The Tree Is Dead

This is the third and, I hope, final session that the tree removal people will have in taking down the neighbors’ poplar tree. I loved that tree and I mourn its loss. It was tall, provided lots of shade and shelter to birds in the neighborhood. It bloomed in the spring, a tulip poplar, they call it.

It was between my neighbors’ house and the house to the north of them. I liked to look at it through my office windows and other windows on the north side of my house. Blackbirds and crows, finches, tits and the occasional hawk would perch in it. Doves would call from it in the evenings.

Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

Yes, I have hugged a tree, lots of them. When I had the choice between taking down the live oak in my back yard and taking down the remnants of the summerhouse competing for space, I chose to keep the tree. There is something sacred about a tree that can never be matched, even if the summerhouse had been rebuilt. I would prefer the birds and squirrels, the acorns and the occasional spider.

When I had the chance to go back to my grade school in Orlando, it was a Sunday afternoon so naturally no one was there. No one, that is, but at least one of the trees that had been there when I was a child. Oh, welcome friend! I could not only rub the coquina-rock steps with my hand, a place I had stood and had my picture taken long ago, steps I had run down too swiftly only to halt at the curb, cautioned by the crosswalk guard, then walked purposefully away from to fly like a lark on the tall swings and leap from the highest arc to fly, for a moment, to the sand and grass below. I could not only touch those stone steps but I could also rub the bark of the old trees that shaded my memory palace.

I would hug trees, talk to them, hide my secrets in their branches, build tree houses and tree forts, respite from the weight of the earth below. I would stretch out on a sturdy branch and snooze, like a cat or a squirrel, and only come down when I had to. I would haul great pieces of wood, the bones of other trees, to make my sacred spots among the branches. I would apologize for my awkwardness, that I was not a bird or anything else more graceful or grateful than a child.

I climb no trees now for I am less graceful than a child, but more grateful for trees. So I mourn the tulip poplar I have watched from my office window for so many years. There is a reason to kill a tree, I understand. I just don’t understand what it is.

I am more pleased than ever that I chose as my ten-year work anniversary gift the planting of ten trees somewhere, anywhere, of any sort whatever. The tulip poplar had somehow grown to be a burden to the human world, too big a tree near too-close houses. My apology is the hope that new trees planted somewhere else, like the Ace of Wands, will someday inspire someone else to plant more and mourn the death of one tree, someday to learn its language to tell the others how sorry I was for the loss of my friend.

The uninterrupted sky is no welcome sight.

http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/trees-communicate-one-another-connected-fungi-video.html

Best wishes.

Old-Fashioned Halloween

A long time ago in southern Illinois, it was Halloween in a place that was known for tearing up the town, literally, in the celebration of the season. I lived in Carbondale, Illinois. It was generally known while I lived there that the store merchants downtown could not get insurance to replace their storefront plate glass windows because of a tendency for the celebrants to destroy said glass windows each year on this festive occasion.

Yes, my college made the Playboy list of the top party schools in the nation when I lived there. It was something of an embarrassment because I wanted a seriously good education. I was lucky and had been identified by the Dean of Liberal Arts as having had a good grade-school background in grammar, bend it though I might now, and because of that and her own personal pet peeves, I was granted not only a tuition scholarship through to graduation but also a job working in the English Department at SIU-Carbondale.

The only thing that seemed worse than attending the current Party Central of the nation was the fact that a footnote had been published in Playboy’s list stating that the university where I had spent my first two years of college, then known as the University of Missouri – Rolla, was not included in the top ten list because Playboy was considering only amateur partiers. Zeesh.

These designations made my fellow students proud of their ability to bash with the best of them. While I was not a stick-in-the-mud about parties, I never attended the Carbondale Halloween glass-breaking festival. Broken glass just never was my favorite medium. Neither was senseless destruction of other people’s property, even if in the spirit of the season. I know, I know…partypoop.

Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

Now, generally Carbondale was a pretty good place to live the other 364 days a year or so. Sure, the first day of snowfall, I swore it snowed LSD because people would inevitably drive the wrong way on one-way streets, disoriented by the winter wonderland and seemingly taken by surprise in spite of fairly accurate weather reports. It wasn’t a social agreement to do something counter-cultural the way Halloween glass-breaking was. It was just a mass confusion of senses that resulted in automotive chaos. Things would calm down by the second or third day of snow and people would resume their usual level of driving acumen, which wasn’t always worth the ride anyway. But at least they remembered after a while what “One Way” with an arrow meant and things were a little less treacherous.

Instead of joining the revels downtown, I always chose what my friends and I thought to be a safer Halloween, usually a party at one of our houses. The year I remember best, the party was at Melody and Monica’s house.

My beautiful and adorable friend Melody was a hippie who loved home arts and was in my earth science class. Science was not Melody’s strong subject so I had made it a point to get her through the class and actually understand it. I figured out the trick for the treat: Put the class principles in terms Melody already understood, and she would get the scary science part too. So, since Melody was perfectly comfortable in the kitchen, all of our earth science experiments took place there. I hooked a hose up to the kitchen faucet and told a story about the rain falling in the mountains and running underground (under dishes in the sink) and popping up as an artesian well farther down the mountain. Melody was also good at helping me clean up the kitchens, either hers or mine, after these lessons, but she made a decent grade in the class.

It was a wonderful example of how to bring a message to someone who is initially intimidated by the topic in the first place. Of course, we didn’t actually create a volcano, but discussed the pros and cons of lava cake and the different ways candy will cool, crunchy and crackly or smooth and gooey. It made earth science a tasty lab class for us.

Melody and her drop-dead gorgeous older sister Monica hosted the Halloween party this year and it was a fun success. People came in costume. I came dressed as my black cat, complete with her turquoise collar and bell and stayed in “cat character” the entire time, meowing instead of talking, hissing for no, purring for yes. Well after midnight, both Melody and I got our second wind when most of the crowd had thinned out and we retreated to her room with cups of tea and girl chatter, planning to talk well into the night.

The living room grew quieter and quieter and even Monica and her then boyfriend, an equally drop-dead gorgeous dark blond from Saudi Arabia named Sultan (it meant “lion” he said, and went with his fabulous Fabio-like mane), had retreated to sleep after the happy partiers had left or at least collapsed on the living room couches and chairs.

As we gossiped quietly into the night, we realized we both heard the sound of running water. But it was from the wrong room. Melody’s room had a door to the living room and a door to the bathroom which then led to the kitchen in their rented bungalow. The running water was coming from the living room.

Like children afraid of monsters under the bed, we hesitated, then knew we had to investigate. Melody, more timid than I was, chose to eliminate the positive possibilities of the bathroom and kitchen. I headed straight out to the living room. We entered the living room about the same time in time to see the source of the sound.

A young man, someone neither of us knew, a friend of a friend of a friend, a casualty of the earlier celebrations, stood at the window in a moment of need, a call of nature. Unfortunately, he had hit both couches, the coffee table, the rug and the walls, in fact, everything but the open window he aimed for. He was, in short, terribly drunk and soon to be dead drunk meat.

The 7 of Cups in Tarot can represent self-delusion. Tell yourself that you’re OK when you’re not. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach. You may be unclear about what your next choices should be. Confuse yourself about what you desire. Drink to oblivion, until not only your eyes and your brain are numb, but your heart as well. It’s one thing to dress in a costume; quite another to lose yourself in the character you have created. In the 7 of Cups, you can lose your way. But it doesn’t have to be permanent; the hangover may be painful but there is a way out.

“Out!” we screamed. He looked at us dully, attempting to zip up with partial success. “OUT!!!”

He was starting to get the message but it wasn’t clear to him yet. Monica and Sultan heard the fuss. Sultan was horrified on many different fronts. First, he was awakened from his romantic snooze with the woman he was not going to marry. Second, he was awakened from his own moderate drinking, but drinking nonetheless. Third, and most horrifying, he was presented with the most undignified example of his gender that he could imagine, a man who had made a dreadful, horrible, fool of himself as a guest in someone’s home. While our watery stranger outweighed Sultan, the power of indignation turned Monica’s sleepy sweetie into our Super Hero. Sultan frog-marched the unfortunate to his car and cursed him on his way home, to his wife and children as we found out, comparing notes.

As we set about in the small, dark hours of the morning cleaning up after the Bad Guest, we suddenly realized we had unleashed the outcast on the unsuspecting driving public. We started to imagine, as we scrubbed away to rid the house of the urine of a stranger, that we would see horrible photos of the automobile accident that must surely ensue from the impaired driver.

Dawn broke on November 1. I rode my bicycle home in the sunrise, my hands red and raw from cleaning the living room and then cleaning myself. Apparently, the Bad Guest had made it home or somewhere safely and we all wished a silent prayer for his wife and children, realizing this was not the first nor last episode and hoping they were all well-insured.

Please have a very safe and happy Halloween and may all your treats be treasures.

Best wishes.

Outgrown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the beginning.

Best wishes.

Heroes Rest

It's September 11, a day of reflection and solemnity, a day to honor those who died at their workplace or in a field for reasons "nothing personal" and everything personal.

Where were you? People ask that about a shared tragic event, like tracing a scar from an old wound and feeling the freshness of the pain again.

I remember the disbelief, the vulnerability, the fear, the fierce protectiveness I felt suddenly for the people on my team at work. I remember the cries of the commuters on the ferryboat taking me home when we realized we had left passengers on the dock while there were still seats on the boat and the cheers as the captain turned the vessel around to go back, a risk we all wanted, needed to take, to pick them up, not knowing if we were in danger or in safety. I remember curling up on my couch once safely home only to watch the Towers fall, see buildings burn and planes crash.

In honor of those who rest, fallen while trying to help others, please take a moment today to be grateful for life and love and friendship and kindness. Take a moment to thank those who help others, even in the smallest of ways. We will all rest soon enough.

Best wishes.

Past Lives

A friend of mine is coming over tomorrow and we’re going to try hypnosis and past-life regression. I’m saying try because I have no idea whether it works, especially on me.

All I know is that since I was a small child I’ve had a memory of a moment, and it is just a moment only, of standing on a man-made stone structure looking out across a flat tree-scattered landscape in grave disappointment about the end of all I had tried to do. There is fire and I smell the smoke. The fire creates its own weather and the hot fire-wind blows my hair, which is very dark and my long plain dress against my legs. I hear screams of people being hurt and the shouts of the invaders who are hurting them. My mentor, a wiry, upright and gentle man stands near me and puts his hand on my shoulder, a gesture of affection and farewell. We both know we are going to die. We have been teachers, teaching those who wanted to learn, those who were not afraid that learning was against the gods’ wishes. We taught an easier, kinder way, with science and mathematics and language and logic. And it is now ended at the hands of brutes. I am not angry. I am sad. I think this must have happened so many times before, where knowledge and learning were met with fear and greed. My mentor has told me it is the way of things a long time ago, so many things he said that we need say nothing more in these last minutes of fire and blood.

All that has come to me in a whiff, in a breath, in a moment. And the memory returns and returns, many times since I was a child, strongly with great detail when I was in high school and many times since then.

I told my friend Cindy about it when we were in high school. We experimented with a Ouija board to see if more information could come up, but that really didn’t shed any light on this memory.

We succeeded in scaring ourselves in a séance in Cindy’s bedroom one evening, with a bunch of our high school friends, boys and girls, packed in to the small room. The door and windows were closed. The candle was lit. The plastic planchette moved wildly across the table as if an agitated hand wanted to scratch out the letters on the board, swinging to letters, then good-bye, then more letters, then good-bye. The candle went out in a puff although no one was near it. Some of the girls screamed. We turned on the electric light and stopped, never to use the board again.

I had read about past lives and Bridey Murphy, the controversies, the skepticism, the fact-checking and not the very least the accuracies in spite of everything. I understood how easily someone might try to fool someone else with information they had gained from research or made up from a florid imagination.

While the people dashed off to find evidence of the real Bridey Murphy, someone whose existence was not proven by records, the interesting thing about the case is that the descriptions of the Antrim coast and other things like the grocer’s name and the name of the church, although asynchronous with the time Bridey is supposed to have lived, were surprisingly accurate. Collective memory, some call it. But it is no doubt interesting.

After reading so many of my high school classmates’ stories of the days when we were in high school, what we got away with and what we didn’t, and now seeing them scattered all over from my small town in eastern New Mexico, I tend to think of past lives more in the current lifespan. The memories have grown softer over time. What was once fierce anger and perhaps even fiercer passion is now the fond youth, the springs and summers that seemed endless and fleeting at the same time.

The 6 of Cups is the Tarot card most often associated with memory of days gone by, of a more innocent time. If only we had known then, we muse. And yet, if we were just to live today as if it were that fond memory that, had we only known then, we would have cherished more, today would be as happy as any yesterday.

I think about the episodes of my life, working as a reporter and newscaster for a college radio station, college scholarship kicked into overdrive as I discovered again and again my love of learning, my first awkward steps into the business world, coming into my own self-confidence in my late twenties, and so many more times in my life. They are like little past lives that, like a fire-hot wind, can sear my mind even today with their scent, their touch, their sights, sounds and tastes.

One of my favorite people in tarot, Lon Milo DuQuette, has a song about past lives that I love, so rather than say more, I’ll let Lon sing it for me. Here is “I Once Was the Hero of Megiddo”, lyrics by Lon Milo DuQuette. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc5mJVEiP7Y

Best wishes.

Loyalty

“Don’t make me choose.”

It was something of a showdown between my father and me. In his very old age he had come to live with us to recover and even thrive for just a little while. He had fallen down an escalator in a department store and shortly afterwards got up in the night in his small apartment and his hip had collapsed, broken.

I was in California then and he was in Missouri, far away from any of his children and doggedly stubborn, something that must surely be a genetic trait within our family. I could not fly out fast enough and spoke to his surgeon who expressed doubts about Daddy making it through the surgery.

Off-Center Lenormand
(c) Copyright 2012 Marcia McCord

“I know he’s 90 or whatever and I know he has heart problems and other issues, but, with all due respect, doctor, you don’t know my father. He will live if only to prove all of you wrong.” And he did. The doctor was dumbfounded.

As Daddy recovered in a nursing home, we kids took turns spending a week with him until vacations ran out and it was clear that without family presence he was not going to be well-cared for.

It was part of our initiation into the world of elder care, the various interpretations of advanced directives, etc. Daddy had a DNR order and had created a Power of Attorney naming me as the person to make decisions should something devastating happen. What we found was that instead of the folks caring for him and consulting me on major decisions, they interpreted DNR “do not resuscitate” as “do not care for.”

When we scooped him out of the nursing home to airlift him to California, he had bedsores, edema, pneumonia and other things that displayed a lack of care. Nothing keeps your loved one alive, I found, more than your presence and attention attracting the notice of the caregivers.

Daddy recovered from all those things likely to kill older people and moved into my first floor apartment, what I call the “basement” although it is not underground. He thrived in a way. He got well enough to become, instead of the “pet father” I had hoped for, truly a troll in my basement. His old age, in his defense, was not necessarily happy for him. His beloved third wife had died after a short and dreadful battle with small-cell lung cancer. He could not see why he was still alive and was constantly angry at everyone from me to Hilary Clinton whom he blamed irrationally for Noni’s death.

I gave him a break though. He was 90 and had alienated just about everyone who might have cared about him, alienated or outlived. And it’s hard for someone who lives only for the attention from others when the audience has left the theatre.

At some point, he picked a fight and demanded that I choose between him and all I held dear.

In Lenormand, the card that signals “loyalty, regard, friendship and enduring kindness” is the Dog. Dogs forgive. Dogs stand by you. Dogs don’t care if you wear good clothes or bad. Dogs will put up with a lot to remain in your pack if they have bonded with you. Dogs stay.

When someone asks you to choose between loyalties, they likely do not realize that they have just revealed their lack of loyalty to you. If they were loyal, they would say, “I need to do this and I know it’s something that you can’t agree with, but I would like to remain your friend.” But by saying, it’s me or them, their regard is revealed as conditional and their loyalty limited; yet, by the demand for choice, it is as if you are the one whose loyalty is in question.

I’ve had that kind of situation lately among some friends. It is heartache for me. Unlike the temporary motto of my family crest (now abandoned with better DNA testing), I don’t identify with “My way or the highway.” It’s a type of loyalty that is divisive, not building.

If your friends and loved ones really care for you, they love you in spite of what they do not agree with. They are strong enough to acknowledge a different point of view, a different choice, without calling it evil or sick or deluded or, of course, disloyal.

When my father presented me with the choice between himself and the rest of my world, I was very clear to him.

Do not try to make me choose. You will lose.

The attempt to force my choice demonstrates your weakened bond to me and signals the danger in my placing my complete loyalty with you. Allowing me to remain loyal to myself will earn you my undying friendship. And then this cat will be the dog.

Best wishes.

BATS Foolery

It was hot, too hot for me. And there was not enough air in the room, either. I was backstage with my SF BATS buddies who were part of the Saturday night entertainers for the “stage” that was the area at the end of the hallway at the Doubletree in San Jose. We were waiting for Thalassa and for the start of the show.

Backstage is a funny place for players. We tug on our clothes, never quite sure if they are right and yet quite sure the overall effect will be, no doubt, a Show. David from Texas stood tall in his wizard…or was it swami? guise, a dramatic figure just standing there wordless. The sound man worked on the equipment. Lon Milo DuQuette sat quietly behind all of us in his impeccable white suit. Lon always looks like some deity to me, although the religion isn’t necessarily what it appears.

Peter and Jimmy are backstage with us, Jimmy in the best Fool costume with his yellow tights, green-sunflower tunic and green Robin Hood felt hat, Peter in his always-ready smile in the middle of us girls who were the first act.

Valentina had dressed as fall, and never a more luscious harvest than she with her great, broad-brimmed hat of fruit and whole dress the color of ripened pomegranate, a feast in herself with her dark hair and dark eyes. Rhonda made the most of her signature long white hair dressed in the charcoals-to-whites of winter, looking like the January that would never end, the frost, the ice, the snow, the wind. Beautiful Carrie was endless summer, bright in pinks and reds. And I was spring in my peacock green printed low-cut long gown and golden slippers. “Nature’s first green is gold,” I had quipped, mostly to myself as I had selected my dress. Now I was just hoping it would stay in place on my too-ample frame.

I was like a bud ready to burst in bloom (good) but I didn’t want to burst out of my dress (bad). I had abandoned the double-sticky wardrobe tape that they say Hollywood uses to keep actresses and their gowns in place.

“Duct tape,” I muttered. “I need duct tape.”

An astrologer had once told me that gravity was not my friend, predicting some 15 years before the event that I would suffer a great accident and injury to my leg. Well, I thought, gravity has done me more harm than my snapped knee and broken elbow.

I remembered a joke my friend Alice had told me. As we all fanned ourselves, waiting for the show to begin, I told it.

“At our age,” I began, “when they yell, ‘Show us your….’” And Peter dissolved into helpless laughter for minutes, gasping in horror at the thought of the ravages of gravity on tender lovelies as they drag towards the knees.

I said a few more things to keep the laughter up. It helps to laugh backstage. At least it helps me.

After a while and a few more crazy girl-jokes, Lon spoke up and said, “You know, this is exactly what my wife is afraid I do on these trips!”

“Give us the phone,” I urged him. “We can reassure her that you are safe!” He did not take me up on the offer, although it was sincere. Lon is a treasure of talent, musical and esoteric.

David handed me a plastic sword and I lent Carrie a cane. Suddenly, Thalassa came in and it was showtime.

Nancy, our director and principal dancer, directed covering us with white sheets so that our appearance would be revealed season by season. Lon and his ukulele went center stage, our Music Man. Covered in a sheet, I now could only hear the players move to the stage. And then it was my turn to be escorted to my mark.

Thalassa introduced us. The music started. I could hear Nancy dancing and suddenly, since I was Spring, I was first to be unveiled. I popped David’s plastic sword up like a jack-in-the-box with an equally bouncy smile on my face. Nancy danced. I mugged for the crowd, moving the sword in rhythm to Lon’s singing and playing. Laughter rose from the crowd.

Good, I thought. We all take ourselves too seriously sometimes. It was a relief to play the Fool for a weekend.

My life has been too serious this year. My workplace has been in upheaval. My job, along with all those of my co-workers, has been in question. Will it be there? Will I have to move to the Deep South and make the best of a hot and humid place, likely not to return to California? Will I be forced to get a job somewhere else in a time where jobs are not plentiful or guaranteed or often pleasant? Will I be forced to move all I have to continue to survive? Will I be able to make the most of another Tower event in my life, recreate myself one more time, find the Star in the rubble? Will I be able to rise above? And when will I know?

Finally, an indication of hope without a complete collapse has come. It looks like I will be able to stay in California. I have held back tears and screams and fear and panic since March, since first hearing of the possibility of great change. I know all reprieves are temporary, all respites brief, all comforts passing and all joys priceless. And for that, they are all the more precious.

So I try to laugh and make others laugh, to forget trouble for a while, a brief moment, as is the purpose of the jester, to make others laugh and to make the monarch think or feel. From within me, from my fears and sorrows and pain and anger, can well up the absurdity of our struggle to make things make sense. And from within me, a greater force arises out of love, to hold the plastic sword, to shield the principal dancer as she changes costume, to kiss the troubadour and flee to the stage door to exit, only to find it locked.

The show goes on while I pound on the door.

“Peter!” I cry in my best stage-whisper, my impromptu panic rising. “Peter! Let me in! Open the door!”

I expect it will be like that, knocking on heaven’s door. And Peter, helpless with laughter as gravity has taken its final toll, may let me in. Otherwise, I’m sure I’ll see most of my friends.

Best wishes from my BATS-termath!