June Weddings

We traditionally associate June with weddings and while now it seems tied to college graduations or good vacation weather, there is of course some history behind getting married in June.

A cousin’s son is set to marry next weekend and the family is all in a dither about the joyous occasion. The groom is handsome; the bride, beautiful. We have found the perfect gift within their wedding registry, a handy way to make sure the happy couple does not begin their new life together with seven toasters and no sheets. Lately, I think the trend is to buy the youngsters gasoline credits or contribute towards the perfect honeymoon. No matter. It takes away the sleepless nights wondering if the green salad set you found for them would be donated immediately to Goodwill.

In Tarot, several cards can point to love and marriage. The Hierophant can signal a traditional wedding ceremony performed by the officiator who understands the spiritual bonding special to marriage. The 2 of Cups can mean the shared intimacy between the bride and groom, the bond they have with each other and no one else, the honeymoon. The 4 of Wands can signal marriage and the marriage ceremony, but my sense of it usually is the wedding reception and not the ceremony itself; peace between two houses who come together to create something more, with friends! And, of course, in this year of The Lovers, the joining of two separate individuals, the selection of what completes and complements.

I found a fun collection of wedding “tips” in one of the old books in my collection, Madame Fabia’s The Book of Fortune Telling to share with brides, brides-to-be and brides-averse. These are meant in fun and curiosity and are traditions from a time gone by.

The Luck of Weddings.

We have heard this one most often:

“Something old, something new,

Something borrowed, and something blue.”

 

But of course there is more. For instance, of particular interest to cousin Patti and all those who sew:  “The little sempstress, working on the wonderful wedding dress, takes care to sew a little cutting of her hair into the hem of the dazzling white gown, so that she, too, may soon wear her bridal toilette.” I love the term sempstress. It somehow sounds like the dress is less likely to fall apart; there’s no proverb about avoiding wardrobe accidents on one’s Big Day but I know that was high on my own list of anxieties at the time.

Color, from the familiar saying, makes a difference and not just in celebrity fanzines:

“Married in white, you have chosen all right.

Married in green, ashamed to be seen.

Married in grey, you will go far away.

Married in red, you will wish yourself dead. [a bit extreme, ed.]

Married in blue, he will ever be true.

Married in yellow, ashamed of the fellow.

Married in black, comforts you’ll lack.

Married in pink, your spirits will sink.

Married in brown, you’ll live out of town.

Married in pearl, you’ll live in a whirl.”

 

I rather like the whirl one although it’s not for the faint of heart. You can see the clear preference for white here. You can make some of your own up for new traditions. Married in salmon, you’ll ne’er live in famine. That rather works, I think. Married in off-white, your in-laws will fight. Well, it isn’t always good news, the color thing. I note here that tradition avoided the inevitable issue with finding something to rhyme with orange, although what comes to mind is a prison jumpsuit so perhaps that’s best left alone.

And here’s some advice for family: “If a bride has elder sisters, they should wear something green at her wedding—preferably stockings—or they will never be married themselves.” I’m just waiting to see if older sisters start showing up in green stockings. The book doesn’t specify whether the stockings are lime green, or spider-web fishnet, so there is at least some room for creativity here.

The day of the wedding itself provides extra hazards to watch out for:

·         A bride should never break anything on her wedding day, as it foretells strife.

·         She should not try on her wedding dress or veil on her wedding morn [no consequences provided, however, ed.]

·         She should not forget to feed the cat, as it may spite her by bringing down rain [or perhaps puddling in the bed or throwing up in her shoes, ed.]

·         She must not lose the heel of her shoe, or she will be unable to get on with her husband’s relatives

·         She must not keep back her tears, as it is said she will have wept them all away, and she must not touch rags

·         It is a bad omen if a bride encounters a hare, a dog, a cat, a lizard, a pig or a funeral when going to church, but spiders or frogs foretell happiness and prosperity, and a lamb or a dove are good omens also. A bird singing on the window on the wedding morn is most luck.

·         On driving to church, the bride must sit with her back to the driver. [This would seem to require special transport or violate safety standards, ed.] If she sits on the back seat, she will always occupy second place in her husband’s affections.

·         A bride should not stumble or fall on the threshold [wow! This actually happened to me at my first wedding! Well, I have to say from personal experience, this might actually be good advice, ed.], and she should enter the church with the right foot foremost. She should come out of the church by the same door as she entered by.

·         A bride should not see a pin on the ground as she leaves the church.

·         It is very bad luck to lose the wedding ring. [Nice they include a bit of advice for the groom, who would never hear the end of this one, ed.]

·         For the green stocking set: A piece of wedding cake, drawn three times through a wedding ring, and laid under the pillow, and dreamt on for three nights is sure to induce one to dream prophetic things of one’s future husband or wife. Sometimes three names are written on three slips of paper, and one removed (without peeping) each day. The last is the future husband’s name. [I think the Tooth Fairy got bored with giving money to children and decided on a new business model, ed.]

·         The clergyman should be paid with an odd sum of money.

 

Finally, there is a rhyme for best days of the week to marry:

 

“Monday for wealth,

Tuesday for health,

Wednesday the best day of all.

Thursday for crosses,

Friday for losses,

Saturday no luck at all.”

 

Since most weddings these days occur on Saturdays for the convenience of the workaday world, it is no wonder we wish the happy couple good luck!

And for the parents of the groom this Saturday, we wish all love and good fortune as they shoo their youngest birdie from the nest onto his next Great Adventure! And perhaps we also may wish them something to calm their jangled nerves.

Best wishes to the bride and groom and all of the rest of you!

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.

Secrets

We all have secrets in our past. Some of them are very interesting or would be if the story was told properly. Some are just things we don’t talk about much or don’t talk about until much later.

My brother and I happened to be visiting my Dad and step-mom Noni at the same time at their house in the Missouri woods. We were sitting around the table after dinner telling funny stories. Suddenly, a little bit of magic happened. I caught a glint in my brother’s eye and we dipped into once-dangerous territory. We began telling on ourselves, not on each other, stories from our wild high-school days, the things we were pretty sure Dad didn’t know about. And we were right!

No, that scar on my brother’s chin hadn’t been from slipping on the ice and prat-falling into his car door handle. It was an old car and door handles weren’t sleek and streamlined like they are now; they were sharp sometimes and stuck out away from the car doors. But that wasn’t what cut his chin. No, he was on a friend’s forbidden motorcycle that bucked under my brother’s inexpertise, rearing up to create that humdinger of a cut that required more than a couple of stitches. He later mastered control of motorcycles, but the scar was a permanent reminder of how quickly things could go wrong.

And Dad really hadn’t known it wasn’t the door handle. He laughed, bugged his eyes out at my brother, shook his finger at him and laughed some more.

“Fool me once,” Dad said, “and that’s your fault. Fool me twice, and that’s my fault.”

Dad was fooled twice, of course. My brother has a couple of scars. There were lots of stories that night.

Since we were confessing, I admitted that I actually had crawled out my bedroom window for late night excursions. Just riding in cars with kids my own age in broad daylight was verboten.

When I was in high school I figured there was truly little trouble I could get into, even at midnight in a car. That’s stupid, of course, but like most kids that age, I was pretty sure I knew just about everything. We lived in a small town in New Mexico that for many years had only one stoplight in town. My youthful indiscretions were few and I generally shared my parents’ hesitance to ride with other teenage drivers. I volunteered for three years at the hospital across the street from our house and saw enough of drunk-driving accidents to last maybe forever.

But, I was a teenager and occasionally the call of the wild was hard to resist. My best friend Cindy and I sometimes hung out with our older brothers’ friends who called themselves the “Squirrel Squad.” I’m not sure the word “nerd” had been invented yet but basically that was the idea. These guys were linked in friendship to the semi-scientific experiments they perpetrated, usually on rural mailboxes late at night. They loved cars and owned perhaps the worst ones in town. One was an old Ford Falcon which had a maximum speed of perhaps 35 miles per hour. They tried to fly radio-controlled airplanes, build and launch rockets and were on the fringes of the chess club. Some of them formed a band and played at our local high school dances. There was a lot of focus on electronic equipment. I think if there had been all the equipment for ghost hunting available, they might have done that too.

This became just a little too nerdy for my brother, who wanted to play varsity sports but ended up with a broken foot or wrist at the beginning of every season and was relegated to the bench. He also liked cars and drag racing. One of the things I learned around the dinner table that night was that he had been part of a group of guys who were drag racing outside of town. I remember he had a very cool looking car, a “442” that was a turquoise color with two big white “surfer stripes” painted down the middle. But I had no idea that he had been part of the drag racing scene that had been raided by the police and that our Dad had to pick my brother up at the police station one night.

My late night excursions were much tamer although not without the possibility of danger. One of the geological features of our part of eastern New Mexico was the dry lake. Weather patterns have changed a bit, but when I lived there, dry was the main weather feature. Underneath the sand and scrub and cactus was caliche, a super-hard limestone. The dry lakes around town were a mix of this hardpan and sand dunes with scrub and sagebrush. Teenagers would go out to the dry lakes, make a fire if they could find anything like wood to burn, dance, ride dirt-bikes and drink soda, Annie Greensprings and Ripple wine. There romances bloomed and faded, we discussed the Viet Nam war and wondered about our futures. And then, my friends dropped me off near my house and I crawled back through my bedroom window. As it turns out, my parents never guessed. And lucky for me, nothing bad happened from it.

We laughed about other stories, like my brother teaching me how to arm wrestle and my challenging all the boys in junior high to duels. I was the arm wrestling champion of the junior high two years in a row. That and playing football in earnest with the neighborhood boys required that I remake myself almost entirely in high school to get back in touch with my feminine side. After all, the reason I liked hanging out with the boys was, well, I liked boys. They were cute. They were goofy. They were kind of simple, single-minded dopey clowns if they weren’t completely bumfuzzled by sexual tension. But they were hilarious when they were. And launching model rockets was a lot more interesting than mastering fashion nuances to me.

The stories I didn’t tell around the dinner table that night were those too precious, embarrassing or titillating to reveal.

I had been asked out on a date by one of the high school football heroes. I was flabbergasted. I was elated. When he picked me up, my heart nearly stopped when he reached down, lifted the lever under my seat and pulled it back for leg room. Little did I know that he was not the least bit interested in me until we got to the drive-in movie and it became clear that first base was this sports king’s only goal. I was crushed. Having been “blessed” with an ample “first base” I realized it was going to be difficult to be liked for my personality. Well, crud. The attempted one-night stand turned into a one-night slap and I was home before the movie ended.

A couple of years earlier one of my junior high friends had gotten hold of a book called Eustace Chisholm and the Works, the most explicit and hedonistic novel ever and may still be at the top of that list. It was, in spite of all these possibilities, also of dubious literary merit (no offense to the author). It was what I sometimes call the 2 of Cups, a phrase from Dharma and Greg, “Hot Monkey Love.”

2 of Cups
Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

My friend wanted me to hide it for her until the coast was clear with her folks. I read it of course. My. Goodness. It made everything quite clear just exactly why I liked boys. Yup, that did it. I had the good sense to be a bit shy about trying the things I read which, I suspect, would have shocked my mother. Oh, she would have been certifiably catatonic about the book and its contents, beyond depravity in her view, I’m pretty sure. What would have merely shocked her, though, was that I actually resisted the urge to experiment freely with the suggestions from that novel. She lived in constant fear that I didn’t share her horror of the opposite sex. Nope. I liked ‘em. Lucky me again: My parents never found the book. I think I finally passed it back to my friend with the newly-enriched understanding of the weight of its danger.

Now that both Mom and Dad are gone, I am sure they are over the shock of my high school indiscretions. Yes, I did crazier things than crawling out my window. I actually thought a high school boy could like me for my personality! But something about that time is sweet with memory of the simplicity of teenage hopes and of the now-admitted innocence of the realities of responsibilities of real life. Some little secrets are meant to be savored, like those first moments sitting in a friend’s car in the night sky on the way to the rest of my life.

Best wishes.

Love in the Time of Influenza

I had the flu. Then the hubs had the flu. This wasn’t the “search the cabinets for anything to help you breathe again” flu. This was that other flu. The flu we don’t talk about. You know what I mean. I don’t mean to paint too graphic a picture here but there are some tarot cards that can tell the story.



It seems like it should have been a short story. Its suddenness was like a lightning strike, a Tower fallen, the rug ripped out from under me. Luckily, I was within range of familiar conveniences. In times of stress, they were never more convenient. Dark moments like these are times when we examine our souls. I really hadn’t wanted to examine my soul from the inside out, though.

But after the initial assault, the siege went on. And on. It was 8 of Wands, the rain of fire, the sudden swiftness of burning, even the up-in-the-air feeling of having been launched, wanting to land but afraid to do so from such a height. The fever raged. The battle continued. The topsy-turvy world of war was upon me. Even water would not put out this flame, would not seek its own level but beat its retreat.

I sought comfort in the dark and quiet, hoping the sweet little songbirds would cease their concerts, the dog would not snore, the cats would not breathe so loudly. Light and air and logic and imagination were enemies. I waved a sheet in surrender and prayed for an end, however it may come. As a soldier crawling from the blast, the 4 of Swords, I sought oblivion even if from cold stone or smooth tiles.

I fought despair of the 5 of Cups. This was still Day 1. And yet I continued to work, to answer emails and telephone calls, to offer guidance on complex computer projects. And sprint. And despair some more. No, I said. This was not flu. This was food poisoning, a poorly prepared potato past its prime in search of revenge for its neglect. It would not be flu.

After the long siege of day and night, I rallied at dawn, sure the worst was over. After all, my husband’s birthday weekend was almost upon us and I would not, would not give in and cancel it. I tenderly tried to regain the balance of my strength, to sip both eagerly and cautiously to win back some of what I had lost. Sweet Temperance led me to sip and sip and sip again.

Ah, but cruel warning came! Peace is not merely the lack of open warfare. Dissembling stillness led me astray and I called out for sustenance. My husband responded in his usual generosity and brought me what would ordinarily be healing itself, Sizzling Rice Soup, and perhaps, if I were daring, a little vegetable fried rice. What harm could a little soothing soup do? Yet, like a thief, like the 7 of Swords, in a flash from full bowl to empty was all the time it took for me to find that the battle was not yet won. Even the sight of the veggie rice was too much to be gazed upon. I lost ground and I retreated once more.

Flu, like Death, be not proud. It takes us all, the willing and the unwilling, from time to time. Flu rode in with my husband on a portion of spicy eggplant from that same nearby Chinese restaurant. He felt fine while I turned green over my bland soup. Yet scant hours later, he was struck, with all the force of all the same symptoms, all the same remorse. And we fought fire with water once again, rallied and sank, retreated and wandered restlessly. All the while our dog and cats watched over us in dismay, concern and perhaps portion calculation should the worst occur.

And in our lowest moment, we knew we were defeated. The birthday weekend was off. The trip to the redwoods was postponed. The prime rib and chocolate cake were not to be. We were betrayed by a microbe, stabbed in the back like the 10 of Swords for providing too friendly an environment for its welfare. We made phone calls. We choked out our apologies and gave our best intentions to our comrades to save themselves, to run.

I determined the only cure for the worst of it was never to eat again. Like the 2 of Swords, I drew a thin treaty with the beastly bug, denying defeat as well as victory. My resolve lasted only into the evening of Day 3 and I rummaged for something, anything like real food. I found a bagel and toasted it, throwing caution to the wind. I returned to fuss and coo over my ailing sweetie whose head was bursting in between other bursts. We slept again.

Day 4. The fire retreats and leaves the charred remains, soothed, finally, by the cooling waters. We rise, having let go of earthly cares and woes, mostly woes. My husband has ventured as far as the kitchen and made chicken noodle soup. While this balm may not last for long, it is a breakthrough. Even the thought of food was torture a couple of days ago. We’ve dared to watch a little television, its trumpet blare and fireworks now not too painful to take. There are so many food commercials on television and not a lot of them are appetizing.

I even watched Julie & Julia, a movie about the love of food. It reminded me of the joy our cousin Patti has in her cooking, her love of France, her annual Thanksgiving “Babette’s” Feast where all is made from loving scratch. It also reminded me that love goes through things together, weathers indignities, unpleasantness, inconveniences, disappointments, defeats as well as joys and celebrations. We drink from the same cup and get the same reward, whether it’s the sweetness of the wine or the wretched influenza, in sickness and in health. We share the same cup.

But it will still be a while before that boned duck thing from J&J starts to look tasty. And I’d better go wash that cup again.

**

All images in this posting are from my Art Postcard Tarot, still available.  See my page called Tarot Decks on this blog for more information. 

Best wishes.