Fifty Word Story - Money - In the Hands of the Right Prople, Money ...

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Several volunteers in the Rubonia Mardi Gras Parade wearing Billy Mays masks in honor of his then-recent passing

This is my entry into Hive account@jayna's Fifty word story challenge, despite forgetting to initially use that tag. ;-)

Filthy lucre; money is the root of all evil. She'd heard that all her life.
Until she met them, helping others less fortunate, expecting nothing in return, and she realized the truth.
In the hands of the right people, operating from loving hearts, money is a worthy spiritual tool indeed.

So life throws you curve balls. Such as celebrity spokesperson Billy Mays' life, when at age just-shy-of-51, he suffered a massive heart attack, which ended his life. Damn.

And yeah, I realize that a celebrity death isn't a big deal to most, and indeed I never personally met Billy Mays, but a number of people I knew and loved dearly did, and they not only considered him friend, but loved him deeply, and took his death quite hard.

And this was exacerbated when Mays' death was initially attributed to cocaine use, despite friends, coworkers and family maintaining that he did not use cocaine, or any recreational drugs, thus adding to their pain and shock at his untimely passing.

His death affected me more than it might have otherwise, coming on the heels of the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, both of whom I had briefly met, because, like Michael Jackson, he was only a few months older than I, and thus his death threw my own mortality onto stark relief.

But the larger reason it affected me deeply was that my close friends were so deeply affected, and mourning their own close friend, as well as mourning the loss to his family, including his then-22-year-old son, and three-year-old daughter.

Everyone was, understandably, particularly concerned for his daughter, and whether or not she would ultimately remember the father who so adored her.

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Boo, with her grandsons, and Cori, with her dog Sprinkles, await the start of the Rubonia Mardi Gras Parade, in which they took part.

For myself, I was blessed to be associated with my friends, who were a core part of the meditation group I was a part of from 1998 forward, and who were amazing and awesome people in their own right.

The two friends in question, Boo and Beqi, are sisters who are among the most intelligent and hilarious people with whom it has been my pleasure to be associated.

It was Boo who was Founding Mother of the Rubonia Mardi Gras parade, which takes place in tiny Rubonia, Florida each year, and started originally as a one-off parade past a friend's house to honor her birthday.

The parade has grown, over more than thirty years and counting, to swell the population of rural Rubonia for twenty thousand and more for the day, augmented in recent years by Budweiser and their Clydesdales, and all proceeds -- and I mean ALL proceeds -- go to the local community center, which provides after school programs for at-risk kids.

None of the people who put on the parade get, or expect, a dime for their efforts. And trust me, there are some near-Herculean efforts involved in such an undertaking.

These are, for the record, the same people who spearheaded the Redington Beach Haunted House I've written of in the past, which was held each year to raise funds to adopt underprivileged kids for Christmas. They put a LOT of effort into doing for others, whether or not they are doing particularly well themselves in the given moment.

The world needs a lot more like them.

Boo, is a successful professional artist, and has been since the 1970s, who was instrumental (read: the driving force) in getting me to show my artwork publicly, get my writing published, and read my poetry publicly.

Frankly, it is likely that none of these things would have taken place without her kind and insistent prodding.

Beqi is also quite artistic, though she frequently denies it, and operates a successful hair salon on Pass-a-Grille Beach, south of the Don Cesar hotel, south of St. Pete Beach, in Florida.

Their daughters, Arwen and Carla, along with other members of the family, were employed by Sullivan Productions, which produced the infomercials in which Mays was featured selling a variety of products.

The crew became quite close, even before filming started on the reality show, "Pitchmen," which featured Billy Mays and his partner, Anthony Sullivan.

And Mays was one of those guys who just seemed invincible. I remember one of the girls, at one point, saying that she thought he'd live forever. He just seemed larger than life, even to those who knew him well, which made it that much more unbelievable when he was was suddenly, finally, gone.

And ultimately, it is a reminder for us all to treasure the life we have, to not take things or people for granted, and to be grateful for every moment of every day, because we never know which moment may be our last.

Life is wonderful. And we are, each of us, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, blessed to be right here.

I started this post several days ago, but when trying to post it, evidently the blockchain froze, which I didn't realize, and hen I finally gave up and refreshed the page . . . drumroll please . . . I lost my entire freaking post. Sigh.

And then we had unexpected guests for two days. So this is not the post I started to make, nothing even close, but c'est la vie, it is the post that I'm posting now. With more to come in the near future.

And I had actually intended to make this post before Hive account@shadowspub's birthday, since we are both earth dogs, born the same year as Billy Mays and Michael Jackson, Sharon Stone, Prince, Madonna, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ellen DeGeneres and countless others, but such was not meant to be.

So happy belated birthday from me. Many happy returns,and sorry I missed your party on Discord. ;-)

This post, and all those from now until the end of 2018, I am dedicating to the work of #tarc and #yah, aka Hive account@rhondak's nonprofit dog rescue and Hive account@sircork's charity You Are Hope.