Dora

I met Dora at least 20 years ago. She attended meetings of Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship that were held usually on Friday evenings for a lecture and Saturday for a workshop. I met most of my group of friends that way The whole group would go out to lunch together on Saturdays and the members who helped put on the program would take the speaker out to dinner. As time went on, the friends group began to form and I was invited to help with the programs and then to attend the full moon meditations at Dora's. She was old enough to be my mother, and, in a way , she was the mother of the full moon group. In other ways we are all llike sisters. If you believe in reincarnation, we must have been. We were in a restaurant once for someone's birthday and a fellow diner asked if we were sisters and Pat told him yes and gave him some sort of outrageous story.Dora was the astrologer of the group. Our meditation sessions were led by her and consisted of reading from a book by Saradarjian (spelling?) that was very interesting, prayers for people who needed them, prayers for America and its leaders and then a silent meditation with music in the background including a solo from the piano playing cat.
I adored Dora. She was knowledgeable, kind, witty, sarcastic, sure of her truth and when she dressed up in her red dress with rouge on her cheeks in the manner of ladies of her time, she was positively regal.
I'm sure she loved her memorial service. It was a group classic. Emily, who is a little foggy sometimes, got the call about Dora from Dora's grandson and called us each. We were so proud of her and made arrangements to go to her house with a pot luck light lunch for the memorial. Then Dorothy in Birmingham (who is never foggy; a little far out sometimes but never foggy), called Maryann to say Dora wasn't actually gone yet but the three of us decided to protect Emily's new found status as capable and not mention that. The meditation was a little distracting because Emily's husband and son and Pat's protege were talking in the next room. Not one of my friends noticed the music in the background (what is it with me and music?) and they all fussed afterwards because of the talking. As we started meditating, the music was that lovely song from Superman, "Can You Read My Mind?..." I pictured Dora larger than life in her red dress and as she came swirling thnrough the stars, the music changed to "Dancing in the Dark". Emily has a 22-year-old longhair calico cat who usually hides from company. Her hair is so long it sticks out in bunches, not matted, oddly, giving the impression of a creature from outerspace who stuck its paw in an electrical outlet. She meditated with us staying about 3 to 4 feet away until it ended, when she approached to within a foot and meowed constantly for a full minute. A fitting eulogy.