'Pray without scissors'

When you are attending a party, wedding or funeral, please make sure you eat heavily. This is according to my octogenarian mother. the idea is that when you go there and the food is delaying in being brought to you, you don’t start displaying your ancestral poverty there. You know when people are hungry, they behave differently.

Ever been to a wedding reception where the chunk of invited guests are moody with an unexplained anger in their faces, especially after 3pm? Don’t worry; you can be sure it is because the food is delaying in coming to them. That is all. The smart ones gaze their eyes on their smart phones pretending to be okay. It is a cover up. Thank God for smart phones.

When you see a few of them still smiling, you can be sure they heeded to my mum’s advice – ‘eat before going for a party’. Don’t come here and display o, yooo.

Around 1999 when I attended uncle Ganyaglo’s Auntie’s funeral. The food was good and uncle Ganyaglo and his wife were to serve themselves. He started whispering to his wife: “please scoop as much food as you can; you yourself you know the house inside no good”. Uncle Ganyaglo using someone’s funeral as buffer to stock food in his wife stomach.

Why is it that many of us say we are religious people and yet when we attend programmes and we are called upon to give the opening prayer, we struggle to get anybody who is readily available to pray? Some will tell you they that are not in the mood to pray so look for someone else.

Sometimes they even direct you to someone in the audience who is very pious and should be the one to pray. Hmmm! Those who attack the devil with all kinds of sharp edges, scissors and machetes in their hands are simply very good actors.

You don’t need any sharp edges; Jesus did not do that. Pray but without scissors. ‘Holy Ghost fire…consume them’. It won’t work. Rather pray for your enemies and their families to be fine. This may not be a prayer to finish your enemies but a prayer you are praying for yourself.

Whatever you wish for people in your prayers, are the same things you are wishing yourself – let it be good, not harmful to otherwise… Beware of what you pray for or wish for others; they may just be for yourself.

It was during one such prayers that I started business transactions with this company in Accra. There is this lady at the company. Anytime I go there, she does not look me in the face when serving me.

She is a very beautiful lady too and what kills me is that her hair is always ponytail. Ponytail hairdo weakens my immune system. Apart from the things in the middle back seat good for comfort when a lady sits on me, my real Achilles heels is seeing a lady wearing ponytail. I just love ponytail hairdo!

This lady is pretty but I had never seen her teeth because she won’t even smile to me. Ironically there have been occasions when she realizes that no one is attending to me, she would beckon me or tell the next person to tell me to come to her to be served. I felt relieved anytime she did this.

She would not even respond to my ‘thank you’ after I have been served by her. I was mostly uncomfortable because of this her behavior. It continued for almost a year and I thought maybe my ugly face was the driving force. Occasionally when our eyes met, she would quickly take her eyes off.

I wish I could just say ‘Hello, how are you?’ k3k3 to her but she would not give me the opportunity.

After a while, I was not seeing her again but could not ask of her from anyone though her absence gave me some relief; the fact that I would be talking to someone who would not talk some. We never met again until after two years later, when I bumped into her in their Tema branch. ‘Lord God have mercy’ or ‘Thank you Jesus’. I didn’t know which one to apply; I applied both! Apparently she is now with the Tema branch of the company.

With some vim, I approached her, greeted and added: ‘long time’. She smiled this time round without saying anything…really. But I didn’t see her teeth. I smiled back with a lot of joy inside me. There were other customers around and I was feeling shy to ask for her contact phone number.

Those days, there was nothing like smart phone so we were limited to only sms and normal phone calls. I didn’t even know her name. Now that I know where to find her, I ‘travelled’ all the way to Tema just to go there for transaction; a transaction that I could simply have done here in their Accra branch office. As for us men di333, oohhhh debidada! Up till now, as to what was the motivation to ‘travel’ all the way to Tema, I don’t know oo though I know.

In my head, ‘as for today, I would ask her for her mobile number whether people were around or not’. I was that courageous because I recall what my late father once told me. He said when you enter a room where there are a lot of beautiful ladies and all of them are giving you attention and there is a particular one who is not looking your direction and wears a straight face, that lady is in love with you. Ladies like that do so to create an aura around themselves for you to strive to uncover.

God is good. On this other visit to their Tema branch, when I got there, she was the only one in the open hall. No customer, no colleague. Halleluya! The sweetest part of it was that as soon as I entered, she smiled and I saw her teeth for the first time. She immediately added in low tone with some difficulty: ‘Mr Zogbenu, the last time, I wanted to take your number but….’ I said myself ‘ern? So quickly wrote her number on it before anybody comes around. ‘Great things…He has done, greater things He will do…..’ Hahahaha! You remember this song? That was one of the happiest days in my life.

I got home and called the number. They said ‘the number you are calling does not exist’. Jesus is Lord! I screamed hoping that it was a network problem. I called severally.

Same feedback. Thoughts of going back to Tema the following day was not a pleasant one. What if I go and this time round there are people there? But let me take the risk. I went the following day, with the same piece of paper on which she wrote her number and gave it me.

I wrote beneath it ‘please you gave me a wrong number’. In addition, I wrote my own number. She corrected her number and apologized. I saw her immediately saving mine. All this while, I was finding it difficult to ask of her name o. hmmm!

In the evening I tried calling again. The phone rang like 100 times, ringing no reply. I called called called…still. I sent an sms introducing myself. No response. For over a month I couldn’t sleep well. Then one Saturday morning, I saw the same number calling. I quickly picked the call. ‘Is that Mr Zogbenu? I responded YES with speed. ‘My name is Flo, the lady at Tema. Sorry I missed your call the last time’.

This is over a month o and the ‘last time’ makes me feel it was only a couple of days ago. The joy in my heart er. As fate would have it, my phone went off suddenly – low battery. I could not find a charger that matched and I didn’t know where I left my 3310 charger. I couldn’t find it. I prayed for a miracle to charge my phone but…I didn’t know what to do to myself.

Many years later, I got married and forgot about her. The long and short of this unnecessary story is that as we speak while in bed, Flo is lying next to me – I married her!