POTPOURRI
A COLLECTION OF POEMS, ESSAYS, SHORT STORIES AND VIGNETTES
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From Doughnuts to Dollars
(Agnes M. Cowan)
Churches are prone to split, especially, I find, Baptist churches. I suppose that accounts for their standing, percentage -wise, among other denominations in their numbers. I think they may have misconstrued God's instructions to "go ye forth and multiply".
Our little neighborhood church, following such a split, was lacking a building except for the loan on Sundays of our local civic club building. Funds were desperately needed to go forward to a home of our own.
Always anxious to do my part in a needy situation, I suggested the sale, on a certain Saturday morning, of the now-famous Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, whose fame took rise from one bakery in midtown Atlanta. The tantalizing yeasty aroma, firing up in the wee hours each morning, produced a commodity to kill for among savvy local residents. We envisioned many dollars for doughnuts, as we loaded up our family station wagon with the five of us and close to a zillion, it seemed, fresh-baked doughnuts.
Our plan was to hit the neighborhood shopping mall as stores were opening and customers surfacing, hungry, we hoped.
Somehow in our perhaps overly zealous ambitions, we failed to "notice" the NO CANVASSING sign, blatantly displayed at the main entrance to the mall.
The aroma of the doughnuts preceded us and very nearly proved the demise of our efforts.
The young policeman assigned to the mall area approached us very swiftly to point out the no canvassing sign. Always a friendly face, he showed signs of great concern at having to greet us with the sad warning. He simply could not permit us to continue in our selling because of the very stringent ordinance prohibiting "peddlers", especially since its enforcement was one of his specific duties.
I have never succumbed very willingly in the face of defeat.
I got right in his face, eye-to-eye, and proceeded to more or less "scold" him. "Now look, you good looking sweet man," I said, "would you rather spend the rest of your day feeling smug over a job well done in your law-enforcing, or spend the rest of your life trying to explain to God why so many of His much-needed dollars are thrown away, molding, in some garbage can while He still has no house to call His own?"
He got the drift pretty quickly.
He sweated it a little, but he was not too hesitant in waving us on.
"Oh, go on, little lady, and sell the h--- out of those doughnuts. I'll just say I never saw you before in my life." And he walked away, whistling nonchalantly, as if the encounter had never happened.
And we went about selling our doughnuts. All of them.
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About the Book
Potpourri is a collection of literary compositions by the same author of The Poet's Eye, First Collection, which was published in 2002.
Sporadic inspirations recorded on anything at hand constitute the substance of this collection of poems, and with the inclusion of essays, short stories, and vignettes, has earned for this second book the name Potpourri, a bouquet of diverse offerings by the impassioned seventy-five year- old writer. Remnants and reflections of her own life, obviously lived to the fullest, are manifest in the compositions, with sensitivity and empathy for other lives and situations observed and recorded.
Beauty, pathos, love, frustration, humor, and nature's majesty pervade the pages of this collection, and the depth of the poet's pocket, the original source of the majority of the items selected for both of the author's books, may determine how many other collections could possibly follow through to future publication.
The author has many earlier and recent individual compositions published in anthologies and literary journals.
About the Author
The author of Potpourri, and The Poet's Eye, published in 2002, earned the name Pocket Poet due to the history of her compositions.
While responding to life's everyday demands as mother, housewife, and entrepreneur, sporadic inspirations were recorded on anything from her pocket, thrown into a big box, the author's writing career put on hold.
The author, now seventy-five years of age, re-discovered the box and a new career was launched with two book-publications within six months.
Many individual items by the author have been published in various anthologies and literary journals in recent years
The depth of the pocket and the content of the box, still replenishing itself, may render other collections for future publication.