Los Dos Oros

There’s a little convenience shop a couple of blocks from here called Los Dos Oros. I look at it and call it The Two of Pentacles. The Two will often have the freshest Serrano peppers and vine-grown tomatoes, essential ingredients in my home-made salsa. If I can’t get the short season heirloom tomatoes I love, large, party-colored and dead ripe, then The Two usually has tomatoes as good as any in town. And I want to keep the little place going. I miss neighborhood groceries and I want to keep this one in business. Tarot reader doth not live by salsa alone, of course, so I do have to shop other places for things not usually found in the bodega. Still, I get a kind of snuggly feeling that a place that helps me juggle my dietary needs—addictions?—is named like a Tarot card with a similar meaning.

I think there may be a point in the “total immersion” process where every Tarot student starts to see Tarot cards everywhere. Suddenly the 7 of Swords is dancing to “Hernando’s Hideaway.” The Thanksgiving Day parade starts to look like the 6 of Wands. Flashbacks of my homeless hero Alma appear to be the 9 of Wands, taking a break from the hardships of life while sitting on a bus stop bench. Children under the Christmas tree playing with the boxes as much as the toys that came in them show a happy 9 of Cups.

One of my friends, Donnaleigh de LaRose, posts images on Facebook and asks, “TarotPic Teaser: If this picture were a tarot card, which one would it be? What do you see?”

Participants look at the image and relate it to their understanding of Tarot and post their answers. I play along sometimes if the picture grabs me and I usually post why I think so. It isn’t to influence what the “right” answer “should” be. It’s just for fun. In the same way, though, that play is the work of children, these fun exercises are reinforcement for those eager to learn tarot.

A couple of other friends will occasionally post, “People. People people people. Not everything is a Tarot card!”

Silly experts, I think of them, gently, fondly, lovingly. They are just past the learning phase where everything suddenly becomes a world of pattern recognition. The students trip over their robes rushing to see the Yin and Yang and declare, “A-ha! The Lovers! Where one ends, the other begins! One completes the other but never becomes the other.” Yes, Grasshoppers. Soon they will understand that the pattern is within human intelligence, within the mind and connect, if they are fortunate, that the spirit of the pattern is what they have breathed on or at least the museum-quality glass that stands between them and the idea and ideal, between them and the essence of the archetype.

If my very advanced friends had not progressed beyond the thrill of discovery of pattern recognition, they would likely have been bombarded forever in the madness of meaning in everything. Some people get lost there. The people I am thinking of did not get lost, at least not for very long. They emerged with filters and understanding.

But I love the Tarot learners at the “collector” phase. Even if they are not collectors of decks, they are collectors of the sight of a concept portrayed another way, collectors of the enrichment of meaning, collectors of the correlation between symbol and definition.

In preparation for a road trip I want to take this year, I dragged out my books on Puebloan rock art. I have some favorite places to go, places where I could spend hours looking at the carvings made in the oxidation-varnished sandstone cliffs in the Four Corners area. I want to go to some other places with rock art, too. So much of the fun of travel is anticipation so one of the tasks will be mapping the route. But for now, I’m noodling into the details of the topic.

Since I’m a used bookstore hound, some of my texts on the topic are older, like F. A. Barnes’ Canyon Country Prehistoric Rock Art. My first impression is gratitude that I am not considered an expert in this topic and as such I will be at worst vilified for being unlearned. I’m grateful because, while this book has some wonderful photography of rock art in the Four Corners area and some good information about materials, I think Barnes himself is one rude dude. Intermixed with the really valuable information about what was known in 1982 about the people who lived in the area before the historic period (that’s, uh, the invasion of the people who were sure that their technology, intelligence and religion were much better than the people who were living there at the time) is something I feel liberated by my lack of standing and expertise to label as at the very least bad manners.

Barnes is democratic in his insults in the text. He insults amateur archaeologists, even those with extensive knowledge, along with the ancient peoples he studies. Distilling his thoughts, Barnes thinks we’re all stupid.

Per Barnes, the amateur archaeologists are stupid for trampling sites, pot-digging and collecting trophies, destroying the pristine areas so that real archaeologists have trouble making heads or tails of them. My own two gold coins come out at this point. I agree that stumbling into an archaeological site and messing it up is very disappointing. In fact, every archaeologist, amateur or otherwise, has likely destroyed wildly important evidence, microscopic and otherwise. So, F. A., pointing fingers at the enthusiast does seem to point those other fingers right back at you. Methods have changed since 1982 and I’ll bet you messed plenty of stuff up.

Worse than that, because we “advanced” people should be more responsible and can stand to be picked on by scientists our own size, roughly, Barnes then goes on to berate the people who seek to find meaning in the images carved on the rock walls. Not only is our New Age interpretation of the most innocent kind such as, “Oh, look! A frog!” and “Wow, I think they’re saying that up the river and close to the mountain range there are a lot of deer,” wrong-headed. It gets worse.


Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park
(c) Copyright 2007 Marcia McCord

 Barnes says that since the designs are not lifelike representations of people, animals or anything else they carved into the walls, they were not the charming stylistic choices of a people who saw things a certain way. They are, according to Barnes, “bad artistry.” While it seems certain that the rock art, done over hundreds of years of occupation of the area, was done by adults, Barnes has concluded that they had a primitive, child-like intelligence. In short, they were stupid, too.

To which I say: Barnes, you meathead, you! How can you possibly say all these people are stupid? After all, you yourself call them “Anasazi,” a version of the Dine (Navajo) word for “ancient enemy.” Who on earth would call themselves Ancient Enemy? Your ancient enemy, maybe? (No insult to the Dine intended. Lovely people.)

Oh. I forgot. There are those computer games. I wonder what the archeologists will make of those?

While I’m not fighting with Barnes, his bad manners, misanthropy and obviously poor upbringing, I am getting a lot of information. Like the Two of Pentacles, you have to juggle the good with the bad and figure it out yourself.

Oooo, look! A Super Nova!

Best wishes!

Layaway

I’m starting to see Christmas shopping TV commercials, at least those aimed at the shop-early-and-often crowd. I haven’t even gotten over the World Series yet, let alone the elections. I thought Thanksgiving was the next thing on the schedule. But at least one retailer has resurrected an old staple from my early retail therapy days: Layaway.

Layaway is a form of extreme wishing where the retailer takes care of the storage of your intended purchases while you give them money on a payment plan over time that in theory results in your purchases arriving under the tree at just the right time. As I recall, the penalty for missing a payment is that they keep the stuff you wanted and all the money you paid to date.

The ad for this says “free layaway” as if that’s a new feature. Actually, the deal with layaway was that it was always interest free. Only later did stores start adding handling charges and then credit cards became more and more common. But for the new generation of people for whom layaway is a new concept, this probably seems like a good deal.

I can’t blame retailers for wanting to be innovative about increasing their sales during the holiday season. They are in business. There are plenty of people who want to buy gifts for themselves and others. It’s the basic agreement of commerce.

Layaway represents a kind of cautious optimism. It’s based on the belief that you will be employed in some fashion at least through the holiday season, long enough to get your treasures out of the back storeroom. It’s also based on the caution that you would just as soon not pay interest on borrowed money the way you would if you used your credit card. It’s something of the perfect risk for the young shopper who does not already come equipped with a credit card. (I suppress an eye roll here but I know people whose children have their own credit cards.)

I remember my early teenage years in New Mexico with my first independent shopping forays. When I wasn’t babysitting the adorable little girls next door at 50 cents an hour, I would go to my mother’s antique shop downtown. Our town was small, population 8,000 or so if you didn’t count the university. One friend’s mom worked at J. C. Penney; another, at the office supply and stationery shop near the town square.

These early experiences fostered the young shopaholic urges that really start to bloom in the teen years. It used to be that I was an easy mark for penny candy and twelve-and-a-half cent comic books. My 50 cents a week pre-teen allowance could yield 2 comic books and a hoard of penny candy each week. If my brother and I agreed on the comics we bought, it was like getting four comic books a week. He learned to tolerate my Weird Tales and I gained a certain taste for Fighting Forces. It helped that my favorite penny candy was a treat called Kits, chocolate-flavored taffy squares individually wrapped which sold for a set of four for a penny. Do the math, and I could get one hundred pieces of candy and a week’s worth of thrills and chills every week.

This bit of heaven gave way to more grown up tastes. At age 5 or 6, I had fallen deeply—well, deeply for a 5 or 6-year-old—in love with my father’s friend who was an assistant manager at an office supply store in Florida. Tall, dark, handsome and with a seemingly endless supply of colored pencils, crayons, Cray-Pas, watercolors and an assortment of paper, Phil was ideal husband material in my mind. The small inconvenience of his being some 25 years older was a flaw I was willing to overlook. Tragically, Phil married someone else, an adult with presumably more interests in common. At first I was jealous. Then, I shrugged it off as Phil’s loss. He could have gone hunting with my father every weekend and I could draw beautiful pictures for him.

But I never lost my love of office and art supplies.

I was a frequent customer at the office supply store in our tiny town in New Mexico and craved the fine stationery available there, along with the art supplies. I had lots of people to write letters to in Florida, although not Phil. I mean done is done after all.

Almost immediately after indulging my office supply cravings, I discovered the wonderful world of fashion.

I had grown used to being mistaken for a college student by sixth grade. My figure bloomed early, much to my embarrassment. My generous chest dimension, plus my ease at talking with adults just enough but not too much, something I had perfected in my mother’s antique shop over the years, led shopkeepers to ask me constantly what my major was in college.

“Secondary education,” I lied, clear-eyed. It was close after all. I was in junior high. Just because I was a junior high student was a detail of immaterial consequence in casual conversation.

The drugstore held the wonder of makeup and I was hooked. The self as canvas became a new world, although with my uneven completion I speculated the cloth was less like canvas and more like burlap or dotted-Swiss. But makeup seemed to even that out a bit too and gave me a little confidence that I sorely lacked when I looked more like pizza than I wished.

And clothing! Here is where layaway became essential. I was tired of Peter Pan collars, red windbreakers and matching red Keds. I wanted grown-up clothes. A shop called Mode-o’-Day had a great little number that was a warm floral print on black and I was going to make it mine. I would go into the store and try it on again and again, pleased with the effect, short but not too short, a little daring but completely modest. This was more like a college student!

By the time I got it out of hock it did still fit and I was ready to wear it to a dance. I didn’t worry that it wouldn’t hold up under intense activity; I couldn’t dance anyway. While not exactly Goth, since Goth didn’t exist as a look then, I was satisfyingly dark but perhaps even more satisfyingly dressed in something I had picked out, not Mom.

Mom’s reaction to the dress was to be horrified. I had grown used to this being her reaction to just about everything I did then. A few years later I pieced together that it was just any evidence that I was growing up that horrified her. She sought to devalue the dress by calling it cheap and cited her own standard for purchasing clothing.

“Best to have one good sweater than ten cheap ones,” she instructed.

I fought back with my natural hard-headedness. My money, I reasoned, my purchase.

Strangely, she could not argue well enough with that. I had, after all, not used her money to purchase the awful thing. I was thrilled when I wore it the first time. I was crushed when it proved Mom right and fell apart in the wash.

But I had learned to juggle my funds on my own and went on to buy the best Christmas presents for my family ever, whatever they were. They were the best because I had a job, I used my own money and I bought what I wanted to give them. I was becoming financially independent in balancing income and expenses, like the 2 of Pentacles in Tarot.

Next to new kittens and puppies or a guy with access to endless art and office supplies, financial independence became the greatest high of my formative junior high days. I realized that not being dependent on my parents was the most important goal of my future, even if some things fell apart in the wash.

Best wishes!

Experience the Present

My friend Ronda and I decided a long time ago we both have too much stuff. If there’s a contest for too much stuff, I think I won, at least between the two of us. I had a head start, though, since Mom had an antique shop. I’ve made my own contributions of course. At any rate, concluding as we have that we both have entirely too many things and adding to that the notation that our birthdays are less than one month apart, we like to celebrate our days and our friendship with gifts of experience. Experiences take up less room in your garage or closet if you don’t bring home too many souvenirs.

Our present to each other for the last several years has been to go on nature hikes. We both share a love of nature conservation, flora and fauna. And we both go about the same pace, a little faster than a motorized wheelchair, a little slower than 75% off at a bookstore. Nature should be savored and should not result in a trip to the chiropractor. Nature should be ooohed and ahhhed at softly, not screamed at like March Madness. Nature should be generally low technology, since our day jobs land us smack in the middle of technology (we make exceptions for binoculars and digital cameras). Nature should come with a picnic table, a bathroom, pomegranate juice, curried chicken salad sandwiches, trail mix and Girl Scout Thin Mints. Nature should be respected by packing out the trash and watching where you step, including not needing to be rescued or considered under the Stupid Hiker Laws. Within those boundaries, which are in fact loose and flexible in our opinion, we find ample opportunity.

We have explored off-birthday-season adventures and retail rather than nature adventures, usually involving my urging Ronda to purchase the aquamarine ring she’s just discovered that she always wanted. But our favorite outings have been the field trips sponsored by the Point Reyes National Seashore Association http://www.ptreyes.org/. The PRNSA is a non-profit organization working in partnership with the National Park Service to provide education and to raise funding through various programs, like their field seminars, to preserve our connections to nature especially in the Point Reyes area.

The field seminars have offered us a tremendous variety of experiences, including tidepooling at extreme low tides (where I saw this fan-TAS-tic baby octopus lounging in a puddle-sized pool), the earthquake trail (where you can see how the 1906 San Francisco earthquake split a fence so the ends were feet away from each other in a single move), folks uses of plants (which we liked so much that we took the class a second time), a bird-watching cruise up the Napa River, the now-locally-infamous Tule Elk-Whale Watching-Great Horned Owl experience where we nearly ruined our friend Pamela’s really nice car and spring wildflower walks so windy that we almost blew off the Marin cliffs to the beachful of lounging harbor seals below. Talk about the balance of nature! Well, you can’t beat that for adventure!

This year, we went for something a little different and found a gem of an experience. The weather was perfect for our Birding Yolo County field trip led by John Klobas and his daughter Sarah Klobas. Not only did this provide us with a new venue never trekked before, but the magic words “car based excursion” were too tantalizing to resist. What if we went on a full day adventure and didn’t spend the next day laid out flat in bed from being spectacularly out of shape? Think of the possibilities! We would get the nature experience, a bit of a hike without a mountain climb, the picnic, the photos, the whole magilla.

No matter what it must sound like, I am actually not a birder. At least I’m not the kind of birder I associate with bird watchers who keep lifetime statistics on what bird they’ve seen when. But I like to go on birding trips because I tend to see everything else along with the birds. And the people who go on birding trips are usually gentle, quiet, sincere, curious, helpful…well, I’m about to add thrifty and other Scouting traits. But you get the idea. They are calm and they don’t want me to fix anything; it’s a complete contrast to my day job.

We were pleasantly surprised to find John and his daughter Sarah knowledgeable and entertaining. I personally was flabbergasted at the excellent and unobtrusive organization that was part of the trip too. And why I did not expect the enormous variety of birds on this trip I will never know! True to my non-birding status, I gave away my bird counting card to a fellow student who needed one and I do not have a full count of the birds we saw, but briefly: 3 kinds of hawks, an osprey complete with fish in talon, a zillion ducks including a wood duck, at least two types of herons, hummingbirds, a barn owl, a few “introduced” species like peacocks and an ostrich, and a full chorus of songbirds. Of course, there were not just birds, but all kinds of other creatures like a river otter and the usual squirrels. There was even a sleepy little bat in the ladies room at the picnic area who looked like a walnut with ears. We visited Lake Solano made from the creek draining Lake Barryessa, next the home of a generous bird lover named Manfred who let us tramp over his yard to show us hummingbird and oriole nests, and last a wonderful wetlands near Davis and the freeway. Our final show at this wetlands was a huge gathering of yellow-headed blackbirds facing the setting sun for their final warm up before evening.

While at the wetlands, we were surrounded by birdsong. I mused to Ronda, “If birds are the nearest descendants of dinosaurs, I wonder if dinosaur song was as lovely as this?” Watching the pelicans, cinnamon teals, coots, white-faced ibis and blackbirds, I was glad for the advantage of scale suddenly. Birdsong is pretty. Dinosaur song perhaps might not be so restful. This is another good reason to enjoy the present.

No matter what kind of life you have, it’s important to do something like this to balance out your life. Maybe you don’t have a nature-buddy like my friend Ronda, but it’s important to balance your own nature. If you do, maybe those dinosaurs you work with all day will remind you of birdsong. And with that little bit of balance, like the Two of Pentacles, you can keep your life going, stay in the game, make a little progress and stay in touch with the present.

Best wishes.