Boise, You Betcha

 So, here's my link to Amanda Turner, interviewer extraordinaire!  It captures the joy. It is long, so I recommend multi-tasking if you want to hear it.  I wouldn't want to presume anybody would be interested in a near hour of me.
http://radiowritersblock.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/the-writers-block-for-april-28th-joan-logghe/.


   But I want to tell you a small moment of my trip, which falls into my Tales of the Synchronistic.
   My dear husband, Michael, wanted to reach a friend of his in Boise, an acupuncturist named Peachy. He called Luna and didn't hear back from her. He looked in the phone book, asked around, and even went to the chamber of commerce and made friends with the staff. We figure it is some sort of nickname,
as we know many folks with a nom de moment, or a Burning Man Name, or a spiritual name.
    Meanwhile, my friend Diane Ronayne was encouraging me to get a massage,
and though I sort of didn't need one, I figured a little self help in the middle of a busy week would  be nice. 
   The morning before my massage, around our semi-communal breakfast table, I was busy messing up a joke I have known for a dozen years.  I said it was the only joke I could tell, and I only remembered the punch line.  I told it like this, "When a guy from the Middle east marries someone from Minnesota, or the twin cities, what do you get?''  Pause.  Confusion.  "Yassir, You betcha."  Ha ha, I laughed at myself for flubbing a joke.  I went on to say my mother was a great joke teller, she called them stories, and her key to remembering them was the punch lines. She'd write them in a notebook, and after her death I found one little flock of lines.  And here I was with a punch line in hand, and I couldn't remember the set-up.  
   Then Diane drove me for the massage, carrying my dress-up clothes for the rest of the day, two readings, one workshop in poetry and one workshop for therapists.
We pull up at the lovely but unassuming massage site, and on a plaque, as there as anything it says "SEAN PEACHEY, ACCUPUNCTURE."  Diane and I are beside ourselves, whooping with delight, and Dominique Tarif, my gal for the hour, says there are two Peachey acupuncturists.  This one has dreads.  Must be the guy I think.  We send his card back to Mike.
  While I have no need to exclaim what a wonderful massage and cranial-sacral
treatment I receive, and I did, there was one detail I want to document.  Dominique was working on my sacrum, the far end from this cranium, and to something I said she answered, "Yassir, you betcha!"  I went nuts, told her I was just telling the joke this morning, an hour earlier.  She said, "A Palestinian man marries a woman from Minnesota.  What do they name their first child?"   We conferred that we had both heard the joke on Prairie Home Companion's joke night, I don't know what year she tuned in.  I can't recall if Dominique said she laughed her ass or her head off, but laugh she did.  The entire rest of the treatment I would burst into a smile.
   Now I am home, and as I type this I think maybe my mom is at it again.  Maybe this is her punch line, that it will be okay.  My youngest is in massage school and I tell her the story, and how it showed me that a massage therapist can be the psychics and healers of our time.  My daughter nods, she already knows this.
Diane says that others have had similar experiences with Dominique. I am listening to her music this week, and can she sing and play mandolin?  You probably know the answer is, Yassir, You betcha!"  And was Peachy the right Peachy? Ditto.