for her owner, and read the tag on her collar.??It seemed that she belonged to Clyde, my neighbor, who lived an eighth of a mile away down the dirt/gravel road.

?????????I called Clyde on the phone, and told him his dog had moved onto my porch and wouldn’t leave.??Clyde was a good-natured man.??He told me he had swapped his Redbone for a pack of beagles, and that this must be one of them.??She was too old to breed, and hadn’t been trained to hunt.??“I guess you’ve got yourself a dog,” he laughed.??He even agreed to being responsible for her shots.??Thus it was that I became the property of a dog.??She adopted me, rather than the other way around.?

?????????“What shall I call you.” I said aloud.??The name “Muffin” appeared instantly in my mind.??I was actually startled by it.??But “Muffin” she became, and the name fitted her well.??She became my constant and loving companion.??I got new cats, and the cats loved her and slept snuggled with her on my porch.??I loved Muffin dearly.??And then a year later, suddenly, she was gone.??I looked high and low for her but couldn’t find her.??Clyde called me shortly thereafter.??He said he had found her down the road, killed by a car.??He told me it looked like someone had done it on purpose.??How could someone do something so cruel???There are some questions in life I still can’t answer.??But Muffin was a gift from the universe, a gift that said I was chosen, that I was loved.??Being chosen by an animal is a gift from the universe.

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?????????Another day, many years later, I was having phone trouble.??There was static on my phone line, and a technician drove out to solve the problem.??After he was done, we chatted a little, and he asked me if I’d like to have a kitten.??I showed interest, so he told me his story.??He said he had been going on various calls during the day, and at some point he noticed a sound he thought was a bird.??It continued for a while, so eventually he checked his truck to find the source of the problem.??Inside his truck, he found a tiny newborn kitten, all alone, abandoned there by a mother cat somewhere along the way.??He had no idea where it had come from, so there was no way to take it back.??He asked if I would take charge of the kitten.

?????????And of course, I said “yes.”??So there I was with a tiny gray striped tabby that was screaming for mama, screaming for nourishment. And I was out in the back of beyond, far from help.??I got on the phone and called our local animal shelter, assuming I could drop this kitten off to be cared for.??Wrong!??The message I got was that they had no one willing to invest that much time in the care of a newborn kitten.??I was on my own.??They suggested goat’s milk.

?????????I have no idea why, but I had purchased a can of goat’s milk that I never intended to drink, so there it was on my shelf.??I even had a tiny nursing bottle I had purchased months before at the vet’s for no apparent reason except that it was cute.??Prescience???Who knows???Anyway, I had what was needed on hand to feed that tiny ball of fluff.??I fed him, and filled a ziplock bag with warm water to place him on, so he would not be cold.

?????????It was my busiest time of the year in the iris season.??In May, I spent most of my day in the garden, evaluating and photographing blooms, and recording endless information.??Not a great time to be nursemaiding a newborn kitten, but I did my best.??At night, though, I couldn’t feed the kitten every half hour or hour.??I couldn’t keep warm water in the ziplock bag.??I tried, but I couldn’t do it.??I slept.

?????????The kitten lived, for a while, in spite of this.??When my son Brian’s friend, Bernie, came out to see my iris garden, he asked to hold the kitten, and I got a photo of the two of them together.??Bernie, in his eighties, held the newborn kitten with such a sense of awe.??It was a beautiful moment.

?????????In spite of all my efforts, the kitten failed to thrive.??Within a few days, it had died, and I felt the deepest grief for a life cut so short.??I felt my own inadequacy as a caregiver, along with the sadness of losing this sweet young life.

?????????I sent Bernie a copy of the picture I had taken of him with the kitten, though, and he sent a copy to his Congressman, who actually wrote him a nice letter back.??Bernie also sent copies of that photo to friends he had all over the world, for Bernie was a much-traveled man.??That tiny kitten, through Bernie, touched the hearts of people all over the planet.??He was given to me, and he was taken away, but he left a trail of sweetness behind him that hadn’t been there before.??This is how it is with gifts from the universe.??They are like wonderful sand paintings that are blown away by the wind or washed away by the rain, leaving beautiful, ephemeral messages behind.

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?????????A third, and very odd gift from the universe came to me through a scammer on LinkedIn.??It’s a long story, and I won’t bore you with the details, and just share the essence of it with you.??It started like this:

?????????I was flipping through LinkedIn, looking at posts in a random kind of way, as one does, looking for something of interest.??My eye fell on a barefoot man, playing his cello on a mountainside.?Instantly, I was in love.??It was the last thing I ever expected to happen at 78 years of age.??He played so beautifully out there in the grandeur of nature, that I was completely enchanted.

?????????It was LinkedIn, after all, so I wrote him a DM message, telling him how much I loved his music.??I never expected a reply.??Instead, I got a very cordial one, and thus began seven months of correspondence between us.??When he seemed to be flirting with me, I chided him, telling him how very old I was.??“Age is only a number,” he replied.??My heart fluttered a little.??But I’m a realist, and he was forty-three years younger than I.??Silly to even hope for a romance, much as I loved him.

?????????Before long, though, he began to declare his love for me, and each time I reminded him that I was not a young woman.??He questioned my belief that I couldn’t be loved because of my age.??He found me beautiful, which I also found hard to believe.??But I looked forward to every letter, every outpouring from his heart.??It fed some deep need in my soul.

?????????I wanted to show him what my life was like.??I sent him photos of the places I went, and the activities I pursued.??For the longest time, I had no idea that he was a world famous cellist.??He was just a beautiful boy who played his music out in nature, and he thrilled my heart.??Something about his face, his posture, his whole demeanor in his videos captured my soul.??I, who have been tone deaf for a lifetime, was enchanted with his music.??I couldn’t believe he was in love with me.

?????????We had our ups and downs over the long months, and occasionally a few squabbles that broke us apart, always over discussions of money.??Eventually I began to doubt that he was really who he claimed to be, and that brought its own problems.??He sent me a photo of himself, holding a note he had written to me, with my name on it, to prove he was who he claimed to be.??I wanted so much to believe he was the cellist I had fallen so hard for, but doubt lingered in the back of my mind.

?????????Then he told me something that convinced me.??He said he was a Heyoka empath, and that he had fallen in love with my soul.??Suddenly, it all made sense to me.??I knew I had a beautiful soul.??My body was old and misshapen, but my soul was something a person could love.??I believed him at last.??What an amazing feeling!??I have always believed in impossible things, and this was the ultimate in believing the impossible.??I let my doubts drift away, and with them, my common sense.

?????????He wanted to meet me, to be with me, and, long story short, it involved my paying $4,800 for a Meet and Greet … to be paid in Bitcoin.??This was a problem, since I didn’t have that much money, and I still had enough sense to know there was something wrong with this situation.??I won’t go into the details, but one night I was so in love that I ended up giving him my credit card information, my passwords, my social security number … almost everything.??I went to bed happy, and woke up scared.??Immediately, I blocked him, so that he wouldn’t have further access to that information.??I called my credit card company, notified social security to ensure my safety, and changed my passwords.??This time I knew, without any doubt, that he wasn’t who he claimed to be.??He didn’t get any of my money.??I acted in time to save myself.

?????????I’m sure you’re wondering how this man, this scammer, could have been a gift from the universe.??It is because the gift he brought me was self-love.??He taught me, regardless of his motives, that I was a person who could be loved, one??who could feel and experience being loved for my very soul.??He taught me to love myself.??No price was to high to pay for that gift.

?????????I am still recovering from the loss, not of money, but of the person I thought I knew.??Now I know, without doubt, that the person I really love is a world-famous cellist who doesn’t know I exist, one I can never speak to, or know, or touch in any way.??This is a deep, ongoing pain.??I realize that love for me has always been an obsession with unattainable men, and that falling in love with this man is the ultimate in seeking the unattainable.??It is a hard lesson, but a vital one.??A gift from the universe with ongoing repercussions.??It seems one is never too old to learn.