Hold the Phone

There was a sudden noise this afternoon. No, actually it was a sudden lack of noise. I was on my work computer fussing over a problem with a document that stubbornly would not display where it was told to display. I had chased the problem down and frustratingly concluded that I had to try again tomorrow. I paused and my computer screen dimmed. That was odd too. I picked up my house phone and realized it wasn't working. In fact the internet was down. I was about to dial my internet provider and realized with a laugh that it was really the power that was off. A quick check on my cell phone confirmed it might be a couple of hours or so. While I still had batteries on my cell phone I sent a note to my boss.

Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

And for a moment I realized I was out of touch with my workaday world. What little battery life I had left was running out. How odd, I thought, after being so very connected with so many little machines, machines I might have barely missed 20 years ago, I am momentarily "out of touch." What a funny, free feeling. But I was delighted that I had cats, dogs, books, cards, needlework and that spider in the bathroom to occupy me. That's hours of entertainment for my over-active Mercury Mind.

My friend Chea, an astrologer, marveled recently (politely, I might add) at my need for what would likely be entirely too much input for someone else. I agreed with her. Too much was almost enough. I once was faced with an assignment to do just one thing; I couldn't imagine a worse job.

Tracking several things at once feels right to me. I had been keeping an eye on a couple of Tarot threads in Facebook. One of the discussions touched on whether cards could be predictive.

This might astound people who aren't part of my regular crowd of Tarot buddies. How could people who read cards professionally question whether cards could actually be used to look into the future? After all, isn't what what card readers do, tell fortunes, foretell the future?

Seriously, many pro Tarot readers don't believe in predicting the future. What do they read about in the cards? The answer is lots of things. A good interactive session of Tarot can help clarify choices for someone who is struggling with what to do. A deeply spiritual Tarot session can assist a person with dealing with grief or change or just a higher level of consciousness like being present in the moment instead of distracted by past or future anxieties.

One perspective on the future holds that free will and often blind chance muddy the waters of the future so much that those umpteen zillion alternate universes that split off with every decision we make are just too many to pick a future outcome. I respect the people who hold this view. Some of them are my best Tarot friends and good readers. I also hold the other view and do predictive readings. I even agree with the currently-held physics-based concept of the alternate universes at each juncture. Where I disagree with my non-predictive friends is that the ability to sense an outcome is not always so close to a zero percent chance of picking the probable future. True, sometimes it is complete mud.

And then there are those other times.

Another Facebook thread, one from a more famous paranormal investigator/psychic/actor named Chris Fleming asked people if they had ever had a moment of ESP. He went on to specify, Did you ever know something in advance that you had no real way to know?

I thought, Sure. Lots of times. And I flashed back to the 1970s.

No, no, not THAT kind of flashback! I never experimented with hallucinogenics even though they seemed fairly readily available. I always figured my best asset was between my ears with my extreme vanity for my feet coming in a distant second. But flash back, I did.

It was August in the mid-70s when the dream started. It happened over and over. I would pull cards about it, but it was still a mystery to me. The experience in my dream was actually being in the car during the accident. I heard myself scream. Crumbles of glass flew at me as I turned my head over my left shoulder in the direction of impact. The dog jumped in my lap. The car that hit our car was in some way locked in its front end to our driver's side back fender...where the gas cap was. The other car was spinning counter-clockwise in the fog, heavy fog and forcing us off the road, into the ditch. Was it deep? And my ex-husband was fighting to keep the car from rolling, from flipping, from doing anything but stopping just off the road.

And then, there was the quiet. We looked at the car that hit us. In the fog, I could not tell if it was blue or green; I just knew it was big, bigger than the little yellow sportscar my ex drove. We had come to a stop, not flipped, not rolled, at the margin of a cornfield. And my ex walked to the corner of "Cornfield and Cornfield" to call in the accident from the pay phone there.

I had this over and over again all winter. It was always the same. I heard myself scream, I watched the glass fly, the fog, the spinning car, the cornfield and the pay phone. I told my ex about it, assuring him that the car was a bit messed up but we were OK and that that was the message. Don't freak out. We're OK.

He shrugged it off like he did most of my interest in metaphysical studies. He listened, but he shrugged it off.

Winter was over and it was St. Patrick's Day. We had traveled with our little dog Stoney in my ex's treasured yellow sportscar to his parents' home in Wood River, Illinois, partied with his friends and decided it was better to get up early Monday morning on March 17 and get back to Carbondale in time for the ex to go to work.

It was foggy, really foggy near the intersection when we turned South on Highway 4.

"I'm getting that weird feeling again," I said to my ex. "It's like that dream only I'm awake."

"Shut up," he said. "Just shut up" He chewed his fingers, his easy tell that he was nervous, that he had heard me all along.

And just south of Lebanon, Illinois, it happened. We slowed in the fog to let someone turn right when the impact came. The nurse driving the car had just gotten off a long shift at the hospital, we found out later. She had looked up, saw us unexpectedly stopped, slammed on the brakes in the fog-wet pavement and started spinning. I heard myself scream. The dog jumped in my lap. The crumbling glass flew in slow motion towards me as my neck wrenched around to see the big car. We landed in the cornfield. I picked up Stoney's leash and stepped out of the car, knowing he would need to piddle after all that. My ex started screaming.

"My legs are trapped! My legs are trapped!"

I ducked my head back into the open car and smiled at him.

"Unbuckle your seat belt."

As I watched him direct the nurse to move her vehicle out of the road so the accident wouldn't be compounded, then head for the phone booth which was, of course, on the corner behind us, surrounded by cornfields, I thought, We're fine. At least I know how this goes.

Sometimes, like the 8 of Wands, the message just has to get through because transmission started a while back.

Best wishes.

Outgrown

I decided to grow my hair long again. It's been a while since it was long, something like 1980.

Hair is funny thing for a woman. They tell you it's your "crowning glory." Seriously, that never meant much to me. I figured my crowning glory was the fact that I yanked myself up by my own bootstraps. But you'd have had to be with me a long time to get that. Only my long-gone and still-missed cat Heart was with me long enough to understand that. She was there through the toughest parts of my life, or those times seemed so at the time.

I was baby-bald until I was almost two. Mom said she had to tape a bow to my head. The funny part of that story to me was the "had to" phrase. Had to? Soon enough, though, my hair grew in, first white blonde, then golden, thick and straight.

This made Mom crazy as she liked a bit of curl or at least wave in hair. She had been someone I considered a "doll person" when she was little. She had baby dolls and wanted to be a mother. She was thrilled to get a girl the second time around, although my sometimes less-than-delicate ways must have been a little disappointment. I spent much of my childhood trying to keep up with my brother, my "Irish twin" who was 11 months older. I wasn't a doll person.

Oh, I had lots of dolls, all right, Barbie Dolls, Ginny Dolls, Chatty Cathy, Horseman walking dolls, all dressed in pretty clothes and frills. I played with them just long enough to make sure my mother knew I appreciated the thought, then turned to real favorites: my real cats and dogs, stuffed animals who came to life under my own chatty imagination and Danish troll dolls. I adored the DAM troll dolls and had a huge collection. I loved them because they weren't trying to be beautiful or perfect. They exuded happiness in their smiling faces. They were short. They had long hair. They had funny feet and cute toes. I was mad for them.

Mom could not understand the fascination but indulged it. I created a whole world within the cabinets above my desk from the doll furniture from my mother's antique shop. They had beds, baths and beyond. They had a huge console radio, a vacuum cleaner, a full kitchen, a television. They had clothes I sewed from felt to cover their tiny troll bodies and protect them from the elements. They had troll pets. They had books and toys and dishes. They had a perfect little troll world that I would occasionally enhance with a crocheted tablecloth for their little round oak table or a new hat. I had one troll that had two heads who had come to me from one of Dad's trips away, from my Uncle Max, they told me. I didn't want to break the news that Uncle Max's trolls weren't really DAM trolls, the only really cute ones. He had sent three, two "ordinary" trolls and the two-headed one. I named them Winkin, Blinkin and Nod-Nod, two heads, two nods, I explained straight-faced. I brushed their colorful hair. What I thought best about their world was that it was quiet and happy. I thought that would be a nice life.

My trolls had hobbies, games, employment, studies and favorite things. They had projects. They cooperated. They hated housework--just like me--but they did just enough to get by--just like me. My trolls were interesting, much more so than the flat-faced staring "pretty" dolls  whose every move might muss their hair or tear some lace.

But still, I recognized that there was pressure to like the "pretty" dolls. I just couldn't do it. They were boring.

Mom dressed me up in dresses she made herself from Simplicity and McCalls patterns, with Peter Pan collars, puffy short sleeves, long sashes that tied in bows in the back, fiddly smocked bodices, and full skirts that required scratchy petticoats. I wore white lace-trimmed socks and Mary Janes, patent leather for dress up, Keds Mary Janes for play. I was her doll but I was rather bad at it, I felt.

Sometimes she would make "mother-daughter" dresses for spring so we would match. She despaired when I, having been sent to school in doll-like perfection, came home with a torn sash and a black eye, triumphant in victory on the playground again. From my earliest days, I associated getting dressed up with the restriction of free movement. I was not supposed to hang upside down on the monkey bars when I had my nice dresses and petticoats and patent leather strapped shoes. My best friend and boyfriend was gentleman enough not to laugh at me in kindergarten on our last day, hanging upside down eating cookies in our best clothes, my skirts fluffed around my nose in an unladylike fashion, my hair ribbons dangling at dangerous angles.

Hair was such a big deal to Mom. Her own hair gave her fits. It was extremely thick and extremely coarse and nearly impossible to style. But it at least had a natural wave that on occasion cooperated. Any curl that my hair exhibited was artificial. My hair was naturally board-straight. This didn't stop Mom.

I had permanents. Much like romantic relationships in junior high, they tended to last approximately two weeks, being anything but permanent. Sooner or later, any style perpetrated upon my straightness came undone. No ribbons, braid, clip or rubber band would hold it for long. Mom liked it just past my shoulders, partly because her ideal hair, as far as I could tell, was Lauren Bacall's. At night she would put it up in metal clip pin curls so that it would dry curly and fall to my shoulders in golden waves, all to fall straight by the end of the day. And we would begin again.

In junior high I rebelled against being a doll, partly because I was physically strong enough to resist being captured and pin-curled and partly because I was just hard-headed, a family trait. I decided to let my hair grow long, like the Beatles' girlfriends. They had straight hair. They were considered fabulously beautiful. It grew long and with a little trimming of split ends from the dry New Mexico air it started to look the way I liked. By then my high school buddies were doing whatever they could to straighten their hair, rolling them on beer cans and ironing them with the clothes iron. Lucky me! No such extraordinary measures were needed.

I kept my hair long, past my waist, for years and found that there are little inconveniences. For instance, it was unattractive to have it get caught under your arms with straight little tufts sticking out the front or back. It would get rolled up in the car windows. In the unrelenting New Mexico wind, it would lash my eyes, my cheeks until they were almost raw. In my college geology classes, it had to be braided when I went caving so as not to entangle bats. As I grew up and worked in an office, it got closed in filing cabinet drawers and caught on the adjustable back brace of steno chairs.

And somewhere around 1980 I realized that I didn't want a job, I wanted a career. I concluded that Alice in Wonderland was not a believable business figure. I made an appointment with the one man in town who cut women's hair, a man with a reputation for dating his wealthier women clients, a man who drove a Corvette. In Carbondale, Illinois, that was a big deal. He shook his head and gave me a bob, just above shoulder-length, crisp and businesslike.

It changed my idea of myself to see my reflection as a woman in a suit with bobbed hair. I became "professional." I went back to school for a second degree and became that professional. I moved to California and worked my tail off.

All the while I experienced the ennui of having to make some special effort to go in and have my hair restored to its "bobness" every few weeks. And after I was laid off in one of the huge dot.com bubble-burst massacres and finally got a job, it was in southern California, Orange County. It was hot, too darned hot.

I cut my hair again, this time into a short sophisticated wedge. But I am not sophisticated.

"Gimme a trim and a duck's butt, Debbie," I would tease my hairdresser who is a professional and takes her work seriously in spite of me.

So, after the careful consideration of a few moments' assessment, perhaps the obvious outward influences of the transit of Uranus through Aries across my natal sun coinciding with my second Saturn return, I decided to grow it out again, long as it will go.

Like the 8 of Wands, it is a work in progress signaled by growth, energy and movement. My hair may soon be up in the air. Debbie estimates I'll hate myself right about Christmas when it gets to a dreadful length that is not cooperative, fashionable or flattering. But then, past that, I'll let it grow so I can be myself instead of the corporate look I thought I needed to adopt to hide in plain sight and have now outgrown. I am no longer a doll. I am me.

This is the beginning.

Best wishes.

It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Christmas

One of my friends passed a Chanel No. 5 poster with Brad Pitt on it with something extra added to the “inevitable” slogan. It was too funny, but if there’s anything that will get girls to buy their own Christmas presents, it’s a picture of Brad Pitt. Maybe Johnny Depp would work the same magic. Thanks to Thelma and Louise, the cougar set likes to think of themselves as holding the possibility for a few special moments with a talented young man like Mr. Pitt or Mr. Depp. But of course, the idea here is to sell perfume, especially as a Christmas present.

My friend went on to say, with other friends chiming in, that she felt, in spite of the persuasive Mr. Pitt, the scent in question was … let’s see, she didn’t actually say “motor oil.” Well, you get the idea. It’s not her favorite.

Disclaimer: I happen to love Chanel No. 5 whether Mr. Pitt is pitching it or not but I seldom wear perfume at all because of the number of people who dislike (or worse, become ill due to) any scent other than fresh-out-of-the-shower. Even some shampoos can make you think the underlying base for fragrance is skunk oil. I tend to buy all my shampoos based on scent because, after all, I have to live with me all day.

One of the great benefits of knowing HUBS-1’s great Aunt Ann was that she was the queen of finding good homes for bent-box goodies like Fleur de Rocaille and other exotic treats. I was showered with little bent boxes with otherwise perfectly good expensive French perfumes while still in the good graces of the first in-laws. I got hooked on the whole Caron line and had to pay up or go cold turkey when the divorce happened. My favorite was Infini. Apparently the name didn’t guarantee the longevity of the product because I don’t see it offered any more, reflecting, I suppose, the relationship.

Perfumes have such a sales pitch. Even Fleur de Rocaille is advertised, “Fleur de Rocaille is recommended for romantic use.”

Huh? Well, I wouldn’t put it in a casserole. What exactly, for a perfume, is “romantic use”? There are still a lot of unanswered questions out there to be explored.

I also liked another Chanel product, Chanel No. 19. I’m no expert nose like my husband, John The Only Good One. But if I were pressed to say so, I’d say there were more flowers in Chanel No. 19. My opinion also included that this is a perfume for winter only, that it smells good with wool and snow and other things part of those days when your breath freezes before you like a rack of ice cubes. In the summer, I felt it was more like a floral sledgehammer. Now that I live in the eternal springtime of northern California, there is no wintertime that makes this scent right for me. It is shelved.

Old perfume turns into something bad, too. It browns. It caramelizes. It decocts to something less pleasant than its original intent. Timing is everything. Gather ye rosebuds… and rose scents where ye may and all that. When perfume gets old, it becomes a lot more like rotten leaves preserved in alcohol. I know this. Don’t ask me how.

In the discussion with my friend, some people hated Chanel No. 5 whether it was fresh or fermented, but we all agreed that perfumes are an intensely personal thing. I’m not so sure scents say so much about your personality as they do about your body chemistry.

I was cooing over Chanel No. 19, in winter of my youthful and experimental content, so much that I insisted my friend Sally try it. (You remember Sally from the time travel dream? That Sally). Elegant, I thought. Sophisticated. I had received compliments on it, after all.

Without actually drenching Sally in No. 19, I did convince her to try it. Wives, not all of them old, will say that you should wait a few minutes to let the perfume blend with your own body heat. They omit the body chemistry part, which is most likely the single most important ingredient.

While on me, No. 19 evoked a certain winter cottage in Doctor Zhivago, on Sally the scent was disappointing to say the least.

“Gah,” we both said together in disgust as if we could spit the smell out of our mouths. “It’s like… like… wet newspapers!”

Thank goodness the stuff washes off eventually. I was sorely disappointed. I had always thought and still think of Sally as being more interesting and beautiful than I am with a mane of just the right shade of red hair and dainty hands and feet and a laugh that can light up an entire room. I’d nearly asphyxiated both of us with my experiment. I let Sally pick her own perfume after that.

My perfume mania started to wane about the time that my first marriage struggled. The bloom was off more than one rose by then. It was Christmas time, glorious winter when one can wear silks and wools and boots and gloves and perfume to light up the frosty days. It was midnight mass at St. Kevin’s.

St. Kevin’s was a disappointment as a church to me, frankly. I like my Catholic churches gussied up like winter and this one looked positively Baptist to me with its cement-block walls and stark décor. Give me a good old Gothic full of pillars and marble and statues and candles. God and all the saints are older than I am and I don’t want to visit them in a place that’s—horrors—about my own age.

But, Kevin’s does pack ‘em in on a Christmas Eve there in snowy Illinois. I was sardined into a pew with my then-laws, feeling faintly panicky and making sure I knew where my nearest exit was in case of spontaneous combustion or whatever.

Cold as it was that winter’s eve, with all the body heat in the place, every drop of perfume had its chance to reach maximum potency. It was if the Ace of Cups had heated the liquid refreshment, recommended for romantic uses, to a rolling boil like the 8 of Wands. There was no turning back.


Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

 The well-dressed, well-perfumed woman in front of me in the camelhair coat with the fur collar (Fox? Possum? Raccoon?) began to fan herself in distress. All of us were dressed for the cold and gradually steamed in the rising heat. And, because we’re in church and it’s Midnight Mass, for crying out loud, no one can get up and leave because everyone will be certain that you’ve gotten a roaring case of the flu or food-poisoning from your mother-in-law’s cooking or you’ve just remembered you don’t qualify for mass due to a great sin of scandalous proportions. Any reason is likely to get you talked about for years and naturally your goal for the evening is to get God’s grace and get out of there.

And there’s Mrs. Possum-Collar fanning Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew at me while I’m packed so tightly in a pew that if I died I would still be sitting upright. We’ve got an older priest, bless his heart, who wants to go slowly through the entire lovely rite with elaborations and a few trips down memory lane. Well, it’s a wonder the only thing I came out of it with was a strong aversion to Estee Lauder anything, asthma and the sense that perhaps I didn’t fit into the then-laws’ family after all. Somehow, I lived.

But why, when I smell Estee Lauder perfume now, do I always thing of concrete blocks and opossums?

Merry Christmas and 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.