Home Is Where

The 4 of Wands says the party is at your house. The event is in your yard. You are the hostess. You welcome someone. The number 4 signifies stability; wands are associated with the alchemical element of fire. The stability of fire is the hearth, perhaps the perfect blend of things that seem opposite. When fire is allowed to burn within its useful boundaries, like a fireplace, furnace or oven, it warms and welcomes. The key is managing all of the circumstances to keep the fire stable but still burning.

That applies to a lot of things for me lately.

Just in case you aren’t in touch with the baseball world, there’s been this little annual event called the World Series going on. Now, as an aside, our World Series is just barely international. I’ve always felt just a teensy bit embarrassed at the American tendency to think that we’re the whole world. However, when my team, my San Francisco Giants win the whole thing, including a sweep of four consecutive games once they actually got to the World Series, I overcome my embarrassment quickly.

My guys are funny. They are amazing athletes. They are an ensemble, a constellation. Not to diminish MVP awards, but the thing that characterizes my team is that they worked with each other for a collective stellar performance. It’s a team sport, after all. It’s hard for me to choose a favorite. Posey has Galahad looks. Pence pumps them up with inspirational speeches. Pagan kept catching and hitting and stole a base that granted a lot of people a free taco between 4 and 6 pm last Tuesday. “Panda” Sandoval hit three home runs in one World Series Game. And there was pitching. And catching. And throwing. And hitting. It’s not like the teams they played were pushovers. My guys worked hard. I delighted in Sergio Romo’s jumping-jack happiness and enthusiasm. Did I leave anyone out? I didn’t mean to. They were all terrific.

My only disappointment is that I never saw the monogrammed handkerchief I mailed to “Mad Bum” Madison Bumgarner. May he use it in good health! GO GIANTS!!

We have been glued to Giants baseball television for some time but I did drag myself away last weekend to gather with my friends for our 20^th fall gathering. Our first night all those years ago was spent on our hostess’ living room floor the night Polly Klaas was taken from her bedroom. She is always on our minds when we gather, symbolizing the fragility of life.

This time we went back to the fantastic house in Ft. Bragg, California where we stayed last year. We’ve all had a lot going on, so instead of staying up talking all night, we gave it up around 10:30 pm Friday. I left my door open so I could hear the ocean waves. We went to our own little almost-Night Circus, Zoppe Circus, an old-fashioned Italian family circus. The acrobats! The trick ponies! The clowns. Well at least, they were not scary clowns. The trick chickens! It was magic or just close enough.

We laughed because there was a tsunami warning from earthquakes off British Columbia, trying to figure out if the seaweed line was a foot or so higher than the day before. We heard there was a big storm, Hurricane Sandy, about to make landfall. We checked the latest path. It didn’t look good.

I had talked to one of my co-workers the Friday before. He was concerned about his house in New Jersey near the beach. He had lost his house, his whole town he said, with the previous big hurricane.

Monday was eerily quiet at work. Half the people I needed to talk to were hunkered down, bracing against the storm. I reached out to a few of them. A house was creaking. Trees had fallen. People were told to work from home. Then silence.

The next day it was still quiet, but those of us who could work kept things going as well as we could. We stole glimpses of the photo evidence of damage coming in. Atlantic City’s boardwalk. The fire in Queens. The sand, the boats and cars in all the wrong places, houses gone. The Bounty sank. Water poured into the deep hole that is still part of the construction site at the Twin Towers site. Dogs and cats and people scooped out of danger. Manhattan was dark.

Halloween came and I bought my candy to give away. We had executed the perfect pumpkin on the garage door, my husband’s idea. One black plastic garbage bag, a pair of scissors and some blue painter’s tape, and our house had a jack-o’-lantern. We set up the tent, the chairs, the table and the lights. We handed out handfuls of candy and I read cards for the moms and big sisters. We cooed over the ladybugs and shivered at the zombies. The sprinkles became a downpour and suddenly the four posts of our tent became shelter from our little storm, all that and candy too.

Somewhere in the night, the neighborhood stray cat slipped into the garage. We call her “Walternette”, the feminine feline form of TV’s Fringe’s main character’s doppelganger in an alternate universe, “Walternate.” Our furry doppelganger looks a lot my Tony at first glance, a big brown tabby with a pleasant disposition. She stayed there all night, then called up the stairs to us. I padded downstairs to greet her.

“Yeow,” Walternette said with a swish and a purr.

“You’re welcome,” I answered as I let her out, my temporary hospitality having sheltered one more soul from the damp.

More east coast people checked in today. Some had been without power for as little as 36 hours. They think New Jersey will run out of gasoline next week between people needing their cars and running generators. I still haven’t heard from my co-worker. His part of New Jersey looks like some of the hardest hit.

I hope somewhere out there, those whose homes are washed away or burned or buried in sand or out of power or just out of reach can find a welcoming hearth to rest their unsettled lives for a moment.

Our homes seem like the most secure of places and we laugh about what could go wrong when trouble seems so far away. It only takes a wave, a wind, a melting hunk of ice to snatch away that fragile stability of fire. Cherish the hearth as it is too soon gone.

Best wishes.

Strangely Quiet

“Are you sick?”

One of the attorneys at the law office where I worked when I had just graduated from college looked at me with concern and curiosity. I knew his concern was whether I would get his contracts done for a real estate deal he had going.

“No.”

“But…,” he searched the ceiling tiles in our small, unattractive offices for the root of his question, “But, you, you, you aren’t TALKING.”

Clearly, this upset him. Some people have trouble accepting changes, even if they are temporary.

I smiled.

“No,” I said, and resumed my work.

“OK. You’re mad at me.” He leaned against the door frame and frowned. “Right?”

“Nope, I’m fine.”

Now he would not let go. “Something is wrong. You aren’t talking.”

“Jimmy, I know this is going to surprise you, but sometimes I go for minutes, even hours at a stretch without saying a word.”

Jimmy shook his head in disbelief. He was still pretty sure I had to be getting a cold or something.

That’s the trouble with stereotyping, of course. You think you’ve got someone pegged, classified as a known quantity, and then they do something outside the usual pattern. Jimmy was right in a way of course.

I am an extravert, no, an EXTRAvert. I talk. I talk in my sleep.

Heck, I sing, laugh and run in my sleep, all without leaving the bed. I fight demons, explore locked rooms, chat with Mom in her antique shop in heaven, argue with Dad, look for my cats and dog, discover I’ve missed a final exam, brave tornadoes, drive cars and buy houses in my sleep. I even fly in my sleep, or at least in my dreams. And all the while I talk about it.

So quiet time in the land of Chatty Cathy seems like an odd thing to the outside observer. But sometimes, I go for hours at a stretch in silence.

I don’t know how introverts do it, exactly, so I would be glad for comments by you folks who get fired up from within. See, when I’m thinking, it’s usually pretty verbal even then even if my mouth isn’t going. It’s true that there’s another set of processes that go on for me mentally. They are more visual than verbal, with puzzle pieces that may also be sounds or smells or textures or even tastes. I always wonder if it is this puzzle-world that is the realm of the introvert but I’ve never been brave enough to ask before today.



Do introverts have a running conversation with themselves—or others—in their heads before they speak to me? I know they are said to have worked through all their possibilities about a thing before coming to a conclusion, then stating their well-considered opinion. Extraverts, on the other hand, are considered to speak more off-the-cuff, with every statement being an experiment to be shared with others, perhaps molded by feedback, depending on the speaker's other traits. Extraverts bounce ideas off others. This is not to say that we think people are like handball courts, scuffed with marks of our previous conversations. But we are those people who will come to friends with a question, keep talking and arrive at the answer, sometimes without actually getting the friends' input.

Sorry for the rude part, there. The act of putting it into words so that you would understand it organizes it for us too, often so clearly that the answer is right there, waiting to be said and heard at the same moment. Shake your head and laugh at me. It’s OK. I do have a sense of humor about it.

They say introverts are smarter. I say, perhaps. As I have mentioned before, never make the mistake of thinking that what an extravert says is the only thing they are thinking. It’s just the thing they are thinking out loud. Depending on the person, there might be several tracks running in there.

Are we extraverts poor listeners? It would certainly seem so, especially to the trapped introvert, cornered by conversation so much that if they determined to say something, they feel certain it would be lost in the hurricane of discussion issuing from their chat-buddy. Strangely, though, some of us actually listen while we’re talking, take in body language, other conversations nearby. We entertain the possibility of purchasing a pair of red shoes inspired by a momentary stranger. In our defense, the act of sharing our thoughts aloud with you is an offer to exchange toys, for so often that’s what our thoughts are.

Having an introvert sigh, but never exactly get the chance to say, “That wasn’t very well thought out and if you’d just clam up for a moment you would see that I’m right about that,” really gets interpreted as rejection of the offer to play. We hear or see the sigh or the eyeroll and understand that we’ve hit the wrong note again. Sorry about that.

As much as I do talk, I really do want to know what other people think. What’s it like in there, all alone? Come out and play with an idea with me. I do listen. Why, sometimes I’m strangely quiet.

Today, the power company came to perform some special maintenance on something in the neighborhood. They had sent a letter saying they might, saying the outage would last all day possibly, but not saying exactly when it would be. Today was that day. Just after 9 a.m. everything went quiet.

The lights went out. The Hubs’ radio was silent. The printer squeaked and sighed and stopped. The laptops I work on dimmed and indicated they were now working from battery. The telephone lost its display. The internet hub no longer brought the hubbub of the outside world.

Only the sound of the gate next door slamming against the fence as someone walked through it, scattering the finches from the feeder and the voices of men in the street, not loud but at a working level filled the world for a moment.

Tony woke up from his cat snooze on the desk, moved over to me to sit in front of me while he looked out the window at the new reality of noise from outside only, just a few sounds. There was no white noise of the indoor world. Quincy woke up from his long doggy dreams and hopped down from his spot, wagging his tail. It must be time to go outside. I let him out.

What a lovely quiet it was! I said nothing. I pet Pixie who has only a brief tolerance for my attention, once, twice, three times. That was her limit. But being quiet, she sniffed my hand one more time, and being quiet, I let her. I had to find out how long my little silence would last, so asked the workers how long the outage would be.

Maybe two hours, came the answer. Two hours! I emailed my supervisor to let him know that I would work a little longer in the evening because of the outage. I grabbed my copy of A Wicked Pack of Cards, the Origins of the Occult Tarot by Decker, DePaulis and Dummett. I began to read the introduction, keeping an eye on my work Blackberry for questions I could answer off the top of my head. And I had questions, even from the introduction and noted to myself that I must follow up with my learned friends to find out. Was there ever a second book as planned?

I remembered suddenly one of my dreams last week where I met with none other than Kit Marlowe, Elizabethan poet, dramatist and spy, said to have been killed in a barroom brawl in Deptford. But was he? Kit is the Knight of Wands in Kat Black’s Touchstone Tarot, sociable, talkative, varied in interests, never seated long nor staying. In my dream, he smiled a wonderful smile and embraced me and together we enjoyed the silence of dreams and played with an idea.

Best wishes.

***^^^***
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That Kind of Girl

I have never been much of a dancer. As a child, I attended the  Ebsen School of Dance in Orlando. Buddy Ebsen, perhaps best known as Jed Clampett, the head of the clan in The Beverly Hillbillies, and as the title character in Barnaby Jones, was a dancer from his earliest performing days and learned to dance in his father’s dance studio in Orlando. If any studio knew how to teach children to dance, this was the place.

At the beginning of my second year in beginning tap dancing, the teachers spoke with my mother, explaining that I was likely to do well in art classes.

Unlike Buddy, my feet seems curiously disconnected from my brain. For one thing, they didn’t do the same things every time. The girls teaching the tap dancing class were serious about their work and they knew how to weed out those without talent.

I was relieved. After all, the best thing about my classes was the wardrobe. I didn’t have to dance to wear the clothes. My mother was a little disappointed that her little cupcake was not excellent in everything she did. But I was the first to tell her that putting my straight hair into curls was not going to make me Shirley Temple.

How could I not be fabulous at dancing? Mom and Dad loved to dance. Daddy worked at teaching me to waltz by having me stand on his feet. I missed the point entirely just enjoying the attention, never being able to have my feet count to three reliably in rhythm.

“You have high arches, like a dancer, like me,” Mom told me. High arches do not a dancer make. Something much more magical must happen between brain and feet besides bone structure, something that eluded me entirely. Somewhere between my brain and my feet, there’s some blocked chakra or something.

Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

 Only mildly disappointed by my “disability,” I began to be curious about the nature of intelligence. After all, some people are utter naturals at dancing, music, mathematics, languages, amazingly good at these things. I had so many things come easily to me that I was almost relieved to be a lousy dancer. Being good in school can make the other kids resentful and angry. I embraced my Inner Klutz. I was good at some things; they were good at some things. We weren’t so different. Hooray! We weren’t so different!

The 2 of Cups in Tarot is the urge to find a common heart, a soul-mate, intimacy and a connection with another person. It’s personal, close, one-on-one. Mathematics lovers can find a common bond over a beautiful equation, as dry as that sounds, because of the capacity of the human heart to love and the urge to appreciate and be appreciated. It can also be what I call the “hot monkey love” card for the mutual passion shared between two people. But the passion doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic. It’s the connection that counts.

Right away I have to clarify that it’s the connection to another person that counts. The fact that my brain doesn’t seem to be connected to my feet doesn’t fall into the realm of the 2 of Cups. Thank goodness. Clumsy is covered by something else. Some 7 of Wands reversed thing, I think.

Fast-forward from the not-so-anguished defeat in dancing school to my Seriously Single days after divorcing my first husband. I was adult. I was employed. I was gloriously svelte, a nanosecond in my life where single digit sizes were my territory. I had just moved to a new city. And I was on the prowl. Think of a kitten getting ready to pounce. Imagine the lack of subtlety, the awkward landings, and the inaccurate aim and place that on a template of dating. But at least I wasn’t looking for anything serious.

I had gone out with a single dad named Bob who had an adorable little girl with blonde hair. When we went out with his daughter in tow, people naturally assumed that the all-blond trio were related. Bob turned out not to be as single as originally advertised and went back to his wife. I was a little relieved not to deal with his should-I-leave-her-or-not drama.

In my new job, my new city, my new apartment, I made new friends, the Lonely Hearts club at my corporate headquarters. The place to go after work was semi-affectionately known as “The Meat Market.” It was a watering hole on the east side of town that served weak drinks, strong hors d’oeuvres and a dance floor with flashing lights and a mirror ball. It was the 80’s.

And I can’t dance a step.

I loved watching the dancers though. I turned down so many chances to dance because of the hell that would ensue once they found out about that feet-brain disconnect. A man in a cravat murmured someone of my sophistication really belonged in New York. I met so many married insurance salesmen, that I completely freaked one guy out when I told him within minutes of talking to him that his father had been a farmer, that he was married and that his daughter was older than his son. I hoped it kept him from at least one one-night-stand or two.

And then, out of the swirling lights and blaring speakers came that rarest of commodities in watering holes in an insurance town: a good-looking, single, straight man. Bill was charming, articulate, and theatrical. He was literate and a clever conversationalist. He begged me to pour my drink on his head and bit his wine glass in half. He would not take no for an answer when it came to dancing and out on the floor, I found myself actually dancing. It was like the Ebsen School of Dance had suddenly gelled into that missing connection with my feet. But it was illusion. Bill was just a good dancer who could lead very, very well.

I wanted to know him better, more than the crazy show at the bar. We went to a football game together with coveted University of Illinois tickets, the kind of day where you’re certain your words have frozen as soon as you speak them. And it was there the cracks began to show.

“Furry little thing, isn’t she?” he nodded at a young girl with an unusual amount of transparent peach fuzz covering her face. Alarms went off. He went on to ask if I wore contacts and explained that he could never go out with someone who wasn’t perfect. More alarms. He had trouble with intimacy, strange things. More alarms.

After a couple of dates, he broke it off. I knew it was a good outcome, but still I was curious. He explained, patiently, rationally, that I was the kind of girl he would bring home to his family.

“Exactly,” I smiled, pleased that he had noticed. I was, after all, that kind of girl.

“That’s not what I’m looking for.”

The pattern of his own dangerous, pathological, controlling behaviors clicked into place. Glad things had not progressed too far, I agreed with him though unhappy at my lack of connection. Sometimes, you just get lucky.

Best wishes.

By Blood

No, this isn’t a vampire story! ‘Tis the season for that, of course, but this is a Columbus Day theme marking the wave of immigrants to what has become the United States of America.

One of the things about being from the USA is that there is always more to that story. Very few of us are actually from the USA, at least when you start the Roots Tour. One of the sad phenomena of our time is that there are people who have forgotten their own immigrant (legal or not) roots who somehow think that other immigrants are not worthy to live here. But I promise not to turn this into a political discussion. No politics, no vampires. That’s almost a theme in itself.

The search for our roots is such a hobby, and for some a religious obligation, that entire businesses have sprung up to facilitate this search with software and websites. College programs sponsor efforts to put cemetery records online. We want to connect to our past and the twisting road where that leads us.

This American obsession with our roots apparently becomes occasionally tiresome. When my husband and I were in Scotland, our innkeeper asked why we were visiting. I thought, Why?? Goodness, it’s Scotland, for heavens’ sake. The land of kilted handsome dudes with that dreamy accent, isn’t it? But of course, I wanted to know more than stereotypes; I wanted full-immersion Scotland. What he meant was, Why would we come to that section of Scotland, a place not classically associated with the fantasies of Highland lassies.

“Well, one of the early mentions of my family’s name is a real estate transaction. They sold land to the Kennedy family,” I answered.

“Oh,” my innkeeper sighed, instantly classifying us as Those People, “a Roots Tour.”

I felt vaguely apologetic for bothering people with my personal interest. But it was my vacation then and I was going to soak up all the Scotland I could get. It was a fabulous trip, complete with the Tor House Ring of standing stones and the ghost in the bathroom.

It turns out, through DNA testing, that my Scotland roots are actually Irish. There always is more to that story! Funnier than that, there’s a good possibility that I’m actually related to my husband, if very distantly. But that’s actually what we are looking for in those roots tours, connections and belonging.

If I said I was Irish, however, that would be inaccurate. I’m an American mutt, like so many of us. There’s something in the patchwork quilt of ethnicities that creates an intricate puzzle for the compulsive researcher. I could amuse myself with English Protestant, French Huguenot, Bavarian Catholic, Austrian, Czech and Bohemian Rom threads to chase. I want to know what they thought, what they liked, what they were good at, what they chose and chose to let go of.

I’m fortunate to have transcripts of the diaries of my great-grandfather Henry who went on an adventure to the California Gold Rush, spent a year or two there selling meat to miners rather than panning for gold himself, then went home “to civilization,” leaving at least one brother in California to be part of the mystique of the cattle business and water rights that are part of the heritage of this state.

Henry went on to be Captain of the 111^th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. His diaries of his outfit’s travels through the country include descriptions of playing baseball while waiting for their next orders. His diary also proved to be a life-saver in his case. His book of his first two years of the Civil War stopped a bullet; my cousin owns the remnants of this souvenir of the war along with Henry's other original writings.

The most interesting parts of Henry’s writing are those that make him most accessibly human. When the North and South were trading stray shots across a meadow one evening, not actively engaged in battle but more a game of “chicken,” Henry’s observation, after one bullet went through the sleeve of his coat without touching him was that if these boys don’t watch out, they’re going to hurt someone.

As the company clerk and Captain, he ran the election voting for a fair and secret ballot. The election between Lincoln and McClellan in 1864 was more hotly contested than we are aware, since we know the outcome. But at the time, Henry’s comments on the political scene were fascinatingly modern, wondering if either of the two candidates could pull off what they promised, were sincere in their efforts or were even trustworthy since they were, after all, politicians. We think of “old times” as being idealistic and naïve when people were just as skeptical of leadership as we are in today’s election. Who knows? Will one of the people we elect as President become the legend that Lincoln is now?

I like Henry, a man I never met. My father remembered an old man with a long beard and a Scottish “burr” to his voice. He recounted that as a toddler he sat on this formidable and yet comfortable man’s lap, being in awe of him, listening to stories of the Civil War and of Henry’s little brother George who had been imprisoned in Andersonville, survived, had been a passenger on the ill-fated Sultana, survived and had gone on to become a U.S. Marshall.

These stories and others I would never have known if I had not searched for roots.

I’m on vacation this week and decided that some of it should be a bit of a roots chase. The least documented and documentable thread in my fabric is the Bohemian Romany.

The mention of Bohemian, notably without the Rom, at least gave me a season pass to my first husband’s Polish family. I went no further with the description of my many-hued personal fabric without realizing that had I finished with the “Rom” part, I might have been thrown out. In the USA, we romanticize Gypsies as carefree, musical travelers who may fix your pots and pans in exchange for a stop at your farm and perhaps tell your fortune by firelight. Like so many fairy tales, the more difficult parts have been omitted. The Romany people have not been so well-received, in fact.



Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

In the mid-1800s in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roma were forbidden by law to marry each other, an earlier “benign” attempt at eliminating them as a people. My great-great-grandmother complied and married a Gadjo (outsider who is not Romani) even though in her culture it meant that she was no longer one of her own people. Their red-haired son, Franz, left Bohemia to come to the fresh start that was America and with his knowledge of farming, his father’s profession, started a grain company in Kansas. I have a tantalizing photograph from the 1870’s taken just before Franz departed the old country, never to return. Records say my great-great-grandmother was Marie but show no last name. Tragically, the Bohemian Romany, speakers of a specific Rom dialect, were all but wiped out in the Holocaust. Thanks to Franz and others like him, vestiges remain. But I have no children and neither does my brother.

I did not grow up with any Rom cultural customs. I laughingly say that my former “unibrow” which has naturally thinned over time to two fairly normal eyebrows could be my only physical characteristic on an otherwise straight-haired blonde and blue-green décor. When I started reading regular playing cards when I was 7 or so spontaneously, my mother simply did not stop me but said it must be my Gypsy heritage.

So, for my vacation, I’m doing a little Gypsy roots tour. With a Tarot buddy, I’m going to seek out a local Roma hangout and have dinner there for people watching and good food. And I am delighted to have found tickets to a Gypsy jazz concert this weekend. Something about the rhythms, the chord progressions, the emotion of that music stirs my blood, inspires me like an Ace of Wands, to seek both roots and connections and move forward to my peculiar, personal and satisfying creativity.

Best wishes!

Chasing the Wheel

One of the versions of the Merlin and King Arthur story is that not only was Merlin a wizard, he lived his life backwards. He started out as an old and wise wizard emerging from the magical hills, advised Uther Pendragon, then taught Uther's young son Arthur, hidden away, how to be the once and future king. At the end of his time, Merlin fell giddily in love with a woman who loved him for what he knew and what he was, but perhaps not who he was. He made a young man’s mistake, chasing after beauty and things on the surface after a lifetime of being a visionary of the depths.

His sense of time was different from the rest of the world and yet his job as spiritual, magical, moral and even athletic coach to young Arthur was to teach the king the importance of seizing a moment in time. Sometimes, like Arthur, we have one chance to do the right thing.

In the legend of Arthur, the once and future king, Arthur dies. Or does he? He is taken to the misty Isle of Avalon apparently mortally wounded. He tried to show the local “kings” that working together was more beneficial than fighting each other. By giving those in local power an equal place at his round table, he indicated to them that he would exercise no positional power over them. By granting them dignity, respect, affirmation, acceptance and their own voices, and by appealing to their sense of honor, he allowed them to believe with him that Right Makes Might.

Yet, also in the legend, old mistakes, however brief or blameless, came back to haunt Arthur. Merlin tried to help, but by then he was in his youthful indiscretion, no longer the wise old wizard who had changed young Arthur to a fish so he could learn to swim or to a bird so that he might fly. The wheel of time had turned and it was a time of change.

Arthur was taken, wounded, to Avalon. Merlin was frozen in a cave. An important theme, no matter which version of the Arthur story you like, is that once there was a time when the imperfect world of human beings actually worked. It worked until it didn’t. Another theme is that Arthur will return. The other thought, although it is seldom mentioned, is that Merlin is likely to return too. Maybe we'll get a second chance.

From the way our world works now, sometimes I think we could both of them. A returning hero with his wise counselor-magician, both cured of their human vulnerabilities, would be a nice change of pace. If only it were so easy.

Dealing with change is never easy. And yet, that wheel is always moving. There are some days when I hate all surprises, even good ones. But the Wheel of Fortune refers to larger changes in our lives, not the little surprises.

The planet Saturn is entering Scorpio again. Saturn’s path goes in 29 year cycles. Think of your birthday each year as your “solar return.” The Sun returns to approximately the spot where it was the day you were born. Of course, this movement is relative and the earth spins and goes around the sun and not the other way around. But in an astrological sense, the sun comes back to you, your spot, each year. Each of the planets—yes, I feel sorry for Pluto because he got demoted—takes its own amount of time to pass through the Zodiac. The Moon moves fastest, then Mercury, etc. Instead of a year, like the Sun, Saturn takes 29 years.

Not to give away too much information for you arithmetically inclined, but I’m approaching my Saturn return. It makes me thoughtful. In my chart, Saturn isn’t particularly a bad thing. It says that older people have been kind to me (true) and while I may not have had as much sponsorship or mentoring as I wanted, it has made me used to living without supervision. Well, being fairly self-reliant has worked for me in many ways, although I clearly admit to loving being spoiled by The Hubs!

When the horoscopes say that I may find myself without some of the support structures I’ve been used to, that’s a characteristic of Saturn in Scorpio. So, in looking at the events in my life that happened when I was born and when I was 29, I try to get an idea what my Saturn return has in store for me.

For instance, I was “accidentally” born at home. I was a couple of weeks early. Dad had flown to California for his Pentagon job, something to do with the Air Force and housing and bases and such. My brother was at the babysitter’s and Mom was alone in our home in the D.C. metro area. Apparently things happened very quickly and in spite of the benefits of civilization and modern medicine, Mom and I had our first mother-daughter do-it-yourself project together. Mom never let Dad forget it either. When I think about it, I’m pretty glad I played the role of the baby in this drama. The other roles were a lot tougher.

“Did you pick me up by my feet and spank me?” I asked, thinking of Butterfly McQueen in Gone With The Wind. No, I did my own little throat-clearing and breathed on my own. So many things could have gone wrong. Better to be lucky than good, The Hubs says.

When I was 29, my mother died. She was 42 when I was born and had lived my entire childhood in terror of dying before I was officially out of the nest. Once I did leave the nest, she was really upset that I had. No, REALLY upset. But since her illness was long and awful, we had had plenty of time to talk, just never enough time. She was in the hospital with no special measures requested and we went to see her. That time, that last moment when we talked, that was like no other. She knew I would be forever unsupervised now and we finally agreed I would probably be OK. I didn’t care about that then. I just wanted to talk to her and have her talk to me. We let each other go.

Now, at my second Saturn return approaching, comically coincidental with the end of the Mayan Calendar, I learned today that my boss was let go. His position was eliminated in that awful “nothing personal” thing companies do when they say thank-you and good-bye. He and I had had a rocky start to our relationship with vastly different approaches to management. He was what many call a micro-manager which so many talented, intelligent workers despise as an insult to all that they are. Saturn is the School of Hard Knocks, the Hard Lesson, Tough Love. When an earlier organizational change had me reporting to him, I took it as an opportunity to learn how to let go of the ego of being a talented, intelligent worker and just concentrate on doing a good job, learning new things, being kind and trying to bring sanity to the workplace. We ended up working well together.

More than the loss of my boss, my vice president made a huge decision to move to a different company so he could spend more time with his family. It’s likely that more changes are coming.

I can bark at this wheel turning, this Wheel of Fortune with its ups and downs, like my first husband’s family dog who chased Volkswagens on their street. BeBe chased until one day she caught one! She rolled around the wheel well while we all screamed in horror. Just that fast she was spat out behind the bug, running around in circles and still barking, completely unhurt. But BeBe never chased cars again.

The wheel of change is going to happen whether I “bark” or not. It’s going to be easier if I adjust quickly, without anger or fear, and adapt to the new circumstances. Of course, it will be just like two Saturns ago. Just take a breath.

Best wishes.

Normal Crime

A Facebook friend of mine just got her house broken into and her purse stolen. She’s dealing with all the feelings of anger, loss and violation. It’s an “everyday” crime that in many overtaxed police departments gets very little attention.

There’s often little chance that the stolen items will be recovered, little chance that they will catch the people who did it. It’s only property, they say. It’s more of course, but so often the thing you lose in a situation like that can’t be brought back, like your sense of safety and peace of mind or your faith in your fellow human beings.

Yes, the police are right of course. It could be worse. She could have been there, been hurt in a much more violent crime. It’s small consolation at the time. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to know where to direct your anger when you don’t know who did it.

Before I met him, the Hubs suffered a similar crime. While he was out, someone broke into the cottage where he lived, stole family heirlooms and, inexplicably, set fire to the cottage. His cats died in the fire. Why set the fire? Why kill the cats? Why not just take the stuff and go? I didn’t even know those cats and my heart aches at the thought of someone doing that in my home, to my little critters. I miss the Molly and Garfield I never knew.

Even after we met while the Hubs still had his cottage, we went out briefly to shop for our Football Pool Dinner and while we were at the grocery store, someone who wore athletic shoes with a distinctive pattern kicked in the door and stole what little was left of value. At least that time, the cats, the ones who replaced those who died, were left alive.

No one was hurt? Hardly true. My friend lost photographs she hadn’t downloaded. My husband lost his precious pets and family pieces that he would have liked giving to his nephews. I hope the people who did these things get prosecuted for something, even if it isn’t this specific crime.

My own brushes with senseless crimes were thankfully harmless to me physically. My first job out of college had me working in an attorney’s office. Our office specialized in wills, trust and real estate and the most unsavory characters in the office were often long-standing clients with big ideas about a real estate deal. While we didn’t handle many criminal cases, we did enthusiastically read the newspapers and occasionally listen to the radio. When something spectacularly silly happened in the crime section, we hooted with glee and with our honed, imaginative and some legal minds we Monday morning quarterbacked the latest stupid criminal antics.

My favorite stupid crime was The Bank Job. Two or three kids sought to rob one of the local banks in our smallish down in southern Illinois and made a dash for the county line. They never made it that far. They were apprehended with the loot and charged appropriately. It wasn’t that they didn’t drive a fast getaway car. It’s just that it was maroon, with large fins in the rear and had “Devils” painted on it.

If they wanted to be famous, they made it, at least for a week or two. They were famous for being unable to sneak across the county line with any subtlety. As I recall, no one was hurt. You can’t count the stitches in our sides as injuries.

By far the most remarkable stupid criminal encounter was the time I had my wallet stolen out of my car.

OK, I admit, there’s some element of the stupid victim here. So I confess that I left my purse wide open on the front seat of my car with the windows rolled down and the doors unlocked on a summer afternoon. I had run to the back of my landlord-boyfriend’s Victorian house, one last trip while we were finishing up a repair/restoration to ready the house for the coming fall semester and the new houseful of irresponsible and destructive college boys who would nearly gut the house by the end of the college year. While in the back, picking up keys or whatever, the criminals stole my wallet out of my purse.

This all seems normal. Except, of course, that this was Normal, Illinois. It’s a name that sets up false expectations at best.

Stuff happened in Normal that you didn’t expect. While I lived in southern Illinois, I grew used to college students abandoning their pedigreed dogs into packs of roving aristocrats of all shapes and sizes. I grew used to it but could never stomach it. But in Normal, the variation on that theme took a different flavor. The college boys in one of the landlord/boyfriend’s houses abandoned their pet who hid somewhere in the rambling house after escaping his usual quarters. The boys left for home, unable to find it until it showed up on the sofa one day. You just don’t expect a large boa constrictor on a sofa in an empty house.

Another time and at another landlord’s house, the kids having the party on the second floor got into boogying rhythm to Love Shack or whatever and danced the second floor right down on top of the first floor, collapsing the inside of the house. That was Normal.

So in the reddening sunset back at my car I realized my wallet had been lifted and I cursed the idiot who stole it and the idiot who left her purse in her open car. The good news is they caught the guys.

It seems that two traveling Bible salesmen from Texas (nope, you can’t make this stuff up) had fallen on bad times. The older black gentleman had convinced his younger and considerably dumber blond compadre to grab the wallet and while at the nearest gas station they gassed up where Dumbo the Blondie used my credit card and my driver’s license as identification and attempted to forge my name.

These two masterminds got as far as Peoria, due to the quick thinking of the gas station manager who had the cool to accept the transaction without confronting them or pointing out that Blondie sure didn’t look like a Marcia and to write down their license plate. Like the traditional “book meaning” of the 7 of Swords, they thought they got away with it.

After almost enjoying a sandwich and a beer at a motel coffee shop, they were arrested and charged. The older guy got off with time served once they had spent maybe 30 days in jail awaiting trial with no bail to post because he never actually signed anything, but the younger guy had made the error of signing my name to compound his petty theft with a felony, forgery.

They had made phone calls to Alabama on my long distance card and they had tossed my nice wallet and my favorite photos out of the window somewhere between Normal and Peoria. I could never drive that road again without hoping for a glint of brightly colored oxblood leather and the photographs I would never see again.

Lock your car. Take your keys. And watch out for those Bible salesmen from Texas.

Best wishes.

Gone Cat

My husband just walked out the door with Eleanor. Eleanor is a cat, our black and white long-hair, histrionic, five-pound screamer who is the Omega Cat in the house. Whatever happens, she comes in last and she and all the other creatures of our little forest know this. Eleanor has had the sneezes for about a week but otherwise seems OK. Her eyes aren’t runny or half-closed the way sick cats can get.

Eleanor prefers to stay in the breakfast room which is my husband’s home office. I’m not sure what made him decide to take her to the vet now but I’m thinking it was just one little sneeze too many for him.

Since he didn’t warn me he was going to do this, I quietly had a panic attack.

As he walked out of the door with Eleanor squalling with every breath, he was on the telephone where he has been a great deal of the afternoon working on some work-related issue. And because he was on the telephone, I couldn’t talk to him.

He doesn’t realize what a nightmare this was for me, one that played out over and over again throughout my childhood. And because I was aware of it, I didn’t exactly freak out at him. I did dial his number frantically for about 15 minutes until I could talk to him. But I didn’t totally lose it. I feel good about this. This is progress for me. I’m coming back down from my panic now and my heart rate and breathing are closer to normal.

***

I mentioned recently that my first dog Clementine was my pet for only a brief time and then the dogs had to go away. That was a recurring pattern. We would have pets, cats, dogs, a rat, a snake, a mouse, fish, even the chickens. Then, without warning one day my father would take them all away. He did not do that with my parakeet. He did not do that with my mother’s dog Pierre. But, the losses were nearly unbearable for me.

I would come home to find my cat gone. My father would lie to me and tell me that my cat had been adopted by a family with a little girl. I am pretty sure they thought I would get over it.

But I didn’t, partly because it would happen again and again.

Sheba was such an unusual looking cat for the alley variety. She had “ticking” or tipped fur, no stripes except eyeliner and a butterscotch tummy. She looked like a fluffy mountain lion in a way. She liked hunting a bit and was fond of the small lizards common in our central Florida yard. She was patient with me in such a maternal fashion that I imagined she thought of me as a large homely kitten. In the 1960’s, it was rare for owners to do anything more for a housecat than feed it, so Sheba had at least one litter of kittens and stayed outside all the time no matter how much I begged to have her come indoors. Fleas were common. Ticks were occasional. Cat lives were shorter. I was convinced I was Sheba’s student in learning all things cat.

Then, one day, all the cats were gone. Daddy had taken them all to the pound which was not called a humane shelter because it was neither humane nor shelter. Daddy lied and said a family had adopted Sheba but I knew he had specified they all be killed. Daddy had a certain look when he lied that I knew.

I mourned the loss of my teacher, my friend, my cat for years. She represented my helplessness in the wake of adult power and responsibility.

This scene repeated itself. My little dog Mitzi who had made the “mistake” of trying to bite the man who brought the bottled water for our water cooler was taken away. Suzi who had too many puppies and who, in classic beagle fashion, liked to escape the confines of the fenced yard and run throughout the neighborhood was taken away.

When we moved to New Mexico, our dogs all caught distemper. Because everyone in the family had a favorite dog and the expense of saving them was too high, Daddy decided to save none of them and they all perished, Beau, Ajax, Bill, Jacques and Jem.

Oh, there were other losses, too, that weren’t at the hands of my parents. Cars hit Pierre, Dickens, Benji and Calico. Some budding psychopath stole Misty and tortured and killed her along with scores of other pets. But all of it grew and grew within me, the knowledge that there was a better way to treat these little creatures we brought into our lives. It wasn’t evil cars or junior serial killers that needed fixing.

Finally, one day while I was in high school, I came home to find that Daddy had taken Meph, my long-haired black cat who had a delightful personality, out far into the New Mexico countryside with her latest litter of kittens and dumped her. Daddy lied again: She’s going to be near a barn where there are lots of mice. She will be happy. I knew better. I cried and screamed in frustration for days. My father set his jaw the way he did when he didn’t want to say what he was thinking.

A few days later, Meph showed up, thin, worn, sans kittens. But she was home. My father was astounded. I picked her up and held her, wheeled around and blazed at my Dad, “You. Will. NEVER. Take. My. Pets. Away. Again.”

My ferocity scared him, I think. He understood, finally, that the way we treat these little ones is so often an echo of how we treat each other. I would have happily taken him out to the countryside and left him in a field that day, lying to myself and everyone else that he would find mice in a barn and live some false fairy tale.

Meph lived another ten years with my parents and then with me after I moved away from home. She had no more kittens because I paid to have her spayed. She had a heated, elevated, insulated house in my backyard and, when no one else was around, she got to come inside and stay with me. She brought me mice each day from her catch and laid them on the front steps of my little house. She hunted chipmunks. She came to my specific whistle. She didn’t mind the dog so much. She died peacefully in my arms when the cancer became too much for her to bear.

***

Eleanor is fine. Dr. C at the veterinary hospital sent her home with some kitty vitamins because she likely has a mild virus, the common cold in the feline variety. Ellie still has the sneezles but she was actually pleased with all the extra attention.

And I kissed and hugged my husband, who, after all, isn’t the monster who took my babies away but the Nicest Man in the World who made the appointment with the vet to make sure Ellie-Bellie would get well again.

My little 6 of Cups in Tarot, memories of childhood, had been set aright and what I vowed as a helpless child to be when I was a “powerful” adult was still intact. I will take care of my critters as if they were the most precious things in the Universe, mostly because they are.

Best wishes.

***

I will be reading Tarot on September 29, 2012 in Petaluma, CA at Halloween and Vine! Click on the link to get directions and take a peek at the other fabulous vendors who will be there like ... Sharon Bloom!