Welcome 2014

2013 sure had its ups and downs for me, almost the epitome of why, “May you live in interesting times” is called a Chinese curse. Yup, interesting times. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there and 2013 as the year of the Lovers was more like trying the find the puzzle pieces after the Tower fell down just to get something back together. Stability in work, relationships, finances, governments, health, even Show Biz was questionable all through the year.

Sometimes, all you’re looking for is just one more donut before you walk into Weight Watchers, you know? And yet, on the police scanner, there’s a report of someone sitting in their car for ten minutes eating donuts behind Target. Now, this in itself says a lot about life today and how the year might pan out for 2014.

When you have a New Year’s Resolution, you might want a really good swan song for that thing you’re trying to change.

I know that if I were going to give up donuts in 2014, and I haven’t quite committed to that although, in my own defense, I can’t remember the last time I had a donut, I might sit in my car for at least ten minutes savoring the last dozen or so. You can see that right? Kind of that 9 of Cups moment before the King of Swords takes over with good sense, you see?

So, yeah, I’m not doing the last dozen donuts thing but I did get this cool app for my iPhone to track what I eat. I know the pitfalls of this whole thing though. If you lie to your food diary, it doesn’t work as well. Why you’d do that is beyond me, but I recognize the phenomenon. Heck, I’ve been guilty of it myself. The levels of self-sabotage in improvements efforts are, to paraphrase one of my favorite philosophers, Sandra Boynton, without number.

Slimming down isn’t my only goal for 2014. If I had my druthers, I’d just as soon a few areas of my life regained some kind of sanity, like work, relationships, finances. Oh, and I need to gas up the car. Yeah, the mundane seems to have gotten a bit out of hand for me lately, too.

At least I’m not alone in the effort to resolve and re-resolve, refocus for better resolution and, if possible, avoid revolution. The cats’ personalities here at the compound have their own proposed 2014 resolutions.

Eleanor, who is a tremendous coward much more timid and terrified than any lion from Oz, has become a tiny bit braver lately. She’s black and white and scream all over, or she used to be. She’s still black and white but the volume of screams has reduced over time. She actually let me pick her up for a while the other day. This is a breakthrough because in the last 6 or 7 years being picked up and cuddled was obviously the precursor to being devoured by monsters. Or something. So this time she was on a purr-fest from being brushed and talked to specifically. A pet psychic said we should think more positive thoughts about her to boost her self-esteem. What could it hurt, right? And it seems to be working. So in the midst of this happy moment, I tried picking her up and I think we were there something like three whole minutes.

From this and from Eleanor’s recent ventures from the kitchen into the dining room and living room, I conclude her 2014 New Year’s resolution is, “I shall endeavor to be braver.” When you say this in your mind, you need to picture her with a hat and gloves seated for tea somewhere in the Midsomer Murders’ summer country in a sunny room waiting for the Detective Chief Inspector’s next question about what happened last Thursday.

On the opposite end of the psychopath scale in our little feline household is Pixie a/k/a Baby. All famous crime lords (ladies?) have nicknames, so it seems natural that our own little innocent-until-proven-guilty would have one too. Baby’s actually softening up in her adult years. She has only once in recent memory taken a flying leap and landed with all four paws full of claws on the HUBS’ back. He’s almost healed now, except that spot on his arm. And she only once tried setting the house on fire, knocking the iron off the ironing board and onto the floor, melting two of the floor tiles. She did this so well that the automatic shutoff didn’t engage because the iron landed plate-side down, like an iron should. One new iron and two replaced floor tiles later, plus airing the house out to get rid of that melted rubber smell and things are like new. I always did like Mr. Wolf in the movie Pulp Fiction, the guy wiseguys had to call when something unexpected happened, like accidentally shooting a guy in your car, and you need an expert to clean things up before the wife gets home.

Baby has actually gotten a lot cuddlier. She used to try to take my hand off after about the third stroke when I was petting her. She really likes the dog and the HUBS but not really anyone else. This is a heartache to me because I rescued her, one of my many little efforts to find a kitty a home that ends with the new home being mine. We naturally took her with us on vacation a scant two weeks after I took her in and I hoped it would be a bonding experience. It was, sort of. Two out of three ain’t bad, as Meatloaf sang, the dog and the HUBS. For some reason, she’s got the mother-daughter blues, a gentle reminder of the “Seven Years War” my mother and I had. Mom and I became good friends, so I hold out hope for Baby.

Lately she’s been letting me pet her more than just the three strokes and I’ve learned the subtle cues that mean enough is enough, like that banshee wail that starts out as a low rumble. And she does respond to gentle baby-talk and kind wishes, although I hasten to add that even the dog, big softie that he is, occasionally has to growl at her for eating his food or just getting too close. He does not do this to Binket, his other-species paramour; she can smear her whole self on him and he nudges her with his nose, gives her typical doggy sniff and the occasional slurp. It’s the picture of true love with those two.

Baby is destined to have more of a struggle in life, mostly because of her need to defend herself before a threat has emerged. I know people like that. But if the kitten can get better, there’s probably hope for the world.

Wherever you are on the psychopath scale, oh, let’s call it the empathy scale, hmm? That’s so much more upbeat. Anyway, wherever you are, if you make a New Year’s resolution, try to take the long view. Like the 3 of Wands, when you launch the project, look out beyond the horizon to the positive end. That way, if the boat tips a bit here and there, you’ll have something bigger and more important in mind than day-to-day ups and downs.

Happy New Year and best wishes!

Looking Forward

One of the questions asked in a Tarot group on Facebook recently is, “Did you have a Tarot mentor?”

I didn’t. I was self-taught. I started out with regular playing cards when I was very young. We always had decks of regular cards. My family and I played card games on rainy days, weekends and holidays. We played many different variations of poker. We played rummy, Hearts, Spades, War, and countless variations of solitaire.

My mother liked card games, especially Blackjack. Years before I was born, my mother was a lieutenant in the Navy WAVES during World War II. She had been thrilled to be placed in the Navy’s cryptography section only to find the assignment crushingly boring! How could it be boring, I wanted to know? I loved puzzles. Think about having a job where you solved puzzles all day long! She patiently explained that since she was an officer, she wasn’t really allowed to solve the puzzles and crack the codes; she was charged with supervising other WAVES who were working on code breaking. Mom’s strong point was never people management, “soft skills,” and personnel work.

She put nearly all her wages during her stay in the Navy into U.S. Savings Bonds but kept just enough out for a vice or two. One of them was Blackjack. She was good at it. She won more often than she lost. I never credited her with having a “poker face” and silently speculated that her trim figure and excellent legs (which she selfishly did not pass along to me, darn it) served to distract her predominantly male Naval officer poker partners just enough to lose track of the count of cards. As she was able to tell the story and as evidenced by the matured savings bonds that she cashed in when I was six, she cleaned up at the poker table.

We learned Blackjack, 5 card stud, 7 card stud, Spit in the Ocean and a number of other poker games. She dutifully explained that there were people, usually people who were very strict about their religion, who felt playing poker was evil. Why, there were even those who thought card games of any sort were evil. They probably didn’t approve of dancing, either. She thought it might be that this kind of thinking could be more prevalent in smaller towns in the Midwest, like the one she and Daddy had grown up in. But she had seen the world, or at least most of the United States east of the Mississippi, and felt more sophisticated than that.

Cards weren't bad unless you cheated or somehow got lost in trying to win your money back and got deeper and deeper in the hole. But cards were just pieces of paper with numbers and pictures on them. And they were a great way to learn your numbers, especially in the late 1950’s. I was suddenly able to count to 21, 13 and 52, deal five and seven cards, and bid speculatively on my chances of winning. We used wooden matches for currency at first, then graduated to poker chips. We never bet real money. Who would do that?

They made fun of me for dealing “backwards” using my non-dominant left hand to distribute cards around our large, round, low round table in the family room. But I could hold my own in spite of being the youngest.

I was fascinated with the cards, the smooth linen finish, the complicated Bicycle pattern on the backs, the mirrored court cards, the pattern of the arrangement of pips, always showing that numbers were made of smaller numbers in smaller patterns. I started to find something more meaningful within the suits. I knew I should love the hearts best or perhaps the diamonds, since diamonds were my birth stone. And spades were “scary,” so gentle, rounded and handy at one end sharpening to a dangerous point at the other. But I liked clubs. I didn’t know why. And the queen of clubs was my favorite in the poker deck because she was smart, energetic and talkative, sociable. Why, she liked cats and dogs and would set up her veterinary clinic for teddy bears on the weekends. Somehow, the cards had a language of their own and I began reading cards and the stories they told there on that big round maple table.

Mom didn’t stop me. She didn’t mind. While she was a stickler for the concrete, a Doubting Thomas, a scary “spades” kind of person, her sharp mind and sharp tongue did not stifle my world of intuition and connections to other. She said she thought it might be genetic, since after all we had gypsy blood, Bohemian Gypsy. She said it with pride and a little defiance, as if it were something she could say at home with us but not aloud in the streets of her home town in the Midwest.

It was OK to be who you were. More than that, nothing ever diminishes you.

I knew it was different. I knew it wasn’t something most people would understand. After all, if my friend’s mother told me I was going to hell for mistakenly saying the wrong age on the Popeye Show, would I go deeper for reading cards? And it connected with the dreams and other experiences I had had since I could remember.

Then I found there were books, booklets, strange little papers that added to and validated what I had already picked up. My mother’s antique shop was a treasure chest of constantly changing reading material, my own personal random library of pulp and lore and leather bound gems. I soaked it up. I read palms. I studied ESP. I had dreams and interpreted. I picked up the rudiments of astrology. We moved to New Mexico and I burned through the entire metaphysical section of the public library. But I had no mentor. The more I learned, the better I became at it and the better I became, the more I understood it wasn’t something you talked about.

“Cindy!” I hissed into the phone I dragged into my bedroom closet one evening, the way teenage girls talk to their best friends. “I’ve met someone!”

In any other conversation, this would have meant A Boy, tall, dark and handsome or some combination of traits that paid attention to me. But this was different. I had met Mr. Schultz at the hospital. Mr. Schultz was a little older than my usual teenage idol, hovering somewhere around 70.

“He’s psychic, Cindy! He understands.” We made arrangements to meet Mr. Schultz the next weekend in the hospital coffee shop during break for the volunteers. We brought a map that Saturday and spread it out on the small table, the three of us, a white-haired angelic old man in a red volunteer’s coat and two wide-eyed teenagers at the beginning of everything.

“Yes,” he told Cindy, never taking his eyes off the map. “You will go to California and dance and meet your destiny.” Cindy’s eyes shone, her dreams certain. The trance-like concentration was catching, a lesson in scrying. He glanced up at me and smiled.

“You’ll go to California, too, but not the same place,” he breathed evenly, his eyes set like jewels in his pink cheeks.

“Yes,” I was suddenly in the zone and understood I had been there before, but suddenly aware of what it felt like. I moved my finger across the map from our tiny town in eastern New Mexico.

“But I have to go here first.” Without lifting my finger from the map, I dragged it to a place I had never been before.

“Fort Wayne, Indiana?” Cindy sputtered over the map, laughing, half in horror. I had to admit, it was a strange thing for me to say.

“Yes,” said Mr. Schultz. That was The Lesson. The 3 of Wands is called a “gating card” in Tarot because it points to the readiness and launch of a new project. The character in the card looks out to sea at the ships he has launched and his vision includes the understanding of the adventure that is yet unseen, just over the horizon.

Years later, while on the telephone company’s private jet on my way to an interview in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I remembered that day. Suddenly I didn’t care about the outcome of the interview. After all, I was going to California.

Best wishes.

From a Distance

“The city is like a girl with a bad complexion: Pretty from a distance.”

I don’t remember what movie that’s from but it’s a line that has stuck in my head even if the title of the movie fell out somewhere along the way. I knew what that was like though, both the city and the complexion problems. Sometimes, when things are not completely in focus, they appear to be so beautiful, their blurred edges like a glow.

Over the Christmas break when I was in 6th grade, we moved. We sold the light blue house with the water meter toad trap, the carport where the rat cage and the snake cage had been, the old-fashioned wringer-washer that was so entertaining, the tree one of our dogs liked to climb, and the azalea hedge in the back where I meticulously plucked dozens of blooms to make my mother a surprise Hawaiian lei to her great dismay. We left the never-finished swing set frame my father had had Pappy the Plumber build for me out of salvage pipe on my 7th birthday. We left the sandbox where my brother buried me and finished the job with a shovel-full of sand in my mouth. We left the avocado tree whose branches had broken every time we tried to climb it. We left the backyard that had spawned puppies and kittens, earth-moving projects with toy trucks, and kumquats which only my father could eat.

The movers packed our house and my mother’s enormous antique shop. We had filled two moving vans and another trailer that shipped by train. We took my new Persian cat Dickens and my mother’s poodle Pierre and my brother’s dog Beau, half poodle, half beagle. We piled into the two cars, the matching Oldsmobiles that were blue for my mother and brown for my father, and drove to a place we had never been before, leaving, in spite of the cars and truckloads of stuff, nearly everything familiar behind.


Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

 We stopped in Georgia, lost the cat, found the cat and drove on. We stopped in Texas, marveling at the never-before-seen snowfall, its beauty and wonder and possibilities beyond our imagination. Just as quickly as we leapt from the car in our newly acquired soft-soled moccasins into the Texas snow, we bounced back into the car, howling because it was cold and wet. The snow blew away behind us as we chugged westward toward New Mexico and on a sunny cold afternoon, we entered my new town.

“Is this the bad side of town, Daddy?” I asked, looking at the unlovely faux-stucco walls with chicken wire showing through at the edges, dust covering everything to create a uniform color scheme of reddish-gold without sparkle.

“No,” my father braced himself. “This is the town.” This was the inauspicious beginning to our next seven plus years.

Our new house was on the edge of town in a new subdivision. It was, we soon realized, the worst house we had ever lived in. There was a weed growing up through the floor and baseboard inside my bedroom. The house was small. It was poorly built. It was decorated in the same colors as the dust outside. I began to hate the color brown.  There were no trees, only the flat, dry landscape visited occasionally by thorny rolling tumbleweed. We tackled the heart-wrenching, body-slam that was unpacking the house and the antique shop. More bad news: The movers had flipped one of the moving vans in the snow in Texas, starting a months-long lawsuit to settle the claim. The shop was smaller than what we had had in Florida too. The screaming and fighting had begun again, the echoes of my early childhood when my parents had battled so terribly and terrorized us.

I started the second half of 6th grade in a new school and tried to play on a playground hard as pavement and covered with a thin coat of dust and tiny gravel the size of BB’s. I was in the nurse’s office every other day, picking gravel out of newly scraped knees, wondering if they would ever completely heal. I started to get an idea why there were so many sad country songs.
Somehow, I found something positive along the way but it wasn’t easy. My brother had given me his old Stingray bicycle when he had gotten a new one and I began to ride through the winding streets of our subdivision. That bicycle was my magic carpet, my time machine, my spaceship, my angel wings. I learned to ride it without hands, to stand on the pedals with my arms thrown out or crossed, steering by speed and angling the bike with my knees.  I could do tricks on the bike and sailed past my new house with one foot on the banana seat, Arabesque.

All of a sudden, the world was prettier on that bike. The houses rushing past my eyes were almost the color they had been painted instead of being muted and daubed with the incessant sandblast that took the color out of everything when I stood still. Lawns seemed greener instead of patchy and dead. The families in the houses looked happier the faster I rode and the taller I stood. I could see farther. And because I could, instead of focusing on the details of the weed that grew through my bedroom floor, or the scratches in the sand-blasted window glass, or the cars and houses that would never seem clean if you looked at them closely, my perspective changed.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had found some small way to exert some control over my life by changing the way I viewed it. Sure, the dust was still there, but my world had color again.

As in the 3 of Wands, a project is often most promising at its outset, when you strive to see over the horizon and imagine the wonders beyond. The goal is pretty from a distance. It is especially so when you cannot see its flaws, grow bored of its sameness and regret what you left behind. As I launched myself like my own ship, first on a bike, then that summer through voracious reading of everything I could get my hands on, including the entire city public library, I began the time in my life when all things “out there” become more attractive than the sameness of what I already knew too well. I set my sights on what was beyond my current vision, having learned that I was capable of leaving part of myself behind to begin something new.

My world was pretty from a distance now and I worked toward that distance so I could once again marvel at the beauty of the imperfect world up close without disappointment. I set off to learn new things, wonderful things, to feel new sensations, to see with different eyes, even if there be dragons.

Best wishes!