Everybody wants to be a crone. There is the blue hair (possibly purple in this day and age), the Bridge club prizes, the jigsaw puzzles with missing places, the daily trips to the library, and the long chats on the phone with the psychic who won’t tell your fortune because she can’t bullshit an old friend.

All right, the entrance into cronedom isn’t easy.  Remember the scene in The Odyssey (movie or poem) in which Odysseus visits the land of the dead to chat with dead friends and get travel tips.  Cronedom initiation is a bit like that.

“Lo and behold!” you say to a crone-ish nymph with medals all over her dashing Hades-black military cloak. She is guarding the River Styx from intruders, and she confides,”Hades is in a bit of a fascist phase since Hercules stole Cerberus, the dogeth with three headeths.”

You curtsey and ask,  “Nymph with the lovely braids, what doth one do to become a crone around here?”

She says, “I am the nymph with the Hades-black cloak, not the golden braids one.”

 And then the nymph with the military cloak directs you to the ferry to cross the Styx, and dives into the Lethe to forget  the conversation.

You make it to the other side of the river – no thanks to the drunken ferryman  = and a ghost named Perpetua walks out of the mist. She is a Chistian martyr who ended up here by mistake.

 “Right now I am l a ghost, in the John Le Carre sense of the word.  If you want to get to Cronedom, tell me a couple of state secrets, or my cover will be blown.”

You huff and puff as you follow Perpetua uphill and downhill, and then you share a few rumors about Aeneas and Dido in Carthage, because Rumor volat (Rumor flies).

And then you hear it.  “is that a Billie Holiday song?”

“It is,” says Persephone, Hades’ queen.  “Billie’s drinking over in the corner there.”

Billie waves, looking a bit stoned.  .

And then you recognize the queen. “Persephone, is that you?”

She sayeth, “Kat, is that you?”

Simultaneously: “What are you doing here?”

The whole crone thing is a scam, Persephone says.. Somebody made it up = probably that joker Dionysus – and now Persephone is in charge of the department of information.  Then you and Persephone and Billie decide to sneak out of the underworld and go to a club Billie knows in Athens.   

You have so much fun that you’re NEVER going back. And you forget all about becoming a crone.

It will come in good time, but not today.