ODDBALLDOM

This edited post from a couple of years ago is up for re-airing now, during the Sun's current annual transit through Aquarius. It relates to one trait most Aquarius Sun people seem to have in common - and actually, they don't have that many in common! : A tendency to attract, or be attracted by, "oddball" characters or characteristics. In the "balls" hierarchy, oddballs fit a pocket that's slightly more sane than screwballs, and one on a level far above slimeballs.

A version of the post:

Astrologer Jonathan Cainer once wrote in an Aquarius daily forecast something along these lines: "You know some very strange people. It is almost as if you are a magnet for oddballs and eccentrics. Somehow they know that you will accept them as they are." At the time I chuckled to myself. Nowadays I don't mix and mingle much, I'm in a rather isolated 12th house situation here in deepest Oklahoma - happy enough with that. My Aquarius Sun does, appropriately enough, fall in 12th house when relocated to Oklahoma. Natives here would not be particularly friendly anyway, to this atheistic socialist. I have, myself, become the oddball, it seems. Sometimes we're windscreen, sometimes the bug.

Mr. Cainer's words were true enough though, during my younger years in what I've come to think of as "my hotel period", late 1950s early 1960s.

I left home and a steady job in a local government department, where oddballs didn't frequent its corridors, to work in the office of a small hotel in a picturesque part of North Yorkshire. This was, I'd worked out, a way to achieve independence and freedom, but still be provided with a room and food plus wages. What else could a gal wish for? This experience of a few short months left me with a yen to do more of the same. In those days, I found a kind of addiction in working in hotels. I can't adequately explain it now. I met quite a few others with the same affliction in my stints of seasonal interludes (coast in summer, city in winter) in various English hostelries.

Some fellow-hotel staff, and others "passing through" were unusual characters, not truly eccentric, but to my young, small-town sensibilities they fell into that category, and sparked my imagination. There were times when I'd say to myself, with satisfaction: "I don't ever meet anybody who's ordinary anymore."

Let's see....among my special friends there was E., a dark willowy beauty from Dominique who had left her island homeland because she'd fallen in love with her priest - and that's not A Good Thing in a Roman Catholic community. She must have been the lone person in the whole of the UK from far-off Dominique back then, in the late 1950s. There was K. an Irish waiter, charismatic guy who one night broke in to the place where the safe was kept, and managed to extract and abscond with a goodly chunk of the hotel's dosh. There was O., charming young man with whom I instantly fell in love but after a few months he disappeared. I later discovered he had been a fugitive, AWOL from the army, got caught, did his time. Many years later, alerted by his sister, I saw him again in a military hospital, being treated for TB.

Can't forget Mr S., not a colleague, but a hotel customer - a rather withdrawn and lonely, single peripatetic bank manager (very Woody Allen-ish) who took a shine to me, the hotel receptionist. He'd stop at the office window regularly and chat for ages. On the day he left I received a huge, tall bouquet of gorgeous bronze chrysanthemums, sent by him via the local flower store, just because I'd happened to say that I love the autumn. And there was H. the lion keeper from Longleat (a safari park). I kid you not - he wrote to me for some months after I'd moved on, always with a little lion in his signature.

There was the shoe salesman, a boyfriend I managed somehow to get involved with - perfectionist, prone to depression, who some years later committed suicide. A brighter spark was the young guy who became a good friend, who believed he was the illegitimate son of local aristocracy, drove around in a beat-up old Bentley limousine, swore he'd be a millionaire by the time he was 30.

There were more too! Eventually, though, the haphazard hotel lifestyle lost its charm. It was back to a staid government office, regular hours, regular people, cooking own meals, living in own space. I'd had an oddball learning curve, satisfied something of an itch, but it's a time I still remember with fondness.