Please Donate for Japan Relief

Instead of my usual fun post this week, I'd like to urge everyone to please donate to the organization of their choice to assist the people of Japan.  This link will take you to the American Red Cross:

https://american.redcross.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=ntld_main

Some things are just more important than others.  This is one of those.

Best wishes.

In 10’s

I don’t pretend to be able to write in “text message” speak but from what I can gather it’s a lot like an entire book condensed to the size of a license plate. My best guess is that the severe abbreviations were born out of necessity as text messages have a maximum length much shorter than a graphic novel and suit the nano-minded young ‘un’s level of patience and concentration. Most texters seem to be those whom we slower, older folk diagnose, rightly or wrongly, as the ADHD crowd. We oldsters, so many of us having fallen prey to the idealist Liberal Arts educational opportunities of our time, may also take a moment to despair of the deterioration of the English language in general and spelling in the specific. The root of the difference is at least accurate: the whippersnappers go faster than we ageless beauties and revived virtuosos do.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



My last couple of weeks, especially the weekends, have been really action packed and intense. In text lingo I think that would translate to “in 10’s” and perhaps stereotypically and a bit behind the times would be expressed as “in 10’s, dude.” This time, though, there is recognizable connection between my intense last few days and the 10’s in the tarot. My tens in tarot are the Wheel of Fortune and the Tens of Cups, Wands, Pentacles and Swords.

The Wheel of Fortune makes me aware of the passage of time and its effects, for good or ill. Some days you’re the windshield; some days you’re the bug. The passage of time can be all too fast. I was just getting used to thinking of my friend Sandy as a mother of three and just this week her third grandchild was born. It’s a girl! (Toss the flower petals now.) Some things just seem to sneak up on you. When the wheel spins, you can land up or down and it’s so lovely to have some happy news to celebrate. Welcome, little Sophia!

That wheel can spin a little too slowly, too, as in: When am I ever going to get rid of this cold? I mean I’m grateful -- grateful, truly-- that my symptoms are nothing like last month’s torture on the rack with the flu. This cold, though, is like static cling, the cat urine of viruses that will not wash out no matter what remedy is applied. It’s evil, I tell you. Just when I think I’m feeling better, a whole new wave of congestion and explosive expletive/cough/sneeze/choke combinations come at the most inopportune time.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



“How are you feeling?” asks my Nordic goddess chiropractor. “Oh, fine,” I lie and barely spit out the words before I’m red-faced and purple eyed with a new seizure of viral noises that would scare dragons away from their caves. “Fine,” I gasp, finally able to get my breath again. Really? Really?

I may have spent the afternoon at work with relative ease of airways but the moment I step into a social situation where I least want to share my most intimate Velcro of a virus, there I go, sneep, snort, hork, choke, gargle, honk and finally, with a swipe of the ever-present tissue, sniff. Yep, I’m ready to put the ol’ 10 of Swords in this baby, cut this microbe off at the knees. OK, cut it off at the molecule. Whatever. I’m done. Quick, Henry, the Flu Flit or whatever viral insecticide will pounce on this thing like the Glee Lady’s limo cat’s story about the cat crushing the mouse. I want to sleep through the night, breathe through my nose and have an adult conversation about any topic other than over-the-counter cures.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



So in spite of this liar, this cheat of a germ, which fools me into thinking I’m “better today” and thus leads me to make commitments for evenings and weekends only to break them or (is it worse yet?) to keep them, I drag my aching ribs and flame-red nose to share.

The unreliability of my breathing and sudden onset of symptoms with little or no warning, however, has made me appreciate at least one thing so much more. My husband’s sister loves to watch American Idol, so when she visits we revel in the contestants, an affliction my husband does not share. One of this year’s stand-outs is a young man from nearby Santa Cruz, James Durbin, who has Tourette’s Syndrome. I am encouraged that if he is able to sing so well when his body may have other ideas, surely I should be able to overcome a cold. Right? He made it to the Top 10, surely a 10 of Cups dream for him and his happy family and friends. Now if only I can start breathing without my nose running.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



Tens are about endings and beginnings, so I’ve got the 10 of Pentacles going too. We’re putting the finishing touches on some financial items especially the annoying paperwork all too common in tax season. We’re working on planning my husband’s family reunion this summer and I feel the details of the preparation for that starting to sneak up on me like hungry ghosts. I wonder if my friend Erica could do crowd shots during the event and, hey, maybe set up a little booth and make a little extra. Add to that the screech of a few unfinished projects lying around that I really do want to complete, plus a quick deep (we’re talking ‘way deep here) dive into numerology using The Connolly Book of Numbers, volumes I and II. These are likely beyond my tolerance for the esoteric (can I be a tarot reader and say that??) but I identified the insufficiency in my own understanding to the point where I could not ignore it. So in I dove. I have a lot of 3’s (off topic, I know) and I like that. 3’s are creative and friendly. And apparently easily distracted. Hmm, maybe I used to be one of those nano-children. Or that’s contagious, too. Back to that pile of unfinished projects.

To top it all off, I’ve been busy at both the Day Job and tarot reading. With the Day Job, if it’s not one thing, it’s about 10. That fits, right? Where are all these people and their projects coming from? My status report is starting to look like the 10 of Wands, not that I want to complain that I’m overloaded. Nope, I’m bearing up bravely. Watch me grit my teeth. Oh, right, the dentist says I’m not supposed to grit my teeth any more. Sure, I’ll take care of that just as soon as I’m done with my cold!

Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

And happily, along with the bundle of too much going on, is a sudden uptick in my tarot reading, both at the shops I haunt and elsewhere. I’m teaching classes, I volunteered for the 3rd Annual Witches Ball in Benicia dressed in fun costume no less and I’m making after hours appointments all over. I’m also looking forward to my big spring treat, going to the Readers’ Studio 2011 in New York next month. I made my reservations, got my flight figured out, remembered that the Cobb Salad was the best thing on the menu for the Aeclectic Tarot dinner that’s being organized and have a couple of fun new t-shirts to wear at the conference. I have to figure out how to pack my costume for the dress-up dinner without crushing the, well, it’s a surprise so I’m not telling. And just to make things even more fun, I’ve booked the Himalayan Festival in Berkeley and another peaceful walk among the songbirds with my bird-buddy Ronda in a class put on by the Pt. Reyes National Seashore Association.

OK, seriously, I am so done with this cold. Di, ynke grm!!!

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!

Over the River and Through the Woods

When we last left my teenage self, I was in the back seat of my father’s car on the way to Grandmother McCord’s house in Alabama.

You have to remember that my husband has concluded I was the only person in my family with a sense of humor. I beg to differ, feebly. To his point, though, I was convinced growing up that I was some kind of genetic anomaly. Optimist, I think they call it.

We had crossed the Mississippi long ago and crossed the Tombigbee River, deep in the pines of Alabama when we arrived in the tiny town where Grandmother McCord lived. Dad had said the land where her duplex was had been a plantation, so I was expecting Tara with Grandmother standing outside as a stern, blue-haired Scarlet O’Hara. That was fairly inaccurate. We turned down a kudzu-infested road and then onto a dirt drive that wound around to a small white concrete-block single storey structure built in the 50’s. That’s 1950’s. There were large trees hung with Spanish moss and a small garden patch surrounded by a high wire fence on the left side of the structure.

We piled out of the car, relieved to be standing and walked the narrow walkway to the wooden screen door. I knocked. Grandmother opened the door. “The better to eat you with, My Dear,” echoed in my head. I had not worn red just in case. Grandmother looked me up and down.

“Oh,” she said, obviously disappointed. My smile froze. “Oh, even you are taller than me!”

I was relieved. At least if my reputation had preceded me, it was the “short one in the family” as opposed to, well, I could think of at least a dozen things that would send her into orbit, just from the letters we had exchanged for two years. I had attended Catholic school. Mother was an antiques dealer. My brother and I are part Gypsy (Rom) on my mother’s side. I shaved my legs (I wasn’t really sure that was an orbit-launching point but my mother had been so upset about it that I thought it might possibly be a Kansas thing, so I held it in reserve as a disqualifier). I was her youngest grandchild. I was the last child of her once-favorite son who had become the Black Sheep of his generation. I did not live and had not ever lived in Kansas. And dear heavens, there was the tarot, dreams and palms thing. My list was longer, but it was such a relief to be disappointing for my towering height, my 5’1” to Grandmother’s 4’11” that I relaxed immediately and hugged her. I think she was startled but she seemed to be pleased.

My father, brother and I came in to her small white living room. We sat and spoke politely as if I were being delivered to a boarding school, all hopeful that the trip was not wasted. Grandmother led us solemnly to the first bedroom down the hall, a cool, dark, white room with a dark Victorian bed, crisp white sheets and a white chenille bedspread. My brother left my suitcase in the corner. We stood a moment.

“Very nice,” I said with the extravert’s need to fill the gap of silence.

We returned to the living room. We accepted cold drinks, lemonade, I think. My father and Grandmother spoke a while. And then, my father and my brother left.

“And this is Peanut,” Grandmother said, indicating the tubby black and tan terrier in the low basket near the kitchen door. Peanut wagged his tail hopefully. I jumped at the chance to focus on someone easy to talk to. “Cute doggie!” Peanut and I were off to a good start at least. Grandmother set about preparing for dinner. She sliced some fresh tomatoes from her garden with an old knife, toasted some bread in an old-fashioned toaster and heated some cream-style corn from a can. We had sandwiches and Peanut wriggled hopefully at my feet while Grandmother explained what a naughty little doggie he was to beg at the table. I slipped him a treat.

Grandmother, it turned out, was thrilled to have me as an excuse not to go to her fellow mother-in-law Mrs. Owensby’s church the next morning. Grandmother thought that church was a bit too neon-sign, roll-and-foam for her and she preferred that God and His Creatures be just a little more dignified. Happy to provide a service, I followed her around, admiring her vegetable garden and flowers, cooing over the dog, dodging the fire ant hills and listening with profound interest of the time when Grandmother was attacked and nearly killed by ants. I helped her change the curtains in the living room. We looked through family photos, including my father’s mysterious first family, my seldom seen uncle and aunt and never-before-seen cousins and admired the family pieces in Grandmother’s china cabinet. We talked into the night.

Apparently satisfied that I had been exposed to etiquette sufficiently to display to others, the next day Grandmother set out with me to go shopping in the tiny downtown. I met my cousins’ cousins, delightful people who took to me immediately. They were the owners of the big grocery in town and were, thank heavens, optimistic, talkative, happy people. We made plans for a pool party. I pushed the grocery cart while Grandmother proudly led the way, each time a little louder and a little more confident than the next, “And this is my granddaughter.”

Back in the car, all the fears of not being accepted within my own family welled up in me. I fought back tears and at the same time relished this small time in a small town with my tiny and ferocious Grandmother. I said nothing, realizing that my point of view was so utterly foreign to this woman who had lived through so much. She had confessed that her main emotions when my Grandfather had killed himself were shame and anger. She was mortified when my father divorced his first wife, forever tarnishing her name in their Kansas town. She was helpless to convince my uncle to let her stay in Kansas, a prisoner of circumstances. Even later in my stay, she would hand me a fabulous cut glass bowl, a family piece, saying, “When I’m dead, your uncle and aunt will make sure you get nothing, so take this now.”

But at that moment, we drove through the bank’s drive through to get cash, our huge load of groceries in the back. The teller greeted my Grandmother’s familiar face. Grandmother smiled at her, turned to me and smiled, then said to the teller proudly, “And this is my granddaughter who is visiting me.” I smiled and waved. News apparently travels very fast in a small town. The teller sensed the importance of the visit.

The 3 of Swords can be a difficult card in the tarot. When all conflicts and sorrows and truths however cruel pierce the heart, the heart is not completely broken. The swords of conflict and truth are perhaps blunted just a bit. But the heart remains larger than any truth, stronger than any fight, more lasting than any hurt.

Along with the cash and bank receipt in the drive through drawer was a cellophane-wrapped lollipop.

“Green,” I said. “My favorite flavor.”

And we laughed together at the nonsense of that, not Grandmother and Granddaughter for a moment, but just two girls together, bound by life. I unwrapped my treat and savored the grandchildhood I had missed, making up for it in one good lollipop. I sat a little taller, love towering over my family’s legacy of sad hearts for a moment that lasts forever.

Best wishes.

Love Potion No. 9

Valentine Greetings from No. 9! That’s my town, Vallejo, California, just named no. 9 in the Most Miserable Places to Live list recently published on a web page near you. OK, it’s raining today but other than that, honestly I’m not in agreement with the survey results. I think I’d know if I were miserable.

Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

Of course, I am a big proponent of people being able to create their own version of happiness. One of the happiest sights I’ve seen in my life was in the middle of what this survey would likely call a Most Miserable place to live. My father, brother and I were driving from Missouri to Alabama. I was going to stay with my grandmother for the first time ever. I was 18.

You’d have to know something of my family dynamic to understand why I was finally getting to visit “Grandma.” She would roll over in the plot if she thought I really called her that. Her name, I was told by everyone including her, was “Grandmother McCord.” Doesn’t sound like a term of endearment, does it? I was visiting her based on the assumption that no one on the planet could be as evil as she was made out to be in my family mythos.

There was, of course, a little history to go along with the reputation. Our first encounter was years earlier. She came to visit us when we lived in Florida. I was 5 or so, before our neighbor told me I was going to hell for lying about my age on television.

My brother and I were terribly excited about getting to meet her. Our idea of a grandmother was something like Mrs. Santa Claus, cookies, hugs, happy to see us, tell us stories, interested in our art projects, that sort of grandma stuff. We all turned out at the airport to pick her up. I was in awe of her. I looked up. She did not stoop to greet me. She did not hug. She did not smile. She had blue hair, a popular affectation among the grey-haired beauty-shop goers of the time (the alternative was pink which I don’t think would have suited her).

My brother, older by a year, stepped forward to offer his hand and greeted her, “You’re looking lovely today, Grandmother McCord.”

Grandmother McCord looked down at him, tight-lipped, arms still crossed, and said, “You are well coached.”

He wasn’t. He was trying to be nice. We were articulate children which in comparison to our contemporaries sometimes made us appear monstrous. He never expected that our Grandma-person would disapprove of a polite greeting. That whole visit turned out to be something of a lose-lose scenario and we didn’t try it again.

I didn’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together until just about everyone involved had died but apparently there were a few unresolved conflicts that remained forever unresolved.

Still, I was hopeful that Grandmother had gotten over her case of annoyance at our existence. I had been writing to her every week for a couple of years, initiating contact out of the blue. She was my only living grandparent after all. I figured if she actually got to know me, she’d like me. By the time I was 18, I had been invited for a visit and I was very excited. My mother declined the opportunity for a road trip to deliver me, saying she had to mind the shop. Actually, she was pleased never to speak to her mother-in-law again. My father felt he would need at least some kind of reinforcement and insisted my brother come, too. I’m not sure how long it had been since my father had spoken to his mother.

Against her wishes, well, most of Grandmother’s life events could start out that way. It seemed like a good start. She was nearly a child bride to an older man whom she apparently loved. My father was her first child and by all accounts as cute as a bug. He was like a baby doll for her. My uncle Max was born a couple of years later and by then the whole drudgery of taking care of children had soaked in. No one was as cute as a bug to Grandmother any more. But still it was pretty clear that my father was her favorite. My grandfather, for reasons we will probably never know clearly, killed himself when my father was a young adult. In her grief, Grandmother called for my father and specifically not my uncle, confirming their sibling rivalry. Grandmother had enjoyed playing bridge and golf at the country club in their town in Kansas, but was forced to go to work. Years later, my uncle moved her to live in one half of a duplex on a former plantation in Alabama, a place Grandmother considered heathen and primitive. It was officially “Not Like Kansas,” tantamount to the expulsion from Eden.

I was unaware of the details of the fury, jealousy and anguish that lay within the family. So many things are not spoken of although sensitive children always know something is wrong. And yet, I reasoned that whatever it was, I had not done it, so that I might strike up some sort of relationship with this elderly woman before she died. So there we were on the road and I had the whole backseat to myself to mull over the years of bad feelings and isolation in my family.

It was nearly evening and we were driving through fields and woods in Mississippi. I had marveled at the changes in countryside when I noticed a wooden house with no paint, no glass in the windows and a rusted tin roof. There were no power or telephone lines. There was no car. There was a man sitting in an old rocking chair, rocking rhythmically and singing at the top of his lungs. By all I had been told about our places in the world, I should have been afraid of this man, afraid of his color, for he was black, afraid of his poverty and even afraid of his joy. But I watched him sing, his few teeth showing browned by snuff or tobacco, and watched him rock in his rocking chair. And I waved and smiled. And he waved back and kept singing and smiling.

He lived in what was then likely to rival that year’s 9th most miserable place if they had had such a survey. Yet, he had the secret that eluded my family, the secret of the 9 of Cups. He understood that he might not be able to change his poverty or other circumstances. But he could figure out how to be happy himself with a rocking chair and the setting sun.

So, I have to push back on that No. 9 thing they just put out there for my town. Sure, our town is known for its famous bankruptcy, but we actually do still have running water, electricity, elections, church spaghetti feeds, school reunions, and quite a few restaurants. I have nice neighbors and interesting friends. I don’t mean to say there haven’t been hard times, but I’ve seen those hard times all over. And yet, like that happy, happy man in the rocking chair, it is possible to find joy, even in good ol’ No. 9.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Mama Said There’ll Be Days Like This

“Why does life suck?”

One of the teenagers in the high school art class to whom I was about to make a presentation made it known that this was her question of the day, maybe of the decade. She was at the back of the classroom and didn’t make eye contact. Her question got no rise out of her classmates. That did not really signify anything. Silence could mean agreement with her statement. It could also mean ennui. It’s quite possible that her classmates were tired of her observation, sensing a theme.

But it’s a common cry among her age group, so I went with it.

“Interestingly enough,” I pointed to the next slide in the show, “I anticipated your next question. This is the 4 of Cups which is sometimes called the apathy or boredom card.”

I went on to explain that at least one of Pamela Colman Smith’s invaluable contributions to the tarot world was her insightfully illustrated pip cards. So, instead of just four cups as in Marseilles-style decks or even our regular deck of playing cards with four hearts, Pamela or “Pixie” Smith showed the meaning of the cards in the minor arcana through her drawings. Here was our young hero, sitting beneath the tree with three cups in front of him and the Universe handing him yet a fourth cup. Mr. There’s-Nothing-To-Do-That’s-Any-FUN sits with his arms crossed and his legs crossed.

His stance is passive (seated) although he could be dressed for action. He’s perfectly capable of getting up and pursuing the cup or other delight of his choice. But, faced with a bounty of wonderful things before him, like the three cups at his feet, even when the Universe brings more opportunity or love or goodness or even intuition to him, he doesn’t even look. He’s too busy looking down and luxuriating in the moment of being in a foul mood.

The number four signifies stability that can drift over into being just plain stuck. Certainly, our pal in the 4 of Cups is stable. Nothing seems to be moving him from his spot under the tree. You could guess it might even be a sunny day, but he picked the shade. Doing nothing is a kind of stability and refusal to accept the positive can possibly seem lower risk. If you never hope, never take the chance to try, there’s the sense that you might lower your odds of getting hurt. But our guy doesn’t look too happy. So his non-involvement theory isn’t really working.

If you look at this card, you’ll see the sky is blue, the grass is green, the tree is tall and straight, the cups are upright and there’s a gift from out of the blue, well, ok, out of the grey, meaning uncertainty, of yet another cup. The only thing “wrong” in the picture is the guy under the tree who is pretty clearly saying, “No.”

I put “wrong” in quotes for a reason, though. Saying, “No,” isn’t always wrong. Sometimes, everything can look great but you just have a feeling about something and have to say no. Sometimes you can’t take even one more thing, even if it’s a good thing. Knowing your own limits and the fact that they change from time to time is a good thing. There are people who can’t say no. Our buddy in the 4 of Cups is the contrast to the clear spring day; he’s the one who isn’t bright and sunny.

My inner Muzak turned on while I was giving the talk to the high school class. My topic was actually the process of creating a work of art, in this case my tarot decks, and what I used to get from a foggy concept to produce a specific and tangible result. Sometimes the Muzak is helpful and the song playing in my head was suddenly The Shirelles’ 1963 hit, Mama Said.

The funny part about that songtrack was that I was also reminded of the story of the travelers on the road who asked an old person they met along the road what the people were like in the next town. The old person asked them, “What were the people like in the last town?” The travelers said, they were terrible and the old person said they would find the people in the next town much the same. Another set of travelers met the old person on the road and asked the same question about the people in the next town. Again the old person asked, “What were the people like in the last town?” This second set of travelers said they were kind and generous and funny and wonderful. The old person said they would find the people in the next town much the same.

So I smiled at the kid in the back of the classroom, realizing that I didn’t know her whole situation and may, upon complete, if unlikely revelation agree with her. But on the surface, I saw that she seemed healthy, pretty, well-dressed, allowed to study art in her teen years instead of having to work for a living to fend for her family, and attend a school that actually charges tuition and has an admissions policy rather than a “free” public school. I could see a few cups set in front of her. And yet she was beset by that bane of restless teen years, a sense of boredom, impatience and annoyance. She wanted the world to take her somewhere but hadn’t connected that she must get up from under the tree and head in the direction that was right for her, whatever that was. I had to give the kid a break, too, though. After all, not yet out of the comfortable nest, she was still in the process of learning what it means to be human. She can turn down the gifts given to her freely if they don’t fit. But it’s not life that “sucks” if she doesn’t then do something to pursue the things she truly loves. It won’t actually be life that sucks; she will just be stuck.

It doesn’t hurt to make your wishes known because like the travelers and the old person, you’re likely to get the energy you put out there. It’s pretty simple. If you’re grumpy, people will likely be grumpy with you. If you’re pleasant, they’ll likely be pleasant with you. And one of the biggest secrets of the universe, especially in teen-age angst, is that seriously, no one is thinking about you more than you are. They are all really worried about themselves. It’s part of the human condition.

Oh, sure, I can cite instances of life truly being awful to people. No one in Miss Nancy’s art class has been executed for saying life sucks. That does happen in other places. I wish it didn’t, but there you have it. And people can put on a completely “sunny day” exterior as a protection from thinking or feeling what is truly going on behind the scenes. We have a choice, in spite of the worst circumstances, to adopt gloom as part of our inner being or use our energies to make things better, even in just a small way.

Sooner or later the kid in the back of the classroom will realize that life will "suck" just as long as she lets it. And, because I wish her well even though I never met her before that day in her classroom, I hope it’s sooner.

Best wishes!

Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best wishes.