Strangely Quiet

“Are you sick?”

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

“No.”

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

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

I smiled.

“No,” I said, and resumed my work.

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

“Nope, I’m fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes.

***^^^***
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The Delegation

I am a woman of a certain age. It’s a certain age the folks in my family, home and high school class all know. I like calling it “a certain age.” I don’t mind the number. Our western society tells us I should despair in my deterioration. It’s true that I am no longer any good at all at gymnastics and my ability to sprint is greatly impaired by an old injury or two and at least one too many delicious meals.

My friend Erica recently pointed out that I also think everyone is tall. That happened somewhere around my freshman year in high school when I started getting this mysterious pain in my neck. I’d always been one of the stronger kids in school, not necessarily the biggest. I have always had to buy my clothes in the petites department even though I have graduated to women’s petites. It has a nice ring to it, petite. It sounds tiny but in clothing it just means short. Women’s petite means short and fat. There’s no getting around it really, no pun intended. But, in spite of my current clothing department’s limited style and color lines, it is possible to dress a little better than a flour sack. (There’s something about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear running around in my head, but it hasn’t solidified.)

The game knee slows me down, that’s for sure. My friends often walk too fast for me, even leaving me behind. It happened this weekend. They all made it to the elevators in no time flat. I made it there in no time flat and half. I took another elevator car. It was late in the day. It helped solidified my need to retire to my hotel room after a long day.

I went to a conference as a vendor liaison staff person to help a friend. It’s a little more complicated than being a greeter for a major discount store I refuse to name. It was an honor to be asked. I had a great time. I like new experiences, meeting new people, getting to know new things.


Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

Those new experiences inspire me. Just this weekend I had two new and interesting ideas, one collaborative effort with a smart friend at the conference and one I haven’t talked about to anyone yet. Sometimes I think the kind of creativity I have is the kind people view with scorn. My creativity is actually synthetic or syncretic. I like to rearrange pre-existing pieces into to new forms rather than starting with a blank canvas. Those new combinations help me understand the nature of the parts better and also the nature of the new thing better. So basically, I feel more comfortable as a collage artist than a portrait painter, more comfortable as a photographer than an abstract artist and even more comfortable enhancing existing software rather than creating all new software. Give me a junk pile and I’ve got art! I’ve got art and a lot of leftover junk. This explains my house actually.

I realized I liked working within existing boundaries to make something different a long time ago. Geometry proofs fascinated me. You know what the start is and you know what the end is and, using a set of rules and lots of possibilities, there are a lot of right answers. Geometry was a real eye-opener for me and my favorite class that year. What if, just what if there were a lot of ways to get the right answer? Wouldn’t that be the BEST?? That’s how I thought of it, a way to be different AND right too without everyone else being wrong. It was perfect in my eyes. That probably set the stage for a lot of the rest of my life.

When I was a computer programmer, I was immersed in the hairy-chested culture of male-dominated geekdom. I don’t mind the hairy-chested ones. I just didn’t want to be one. And that was different but thankfully not unique. In my department of about 100 people when I first started out as a programmer, then a database administrator, there were still about two men to every woman in numbers of technical folks. Some of the older guys weren’t too keen on females in technology.

I remember a guy from another department came to ask us about our databases. He, my manager and I all sat in a little conference room. The visitor asked my boss a question, looking only at him. My boss shrugged and looked at me. I answered. The visitor asked my boss a question and it went on this way for at least 30 minutes with the visitor never once looking at me or talking to me. It was one of the strangest times in my professional life. I had all the answers he wanted but he could not stand that a female was answering. I felt sorry for him. What a handicap he had. He just could not adjust to the change, the “invasion” of women into what had been male territory.

Another part of being a programmer then was the perceived status that a “development” programmer had over a “maintenance” programmer. Development programmers are like those artists who take a blank canvas and from that create what is for the moment a masterpiece. Unlike art, computer programs do not hang on walls to be admired for generations of museum hounds. They have to serve their business purpose. So in spite of their glorious beauty and perfection at their moment of birth, they have to change. Think of it like a baby, since a lot of programmers treat their “offspring” like their own progeny. To get along in the world the baby must become more versatile. Does this mean it is not perfect? (Try not to insult the fawning parents now.) Adding an extra arm and hand would mean that all of baby’s shirts would not fit, resulting in unforeseen wardrobe costs and probably some other trouble. So there is art, too, in maintenance programming. OK, wake up. I’m done with the programming stuff, but you get the idea.

People paid to adapt an existing set of components to new circumstances have to exercise creativity too. They just don’t get the same applause. It’s OK. There’s a lot more adaptation of current things to new circumstances needed than brand new things anyway, seriously.

So, as my new friend Eddie said, there I was (not an exact quote), there I was at the conference on the last day. I had actually left my hotel room well before check-out time, uncharacteristically organized behavior for a fun weekend, and dragging my rollerbag suitcase beside or behind me, I attempted to haul it, my tote, my purse and my bum knee up a few steps. It wasn’t working.

“Do you need some help?”

I turned to see a tall handsome young man with a look of amusement and sympathy on his face.

I flashed to my Dad for a moment. He was so bent on maintaining his independence that he would not accept help even when he needed it. He would not delegate. I want to learn from that. I thought about my satisfaction at being a maintenance programmer, an amateur photographer and Photoshopper, making something interesting out of what I’ve been given already. This was that moment.

I’m a certain age, like I said. It’s not an old age, no matter what you young'uns think. But if I’m successful, that’s where I’m headed. And when I’m old, a long, long time from now, I don’t want to be like my Dad, unable to accept help because it somehow means there is less of me. Nope, I can be smart. I can delegate. I can start practicing that now before I get caught by surprise.

“Yes!” I smiled at my cute knight in shining earrings and t-shirt and conference pass. “You know,” I winked at him as he took my suitcase and I made it up the stairs, pleased at my latest adaptation, “I used to be a young person.”

We both laughed. I thanked him for his gallant and timely save. It was his save but my transition. I went to the conference to pursue growth and new experiences, like the Knight of Wands. I got what I was looking for.

Best wishes.

Possum Holler

I love urban wildlife. I don't mean spouse swapping. I mean critters who have adapted to human invasion of wild territory. Some critters adjust better than others, like squirrels and the birds at the bird feeder.

Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

Some of the species are "introduced" although I don't think it was what Miss Manners had in mind. Our friend Karen in Fort Lauderdale took us for a little walk around her neighborhood when we visited a few years back. Part of the tour included show and tell about their current problem with iguanas who roam the neighborhoods. We saw them. They run in gangs and look like thugs in green leather jackets and little iguana-Mohawk topknots. The grouping (what DO you call a collective of iguanas?) we saw near the houses next to the canal looked like they were waiting for a friend outside a tattoo parlor, chain-smoking.

Aside from being startling, and I mean who, like the Spanish Inquisition, expects an iguana at your front door, I was curious about the harm these escapees cause. Apparently, they eat things like your landscaping. The most curious problem happens about this time of year, Karen said, when they sleep in trees in the winter. Being cold-blooded, they don't move much after a cold night and tend to fall out of the tree. OK, an iguana at the gates is one thing but one falling on your head is a bit much.

Most of my encounters with urban wildlife have been with the natives, like raccoons and deer. Deer love roses and so do people who live in California. One of my favorite garden tips came from the Marin I-J. A disgruntled gardener wrote in to the garden columnist, "Can you name a variety of rose deer won't eat?"

"Yes," came the expert reply. "Plastic."

The deer in California are different from the deer in the midwest. California deer are about the size of a good-sized dog. Deer in the midwest are about the size of a small horse. Well, they are when they are crashing through your backyard during a pleasant Sunday afternoon when you're trying to read a trashy novel in the sunshine. But, with the price of landscaping, rose-eating deer cause a lot of consternation. My friend Ronda has deer roaming her neighborhood and wild turkeys too. That's the bird, not the bottle.

Another thing that I wasn't used to when I moved to California is the occasional wild pig alert in the Mt. Diablo area. The pigs are descendants of domestic pigs brought in to keep the cows from eating acorns and losing their calves. A lot of little pigs later and occasionally wild pigs completely destroy people's yards, etc looking for goodies.

Lucky for me, my encounters with wildlife at home have been more benign and less costly to the property. A small rattlesnake was quickly relocated to the designated open space by a neighbor. Just part of the gold in them thar' hills here.

One of my favorite encounters was with the vain red-tailed hawk who hung out near our house for a while. He perched on the windshield wipers of the van across the street and admired his reflection in the glass, turning his head one way, then the other, as if to make sure his sideburns were even. He's moved on at least, hunting for songbirds and other small creatures in easier locations with fewer powerlines and dogs to interrupt the process.

Last night, however, the visitor was something of a more mundane variety.

First, I should tell you that Martha and Miguel next door have the cutest little chihuahuas, Chocolate and, um, Mrs. Chocolate. I've never quite gotten her name. Along with Mr. and Mrs. C also lives Moche who is, to the best of my understanding, a papillon. Moche makes a pretty good guard dog. You make the wrong move, you could lose an ankle. And he barks. In fact all of them bark and howl. When the ambulances screech down the next street over on their way to one of the two hospitals nearby, our very own "Mariachi Chorus" entertains us with their high-pitched song.

Ordinarily, I don't mind their serenades even at odd hours. I realized last night that the reason I don't mind is that ambulances go past here pretty fast and the accompaniment is generally brief. Last night was an exception, a long exception.

When Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus (the hubs and me) settled in for our long winter's nap last night, we had fully expected that the noisemakers and excitement from New Year's Eve was pleasantly over. You know, over, like a couple of days ago. We had just reached an agreement between the dog and cats Tony and Alice about which sections of what real estate on the mattress were allocated to whom and where the easements were when the racket started.

With no high pitched screaming, I was pretty sure the three canines next door did not have a cat as a quarry. After all, these are small dogs who are justifiably afraid of cats. The few outdoor cats in my neighborhood could take three small dogs with one paw tied behind their backs but are entirely too lazy to get into a situation like that.

Amid the chihuahua high notes was a baseline of songless growling. John and I looked at each other and shrugged. We were pretty sure the situation would resolve itself shortly. We were wrong. It went on. And on.

"I'm pretty sure the Mariachi Chorus has cornered an opossum in the fence back there," I gestured out the window where Alice was now enjoying her ringside seat.

"Ungh," John said. Really, he is a big talker, just not after 11 pm or so. The ruckus had been going on for half an hour. I turned a page in my novel, no where near sleepy.

"It's surprising Miguel and Martha can sleep through this." I imagined shoes being thrown out windows. A shoe could hit a dog, I reasoned. We wouldn't want that. John muttered something about rolling over. I endured another 20 minutes with remarkable patience. Alice never left her post, enthralled with the yaps and squeals of the dog and the gutteral rumble of their quarry. These are tame dogs so while they might corner their prey, the next steps were not entirely clear.

"I know where a flashlight is," I said, nudging John gently. "Wouldn't it be terrible if little Pogo got hurt?"

John sputtered a few things that might have been Butte-en-ese or Gaelic or something else my mother would have pretended not to understand and swung his legs over the side.

"I get a back scratch out of this and that's final." I agreed quickly.

He donned his robe suddenly reminding me much of an elderly spinster who had neglected to shave her legs. Or beard for that matter. He left the bedroom, rattled around in some utility storage spot. The backyard light came on and Alice sat up with greater interest. The crunch of leaves and the beam of the flashlight helped us follow his progress. He was my Knight of Wands, bringing light and energy to change the stalemate.

"Daddy's going to save the possum, huh, kitty?" Alice was not sure if that would mean saving it for her or just saving it. One of those would be good news. She intended to watch. Tony hid as the better part of valor. Quincy slept, deaf dog.

The barking and growling continued, but in a few minutes it slowly moved along the fenceline from the back of the yards towards the front. A bit of scuffling followed by a de-escalation in barking. Gates opened and closed. Feet trudged up stairs. The back yard light went off. All was quiet. John slipped back into bed.

"You were right," he muttered. "Possum. In the corner of the yard. Got his tail stuck in a board in the fence. Used a stick. Should be OK now."

He rolled over, no longer interested in the back scratch. I assume he will collect later. He likes a good scratch.

Mrs. Chocolate started up again. We looked at each other and sighed, no longer willing to answer the alarm. I read a little more in my novel and started to snooze, noise and all. I turned out the reading light finally and Mrs. Chocolate gave up the possum alarm, finally realizing she was no match in the dark for a fully grown and annoyed Pogo. We all settled back down into our naps with hope for a better tomorrow.

Best wishes and Happy New Year.

Bugs

That high pitched screech you hear when I hit my high note at the sudden and unexpected encounter with an insect is something I call my “Bug Scream.” I’m a soprano, not the TV mobster kind, just the natural pitch of my vocal range kind. My choral director in Sweet Adelines once told me, “Marcia, only dogs can hear notes that high.” OK, maybe.

Let’s just say that I like to be properly introduced to bugs. I like to work up to a relationship with them and not have bugness thrust upon me, so to speak. Sometimes the dog comes in from a patrol of the back yard and brings in a hitchhiking baby slug. If I see it first, I feel quite calm about getting a tissue to transport junior to the back door (or to the toilet for a good flush if my husband isn’t home). My husband tends to name the snails and slugs that we encounter. I do not. Being surprised by one and getting advance warning are completely different experiences when the slimy-footed types are involved. After all, I love seashells and those are just seagoing slimy-footed types.

No, it’s the solid exo-skeleton bugs that give me the screeches. One thing I’ve noticed about living in northern California is that the bug thing isn’t as much of an annoyance as it is in other places in the US. Of course there are startling exceptions in California, like the potato bug. The first time I ran across one of those was in Copperfield Books in Petaluma. I was browsing through a spinning rack of interesting greeting cards, picked one up and woke my new friend up from its nap. Very shortly after that I woke up everyone within about a block, including the dogs. It’s just the one noise I make but it’s startling and completely involuntary.


Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord


I have a typical Knight of Wands reaction to little crawly beasties. Although I have never stood on a chair swinging a baseball bat at a bug while screaming at the top of my lungs, the urge has been there. I don’t mean to be unkind to them. I have this roach phobia from my childhood in Florida and I’m horrified every time I think that they apparently can survive quite a while without their heads [ed., she refrains from drawing any analogies to politicians here] and are likely to survive a nuclear blast. When it comes to bugs, I tend to have a “don’t think, just do” approach.

We’re certainly not bug-free here in California. There are fleas. This year was especially flea-ful since there was just a bit more rain. My vet told me that people were resorting to dosing their critters twice a month instead of the usual once-a-month treatment for the back-of-the-neck flea and tick killer. The dog and cats greet this treatment with the same enthusiasm the Occupy crowds have when told they need to disperse. They of course do not like the fleas any more than I do so we came to a compromise. The agreed not to take my hand off at the ankles when I put the flea stuff on them as long as they can grouse about it and I have to comfort them in their distress but only if and when they want it. Strong prima dona strains run in the cat family here.

The diva thing doesn’t prevent me from trying to teach everyone to hunt and eat bugs so mommy doesn’t stand on a chair and scream. They have so far shown moderate enthusiasm for this activity. What if a cat were too warm to move? Or too comfortable? Or bored? Or well-fed? Or engaged in some debate with one of the other cats? One could not be bothered with something as mundane as a Daddy Long Legs in the bathtub.

And we can’t forget scorpions. Seriously I’ve only seen the one but it was the sports spectacular version at the river house with my friends. But we do have them. There are pillbugs, aphids, ladybugs, moths, butterflies, mosquitoes, stinkbugs and spiders. This was a really big spider year too. They all began making webs early around July; usually September is their season. Usually they are what we used to call “jumping spiders” which helped you judge your distance in observation. The “garden spiders” (these are not technical terms, for you arachnophiles) were the big web-builders this year and there was one hum-dinger out on the patio, about the size of a half-dollar if you include the leg-span. My husband deposited that one in the agapanthus. After all, they eat other bugs so I don’t really want to kill them.

I’m just a little disappointed that there are no fireflies in California. Of all the bugs from my years in the Midwest, fireflies were my favorite. They hover like little votive candles over the ditches and meadows on a humid evening, looking for a date. On a trip back to Missouri, my husband thought he was suffering from fatigue-induced hallucinations. He was relieved when I pointed to the ditches full of ditch lilies in the twilight and laughed, “No, honey, those are BUGS.”

My Big Bad Bug encounter this year was with the yellow jacket on September 11 as I patiently waited for the firemen and police to come for coffee and cakes. I can barely see the scar now, which is surprising since I was pretty sure at the time my finger was going to fall off. The encounter did bring up some creative thinking about a new cartoon super heroine called Yellow Jacket who was completely into must-have fashions and of course ridding the world of meanness, one sting at a time. I figure my super-heroine has a thing for chocolate. Well, it got me buzzing; I could see the fantastic array of yellow jackets she would wear. Why stick to just one super costume?

It doesn’t seem to be such a huge logical leap that much of my professional life has been dedicated to the finding, eradicating and preventing of bugs. Well, that’s in software at least. I used to keep a trilobite fossil next to my keyboard at work. Just the thought of a time when the whole planet was literally crawling with these scuttly critters is enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. As a touchstone, it helped inspire my own “Spidey Sense” to find and fix problems in software intuitively. I’m so grateful that I’m not the only person in technology who does this sort of thing. One of my best friends admitted, although she can remain anonymous here, that she too has spent a career of having people ask her, “How did you know that was the problem?” and having to answer with a shrug. Heck, just had that crawling sensation over here in this section of the system…well, it’s hard to explain. But it brings out the Knight of Wands in me although I do tend to suppress the whole “primal scream with a weapon” when it comes to working on software.

Yet, I’m still grateful for all the critters (ok, I don’t see what possible positive impact a cockroach has but I’ll bet someone will try to tell me) and I encourage bees in my yard with some bee-attracting plants. I’ll buy a box of live ladybugs at the garden center in the spring to set upon the aphids if need be. I must say I’m not looking forward to the annual migration of the tiny ants, which are fair-weather ants at best. When the winter rains come they come indoors and forage for the interesting things in the carbs section of the cabinets. If you hear high-pitched screaming and rhythmic crashing coming from my house on a rainy day, don’t worry. That’s just my inner Knight of Wands expressing itself freely!

Best wishes!

Sane Children

This would not have happened to me. I mean having sane children. If I had had my own children, they would have been talkers, for certain, but talk therapy doesn’t cover all problems in psychology. We’re just lucky that we get to spend time with our friends’ children to show us what sane children can be like.

Sure, we’ve seen examples of the other kind, the tantrum pitchers, the “listen reasonably to everything you say with at least feigned interest, then land in jail for some form of teenage stupidity” kids, the Defiant Ones. But it’s clear that those aren’t the only children out there.

After all, I wasn’t immune to bad judgment as a teenager. For instance, I wasn’t supposed to ride on the back of my beau’s motorcycle when I was in high school. He had an older motorcycle, a Benelli, with a very hot exhaust pipe on the left side. Every time I made my dismount from the forbidden Road Monster, I burned a 2-inch section of the inside of my calf on that exhaust pipe. Talk about stupid. My mom could tell every time I’d disobeyed her, just from the number of burns on my leg. I was lucky the only thing that happened from that lapse of judgment was the burned leg and burning ears.

And I was one of the Defiant Ones, too. I estimated that my mother and I had just the one fight, but it last from my age 15 to age 23. The topic was, “Who is boss?” I think I won. I think. It wasn’t that I thought I was always right. No, that came later. It’s that I thought I probably wasn’t always wrong, given the odds. A stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say. But it’s a hard process, growing up and learning who you are, how you are different from the rest of your family and how you are alike. It’s hard on everyone. Even as a teenager, I knew that the successful parent was one who had done their job well enough that the offspring could manage on their own, someday. I recall explaining this patiently to my mother during one of the age 15-23 moments. Logic, it seems, doesn’t always win points in an argument. Sheesh. They teach you to speak reasonably like an adult, then go bonkers when you do it. What’s that about?

Not that all of my defiance was the reasonable adult kind or even the accidental burn from the motorcycle kind. Nothing of the sort. I did my share of crawling out the bedroom window to sneak off with my friends to an after-hours Annie Green Springs party out at one of the dry lakes near my small town in New Mexico. I seldom actually drank any of the offerings at these parties. I just wanted to be out and about, under the vast sky full of stars, watching my friends learn how to be cool to the music of my time. And mostly I wanted to be away from my mother’s terrible unhappiness for a little while. I always came home. But it was utterly stupid.

Now when I get a chance to be with sane children, I jump at it. So, when our friends, the pleasant attorney and his darling wife the accountant, asked if we could take their two younger boys, Will and Grant, for the day, we of course said yes. After the initial amazement in how tall Will is now, taller than I am, and how many big teeth Grant has now, we started out with a brief inventory of cats, followed by an instructional moment with the Mahjong Solitaire matching tiles and watching dragons disappear in flame and smoke. Then our day really got going.

Miniature golf was first on the menu. We didn’t get very far into the arcade when we discovered my all-time favorite arcade game Skee-Ball available. Grant and I Skee-Balled for quite a while and John and Will air-hockeyed. We bundled up our winning tickets and stuffed them away, bought some soft drinks and went out to the golf course.

I don’t mean to brag, but I am the best person to play miniature golf with, mainly because I can make your score look fantastic. I need a designated putter. Getting onto the green is my forte. I can just about always whack that ball down the middle just as the flap door on the castle is opening but once it’s on the green, I can turn a birdie into mini-golf roadkill. “C’mon, Aunt Marcia! Say 8 strokes and let’s go to the next hole!” What a sane suggestion!

Still, being awful at something doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. My favorite miniature golf moment is actually a scene from the TV Comedy Dharma & Greg where Dharma impersonates Gigantica standing over the Eiffel Tower booming down to the terrified Parisians, “People of France!” Dharma is tall but even short people like me can boom, “People of the Netherlands! Do not be afraid! Your windmill is mine!” Will had the best score, followed closely by Grant. I was dead last. But it was fun.

After some more arcade stuff where I got to rest in a racecar seat watching the boys annihilate rock monsters in a vaguely Mario-esque jungle scene, we finished up with more Skee-Ball, turned in all our tickets for whistles, candy and one purple rubber ball for me. Despite my husband’s protests, we stopped at the McDonalds for some “hamburgers” of dubious vintage, then headed for the country.

Will and Grant live in the city. Actually, they live in The City, known as San Francisco or SF but never Frisco. So country life is sometimes as foreign to them as the moon. I set the rules, being the designated naturalist, the representative of the female ilk and the Mom Substitute.

“First one to see a rattlesnake wins!” I didn’t expect we would actually see a rattlesnake. I’ve lived in California 20 years now and I have seen fewer than five. And I’ve been looking, not too closely of course, but looking. I wanted to go to Lake Solano. The last time my husband and I were there, we saw a rattlesnake. These are boys, after all, so crawly stuff like snakes should be the right thing. Snips, snails, puppy-dog tails and all that. And what do you know? We weren’t a few miles toward Lake Barryessa and what does John spy in the road, comfortably dead but still recognizable, but a big fat diamondback rattler. To verify our find, we turned around and drove past it two more times. Yup, a rattler, and really dead. Did Grant want to take a picture? No.

We stopped at the hydroelectric dam near the lake and Grant did take pictures there. John pointed out the buzzards which were promptly named for members of the family. We moved on to the Lake Solano park where we finally got rid of that old loaf of bread much to the delight of at least six Canada geese and one Ms. Mallard. I checked the ladies room to see if the bat I had found there last spring was still about; sadly, no, only a cockroach. Eeewww. We found a good length of string, figured out how to cut it on the edge of a nearby barbeque firebox, and tied a rock to it to see how far out into the water we could throw it and bring it back in. We watched swallows, listened to woodpeckers and scrub jays and followed a centipede. We told amazing stories in a game where each person followed with his own segment of the story using the format, “Someone [did something] somewhere.” Someone named Hillbilly Joe got away with stealing chickens, a few cars, escaping police and an irate soccer mom after successfully navigating a traffic jam on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, somewhere. We collapsed into giggles.

After a take-home pizza from Napoli’s, makers of The Best Pizza on Earth (just ask my husband) and a rousing game of Scrabble (no scores, please, to save time and egos), the refreshed attorney and his blushing accountant wife returned to pick up Will and Grant. Our adventure was over and the big and little Knights of Wands, having pursued vitality and imagination all day, gratefully returned to their bunks.

How nice to spend the day with sane children. May you have the opportunity to do the same.

Best wishes.

Not Restraining Order Famous

I’m just like you, right? I read my horoscope. I see if it fits. If it doesn’t, I smirk. But I do go a little deeper and wonder why. One very cool thing I got as my own personal forecast recently was that 2010 is the start of a 15 year cycle of public life, ending my relative anonymity for the last seven years. I’m a little resistant to this. I was actually completely comfortable with anonymity. Not being recognized can get you into places, allow you to pass without notice, blend into the background, ooze normalcy. OK, oozing normalcy is a goal.

I have a goal that conflicts with that too, on occasion. I like to say that all my life I’ve tried to be extraordinary and the best I’ve been able to muster so far is peculiar. But my brand of normalcy and peculiarity still falls within that Big Bell Curve of People Who May Pass Unnoticed. Perhaps I’m on the fringe of that. Still, that’s a comfortable position. I like the fringe.

I’ve become interested in my own chart recently because of the discussions I see about the challenging Grand Square/Grand Cross affecting all of us just now, especially those in the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn). Checking out my own chart, I became interested if not precisely alarmed at what looks like a Grand Square/Grand Cross in it. Having been reassured to some degree by experts that I do not have a Grand Square/Grand Cross but only a T-Square in my own chart, I’ve sunk back into my cushion of complacency. My father, although skeptical of everything that wasn’t paying direct attention to him, would have warmed to this idea of a t-square in an astrology chart. It sounds so, so architectural, so engineered. Sun-Uranus-Neptune in cardinal signs are supposed to be the challenges that fire me up and that fits. I’m not only comfortable with the misty and mysterious and out of the blue sudden changes; I’m in my element, so to speak. Combine all that with a very high score in the Mercury department and you can see the answers to so many things. My ADHD goes so fast, I come back to my original topic and people think I’m focused. No reason to alter my mind back in the Yellow Submarine days; I was already there.

For instance, I wasn’t much into dolls as a child. But I was mad for a Chatty Cathy and the Danish troll dolls. Is there something autobiographical about children’s choice of toys? I quickly bored (oh, Mercury) of Chatty Cathy when it became clear that her repertoire of speeches played out from that pull string at the back of her neck was, alas, limited. While the trolls didn’t talk much, they spoke volumes. I had scads of them, dozens, big ones, small ones, a two-headed one that I had gotten in a bunch with two others and named them Winkin, Blinkin and Nod-Nod, two heads, two nods. I made clothes for them out of felt. I taught myself to crochet and made outfits and rugs and table cloths and together with what must now be highly prized antique doll furniture gave my trolls an entire world of things to do, bathing, watching television, listening to the radio, vacuuming, cooking, sleeping and of course, wearing the latest fashions. The heck with Barbie with her vacant eyes, tottering on spike heels, living in her cardboard dream house! My trolls lived in troll-luxury, sleeping under quilts stitched by my loving, if awkward hands.

It wasn’t so much that I was seeking the Utopia of domestic bliss as it was that I was stepping into my own imagination. It’s a useful tool to me even now in my Day Job, one they tell me is rare, especially among the computer-types. I looked at my troll world from their point of view. Clothes for trolls should fit trolls. Beds for trolls should fit trolls. I stepped into the troll world and imagined what it would be like. They rather like cinnamon rolls, for instance, gooey ones.

So how does this translate to a work skill? Easily!

“Just imagine this is the first time you’ve ever seen this software,” I’ll say to people at work. “Would you know what to do without someone training you how to do it? How could you make the right answer seem more obvious?” If I could give people the gifts of empathy and perspective, I would. It might be cause for a little less shouting in the world, a little more understanding. It might make better software.

That ability, whether it’s the over-active Mercury in my chart or the engine-revving Sun-Uranus-Neptune t-square or, heck, why not both? helps me view things from another point of view. It’s something like an “out of self” experience. It helps me prepare my conscious mind for the messages from the subconscious and other sources when I read tarot. And, just in case I've lost you a time or two, it's not perfect like any other human frailty.  But I’m not sure I’m ready to be anything like famous.

My mother’s ideas on fame predated Miss Manners by many years and were more of the Amy Vanderbilt era. A lady, she explained to me patiently, has her name in the paper three times: When she is born, when she marries and when she dies. I don’t think even my mother really thought this was right. She was a journalist and associate editor with a byline before settling into a life of domestic despair, before becoming an antiques dealer by accident. Something about that, not the manners part, but the Mission Impossible, The Saint, the Jason Bourne, even the Mr. Ripley aspect of impact without fanfare was appealing. Say, for instance, my fringe thinking, feeling and intuition were, well, ordinary-looking. One could pass for polite or reasonable or…well, you get the idea.

My husband says my alter-ego is Danae from the comic strip Non Sequitur. While she’s much more pessimistic than I am and has needs that I don’t share, we do have a lot in common. Earlier this year, Danae was in a funk which her long-suffering father sought to probe. He asked her what was wrong. She burst out with an explosive cry of pre-adolescent angst, “I’m not famous!” Her father, always approaching the Wild Thing with caution, gently reminds her that the neighborhood boys would seek to differ with her. With the eye roll innate to her kind, Danae retorts in exasperation, “I mean American Idol-famous! Not restraining order famous!”

So my own chart, like the Knight of Wands, lets me, leads me, shows me how to chase after my passion, not just the passion du jour, for that is a time frame altogether too brief for big mysterious things like Neptune and Uranus, and altogether too, too long for my off-the-chart Mercury score, but the passion of life like the smallest particle that moves so quickly it appears to be solidly standing still. And, hopefully, I won’t be restraining order famous. For we are here but a moment and the moment’s gone.

For more cool stuff, check these out:

Danae
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur

Trolls
http://www.troll-company.dk/

Donna Cunningham's SkyWriter Blog
http://skywriter.wordpress.com/about/

Best wishes!

It Ain't Braggin' If You Really Done It

In the words of the Immortal Bard, Dizzy Dean, "It ain't braggin' if you really done it."  In that spirit, I want to share my contributions to the recently published very limited edition (restricted only to the contributing artists) 2009 Tarot Collectors Forum Collaborative Deck.  I am so excited to have some of my work published, and, since I retain the copyright to my own work in that deck, I wanted to post my cards and tell you about them.  Remember, this deck isn't for sale.  I don't have extra copies.  Part of the agreement we all made as contributors was that we did not want this deck for sale commercially.  It was a labor of love.

When I first saw the posts on the forum about the 2008 deck, I was eager to get a copy and crestfallen when I was told it was not for sale.  Only the artists had copies.  Then, the threads started up about the 2009 deck.  I pinged a friendly contributor, expressing my inhibitions and inadequacies as an artist.  Sure, I stitch, but it's a grid.  And sure, I took art classes in college, just enough to realize that my kindergarten dream of becoming "a artist" was not to be.  I actually walked out of a college art class when I had one of my Tower moments:  Kiddo, there is a big difference between appreciating art and creating it.  I resigned myself to being a big appreciator, not famous or rich, just big.  By the way, thanks to Dr. Acker for giving me a grade in that class instead of an incomplete.  I think he gave it to me as credit for an artistic fit of pique.

Thanks to the encouragement of gregory, who uses a small G in her name on the boards, I contributed anyway using my own photographs and a little post-photographic magic courtesy of Photoshop to crop and in a couple of instances enhance reality.  Thanks also to skad1 and BlueToy for turning all the contributing artists' efforts into a real deck of cards, complete with LWB (that's Little White Book).  This has been one my favorite Christmas presents this season!  The following are the entries from our LWB and cards I contributed.

The Empress:  My Empress is a photo of the Sheela Na Gig that still guards the eastern wall of the castle at Ballinacarriga, Co. Cork, Ireland.  While in later years, sheelas were used as religious instruction on the "evils of women," there is an earlier tradition that a sheela placed on the eastern wall will protect the castle from harm.  The story goes that when invaders sought to destroy a community, the old wise woman confronted them by exposing herself.  Whether through shame of fighting with their mother or terror of divine retribution, they retreated and the village was saved.  Sheelas are found throughout Ireland and the UK usually on the eastern wall if still in situ.

My husband and I had a wonderful time while we were in Ireland and I took thousands of photos, thanks to the miracle of digital photography.  The next three cards are also part of our trip to Ireland.

Page of Cups:  A foam model of Shakespeare's head floats in the Mall River in Co. Mayo, Ireland.  In the bright September sunshine, he gazes into the water while his reflection, a bit darker but no less clear, gazes back.  The Page of Cups dips into the subconscious for a message.  Shakespeare looked into the soul and reflected it, good and bad, funny and sad, great and small, for our understanding of what it is to be human.

The City of Westport in Co. Mayo, Ireland, where this photograph was taken is a frequent winner of the "Tidy Town" award and for good reason.  During our stay, there were perhaps a dozen Shakespeare heads floating in the Mall River and they all looked like fun...and a little spooky.  It's a lovely place to visit!

Four of Pentacles:  4 Celtic-style triskeles on a stone column, Balintubber Abbey, Co. Mayo, Ireland.  While these triskeles aren't pentacles, this set of four struck me as the ultimate "can't take it with you" gracing the abbey ruins.  The more you hang onto the material world, the more likely you are to notice that it slips away.

Our friend Vince met us in Westport, Co. Mayo, where he has a home.  Our quarters looked over the peaceful Mall River where the days were just a little warmer than we expected.  While in Westport, I made an emergency purchase of good walking sandals to keep cool.  They turned out to be an excellent buy because Vince gave us a wonderful tour of ruined abbeys, pilgrim paths and prehistoric stone markers.  What a treat!

Page of Swords:  A face melted into the stone ruins of a gothic window at the church at Aghagower, Co. Mayo, Ireland behind Croagh Patrick is revealed.  The observer, the spy, the messenger whose trust is in question.

Just to show that my whole contribution wasn't that one fantastic vacation in Ireland, this next section shows another favorite place of mine, the American Southwest.

Eight of Pentacles:  A display of native American baskets from the Arizona desert.  Baskets were essential technology and this display shows the diversity of size and decoration, plus a brief glimpse into the mind of the master craftsman.

Knight of Wands:  A true relic of the old west from the 1800's, this portrait of a man and his horse is part of the precious heritage of the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest near Mesa Verde, Colorado.  Card meaning:  Action and energy, perhaps too rash, exemplifies the Old West and while the "fire stick" firearm here is implied, the vitality, glory and grit of the armed man on horseback lights the fire of our imaginations even today.  The Wild West at first seems romantic, but look closer and find a common theme of "ready-fire-aim" so much a part of the settlement of any frontier.

We've been lucky to find the most interesting people and places while on vacation.  Certainly a favorite was our trip to the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation where our native guide introduced us to the many aspects of life there.  Besides this relatively modern "knight" from Ute times, we saw much more ancient Pueblo petroglyphs.  In them were the stories of creation, hunting, travel, astronomy and horticulture.  One is even a solar calendar that marks the winter solstice and the return of the sun.  If you have the urge to travel back in time, take a road trip a bit off the beaten path.  Visit www.utemountainute.com and check out the Tribal Park.

Six of Cups:  Children's toys at the Borland Home which is also home of the Martinez Historical Society in Martinez, California while on a ghost hunt.  In a departure from the rest of my relatively "straight" photos, I wanted to show that memory, especially of childhood, is always enhanced.  Some things are not part of the picture, some things are perhaps not exactly as they happened.  Or, are they?  Is a step back into the past just like a step into an alternate dimension?

If you collect tarot cards and you aren't a member of this informative and fun online forum, I highly recommend it.  Visit http://www.tarotcollectorsforum.com/ and enjoy!

Best wishes for a bright New Year!

copyright 2009-2010 Marcia McCord