Nearly Silent Night

I woke up in the dark, sometime between bedtime and dawn. I didn’t want to look at the clock. I counted the snores. Hubby, 1; dog, 1; cat, 0. Tony doesn’t make much noise when he sleeps so I wasn’t too concerned; Alice is a completely different story but she was out in the living room. Tony chirped and hopped up on the bed beside me to snuggle into my hand. Some critter in the back yard rustled some leaves, just enough to make Tony turn an ear towards the window but not enough to get up and investigate. We were all warm and safe.

Tea Tarot
(c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord

We had had a peaceful Christmastime. Other than my gift of a cold from the outside world, all was calm and at that hour, we all had excuses for not being too bright. I sniffled softly, trying to keep the rest of the house asleep.

This year was the closest thing to an old-fashioned Christmas I have had in a while. It started out the first weekend of December with the Global Holiday Fair, an annual charity event. I usually take a shift in the kitchen filling orders for chili, no chili dog, no make that 2 chili dogs and could we have the spicy vegetarian chili, not the mild, medium or hot beef chili, and banana fritters and turkey vegetable soup and sodas and few other local delicacies and could I have the chili on the side? After a couple hours of that and my holiday spirit really sets in. I’m glad I don’t work in a restaurant. Those people are made of stronger stuff than I am.

Over the years volunteering for kitchen duty, I’ve learned that “zone defense” seems to work the best. The kitchen aisles are not that wide and the kitchen workers for the most part, ahem, are that wide so that we seem to do better “bucket brigade” style than trying to run a hundred yards for a touchdown. I like low-contact kitchen sports when you’ve got an armful of molten chili. I’m pleased to say this year that no kitchen workers were harmed for yet another year of Christmas kitchen safety. Church choirs sing and different charity groups have booths and sell Christmas-y and other winter holiday gifts. My husband always goes big at the bakery booth. This year, I was enchanted by the sculptures done by Doug Chenelle and his friends at Milestones of Development. Where else can you get gift exchange items that are individual pieces of art for the low, low price of, well, what you’d spend on a gift exchange item?

My husband is fond of consumables for gifts. If you saw our garage, you’d know why. So our big gift this year was my favorite Yule welcoming celebration at the Cal Revels in Oakland, California. Once again we had the perfect seats. I use the “nose” method of determining seating chart selection. If you are sitting so far in the back that you get a nosebleed, you’re too far away; if you can count the hairs in the performers’ noses, you’re too close. I have to say it’s hard to get a bad seat at the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland, though. The theme this year was King Arthur and Camelot. We were treated to the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with colorful costumes, artful dancing, juggling and as always a sing-along with the crowd. I love the Cal Revels' Christmas spirit, full of joy.

This year I had an added treat of a visit from my sister and her husband. My family never gets together at the holidays so I was thrilled to get a chance to have dinner at the Union Hotel in Occidental with them. Occidental is Away From It All, charming, woodsy, and has two famous rival Italian restaurants, the Union Hotel and Negri’s. Both are delicious dining, worth the scenic drive through amazing Northern California.

We always spend Christmas Eve with our friend Gerry and her family. The family is growing and growing, with adorable Lu, now almost two, and her new little sister who will arrive next week! Gerry’s grandson Nick had splurged on Scratcher tickets and I came away $3 richer. And, Nick, thanks for the pepper spray! I hope I never need to use it.

I decided to tackle Christmas Day head on this year and invited my brother-in-law Don, plus my young friend Andrew and his buddy Patrick to dinner. I had taken a somewhat more leisurely approach to the meal than usual. John likes his roast beef burnt, the condition where the chef in the finest and even less-than-fine restaurants will toss up their hands in a fit of pique and exclaim in some accent or another that “ze can NOT guarantee zee quality when zee customer demands zee beef overcooked!” I decided to pass on the fit of pique. John and Pat wanted well-done roast and although it makes me shudder to do it I figured out a way to give them their burnt beast and still have a decent, recognizable cut of prime rib for Andrew and myself.

“Two roasts,” I said as my Final Answer. Though it hurt me to do it, I scorched that poor beautiful rib roast until properly petrified for my well-done-ers and waited a discreet amount of time before introducing my well-cooked rare roast to the oven. A generous crust of maple seasoning and garlic salt graced them both. We played board games at the big round oak table while everything cooked. I lost on the last question for Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? and won at cribbage by a hair. We then quickly swept the cats into the bedrooms, set the table with my Grocery Outlet Christmas dishes, brought out the better silver, and had a feast fit for any king and a table full of knights, including the pumpkin pie with generous whipped cream.

My favorite Christmas moment, however, came the next day. I am in the midst of helping my friend Susan and her daughter Della get their internet connection up and working. I hadn’t seen Susan in a long time so I was so happy to get a chance to talk. Her cat had died a few months ago and they were still blue, missing Coalie.

“You need a cat,” I said, with my usual subtle diagnosis. “I know a cat.”

I didn’t exactly know the cat. I knew of the cat, or rather cats. My friend Becca had just told me about a recent rescue of a set of indoor cats who had not reacted well to one of the cats in residence. Teddy had been ousted from his territory in the office and had set up his last defenses in the bathroom. The situation was dire, especially since Teddy sounded a lot like the low-key lovebug that my Tony is. Teddy, the little Knight of Cups, sought peace, love, harmony and was currently lost in the deep, deep woods of a once-familiar home with monsters all around.

Boxing Day became Teddy Day and Teddy was introduced to Susan and Della. Teddy is a luxurious silver tabby with well-proportioned features and a soft medium coat. We knew the introduction could be delicate but we were hopeful. While Teddy did show his shy side, he didn’t panic. No barking dogs, no marauding gangs of invader felines, just two sweet ladies with a vacancy for a snuggle bunny. Teddy crawled up into a secluded spot in Susan’s recliner, not yet ready for thorough exploration. He didn’t hiss. He didn’t run or scratch. He let us all talk softly to him and pet his tail or foot.

“I’m a match-maker!” I beamed to John. At least I hope I am. Like the Knight of Cups, I feel it is never too late to pursue love, no matter how shy you are, no matter how long it takes. What better season than this to try to bring a little love into creatures’ lives?

Bright hopes and best wishes!

Last Minute Christmas Gifts

“Goon!” I bellered. I call him Goon but he’s actually my husband, Prince Third-Time’s-a-Charming.

“Goon! Come quickly! I broke the toilet!”

You have to realize that I took an awfully big chance marrying this guy. For one thing, Versions 1.0 and 2.0 were not successful releases, if you get my drift. I don’t like the blame game so I feel it’s important to note my own flaws in those previous and unsuccessful financial relationships. For one thing, I failed to see how wrong a choice I was making at the time. These are expensive mistakes and so, counter to conventional wisdom, traditional religious beliefs and what your mama said, I recommend at least a thorough beta testing of the model prior to purchase. However, I also have to admit that the enthusiasm of the sales force prior to purchase can diminish to near-zero after the sale.

If you didn’t follow that, you shouldn’t get married. I’m just sayin’.

Another part of taking a big chance had to do with the parties involved, namely The Goon and me. He’s a Capricorn and I’m an Aries and for me to say that he “grounds” me is something like saying that helium is holding down hydrogen. I’m flammable; he’s not. And there's more to it than just your Sun Sign. There were some who were concerned about the lack of adult supervision in our relationship but we have the dog now.

Quincy will bark at us until we are all seated and being nice to each other, preferably across the room. There is no hugging or kissing in dog, as John explains, so we have to sneak in PDA when the dog’s back is turned. This is one of the secrets of keeping our romance spontaneous.

“Quick!” I’ll hiss to the Goon in the middle of the kitchen.

“While he’s outside in the back yard!”

We’ll sneak in a smooch or dance to some tune in our heads, usually sung with made-up lyrics, something like this that was never meant to be in Oklahoma,

“Don’t cross your eyes like that.

They’ll just get stuck that way.

They look so cute stuck that way!

People will say we’re in love!”

We started calling Quincy “The Duenna” and just settled for calling him Dwayne when he starts supervising during the good stuff. We didn’t realize we had a Cocker Spaniel in law enforcement, his Day Job being the Knight of Swords. What’s funny is that he (the dog) tends to work only one shift. After about 10 pm or so, he just looks at us, snorts and goes back to sleep. My sense is that he figures if what we’re doing is fighting, it’s someone else’s problem until he’s back on duty the next day.
 

Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

 
John figures his marriage vows were to love, honor and say Yes, Dear to just about anything I came up with. In fact, I did make him promise me one thing.

“Promise me…” I struggled with the exact wording.

“Yes, dear?”

He felt it wise to get practice in before the ceremony.

“Promise me you will not be handy.”

“What?”

See, the thing about guys is that they always want to fix stuff for you. That’s so Knight of Swords too. That’s so cute. Well, it’s cute unless he doesn’t really have a knack for it. It’s not that John hasn’t a knack for fixing things. It’s that he is so creative with alternative solutions and wants me to participate in the process of selection. My imagination runs wild with visions of burst pipes and John reviewing the choices of duct tape versus replacement pipes and whether copper is better than PVC. My promise extracted from him means that when the pipes burst, we call a plumber, period. He is free to speculate and even annoy the Hired Professional all he wants as long as he stands back far enough to let the expert do his work.

Sometimes John does do some handiwork but I always cringe at the descriptions prior to actually viewing the body, so to speak.

“Come out here and see this lash-up I rigged for watering your roses,” he will announce. I suppress all my fears and reason that as long as the “lash-up” doesn’t actually undermine the foundation of the house causing it to settle even more than it has already, it can’t be all bad. If necessary I could always purchase new roses for the yard.

Most of the time I think it’s a language barrier. John speaks Butte-en-ese (byoo-tuhn-EEZ), the native tongue of those from Butte, Montana, usually Irish in origin but with the occasional Finlander and Italian phrase thrown in. It’s almost like English and perhaps just a tad more cosmopolitan than the language spoken in the movie Fargo. Like so many things about John, I used to think he was joking because it sounded so funny. Then we went on our honeymoon to his family’s reunion in Butte and I realized he was telling the truth after all. By the end of the week, I was saying, “Yah, sure, you betcha’” with the best of them. At least full immersion in Butte-en-ese gave me a way to translate, but occasionally a term like “lash-up” is something I take entirely too visually.

How can you lash up water, I muse as I’m reluctantly trudging down the stairs to view whatever he’s done to my roses now. The project reveals itself to be merely a complex series of tiny hoses, valves and sprinklers threaded through my flower beds for zone watering. The materials he used were those actually intended for flower bed watering. He called it a “lash-up” because he was not sure, even after the success of his project, that he’d done the right thing.

Back to more recent times and the broken toilet, John rushes into our 1930’s era pink, violet and black tiled bathroom which I call Mary Engelbreit’s Bad Dream. Don’t get me wrong. I love the color scheme, but I recognize it’s not that California sea glass and sand thing that people associate with luxury bathing nowadays.

Tony Sincerely Concerned With the
Status of Things in the
Pink, Violet and Black Bathroom



I had reluctantly agreed to replace the 1930’s toilet a few years ago due to wear and tear. Little leaks become big leaks and replacement seemed like the right thing. You could sink the Glomar Explorer in that baby with the water capacity, so the new one is more eco-friendly and low-volume. It feels responsible to have the new one, even though I miss the old one. But if I’m saddled with the new one, I expect it to last at least 50 years like the old one did. Flipping the little flush handle on the new convenience and having it swing limply in response was, well, horrifying. I had to yell for help. My Goon came running. OK, it wasn’t running because of the replaced knee, but he hurried after he figured out I was hollering for him.

After all, I have to give him these little opportunities to rescue me, right? He threatened to use language that Mother would not have approved and eventually wrestled the chain back onto the hook, restoring order to the Universe.

“My Hero!” The big ones like praise like this so I like to make sure he gets it whenever possible.

“Dollie,” he calls me Dollie, “Dollie, if I’m a Hear-O, what would a See-O or a Smell-O be?”

My eyes close and my mind shuts down momentarily. I breathe deeply.

“Quincy, bite the Bad Man.”

It’s not very effective giving verbal orders to a dog who can’t hear so Quincy, picking up the scent of our breath, wags his tail, pretty sure he was just told he was a good dog. Bad jokes, however, are a small price to pay for getting the toilet working again especially since I’ll be cooking Christmas dinner for a motley crew of guests this year.

Sometimes those last-minute Christmas gifts can be the best thing. If I can find that nice bow the cats hid under the couch, I might put it on the toilet tank as a reminder that we still don’t have to go out under a tree like the dog does!

Best wishes for a bright holiday season, no matter what your faith!

***

There's a last-minute gift you can give any time of the year and that's your registration to be a bone marrow donor. Our little Tatiana's happy recovery was short-lived and we lost her. That bright little star twinkles down upon us from heaven. But you can make the gift of life to someone else. Be The Match.

While you're at it, please say a prayer for my friend Johnny Leadfoot who has been battling cancer this year. He's been trying to dress up as Santa for the folks at the cancer hospital in Houston with a sign that says, Does this make me look fat? Prayers for him and for his family would be appreciated!

Do You Hear What I Hear?

The dog just barked in my ear, enough that it hurt. I have to consider this a good sign though. I can hear the dog well enough that he doesn’t have to scream in my ear. Hearing is important to my work, both the Day Job and my tarot work.

I had my hearing tested last week. It took almost a year to get the appointment and, unlike my medical plan’s other policies, this particular test wasn’t covered under the “diagnostic tests are free” rule for the co-pays. I had to pay money to find out if my hearing is bad enough to need a little boost.

I spent a good deal of energy in my childhood translating what my mother said to my father. I suspected it was “selective deafness.” He just couldn’t hear my mother. Lorna, my hearing test technician, confirmed this phenomenon also known as marital deafness. Apparently it can be contagious.

“Good news, honey! I don’t need hearing aids yet,” I said to John.

“Huh?”

Well, you get the picture.

The good news is that I didn’t have to spend an extraordinary amount of money on a personal speaker system to pump the everyday world straight into my head. Decent hearing aids are thousands of dollars and I’d love someone to explain exactly why.

I want to give a break to the deaf community here by saying I think it’s perfectly OK if they feel good about their variation of the hearing feature and alternative language skills. I’m not an audio bigot by any means.

However, since I have grown used to hearing, I would like to continue to do so as a personal choice. I attended my share of rock concerts. I saw George Harrison during his Dark Horse tour. Well, I saw his left shoulder and vest. I was on the floor of the arena in St. Louis in the last row of the folding chairs. Even standing on the chair, due to my lack of personal altitude, I feel the best I can say is that I saw George Harrison’s vest. But I did hear him.

I saw Bob Dylan when he was doing a jazz thing. I went to a concern where Blondie warmed up for Savoy Brown. I slept through Savoy Brown. Not many people can say that, I think. I loved the REO concert in Rolla, Missouri where we danced out of the gymnasium, happiest concert I ever attended. I thrilled to Renaissance in Edwardsville, Illinois by the river bank, transcendent music for me. I sat in the top row of another sports arena and watched fondly as one of my precious friends, with the aid of entirely too many brewskies, attempted to rush the stage in adoration of Stevie Nicks during a Fleetwood Mac tour. Bob’s attempts were foiled but perhaps it’s just as well. We are not sure he would have remembered the encounter had he been successful. We all understood the need, though, to touch the intangible.

I probably attended more Kinks concerts than any other group or single artist. My first husband and his best friend from high school were Kinks fans. The girlfriends and wives of the group of guys they hung out with generally turned up their noses at the Kinks but I think now they were just scornful of the primal scream competition that the guys held any time they got together, filled the rooms with smoke and turned up the volume on the stereo which was usually playing the Kinks. I could usually bring the scream-fest to a halt by participating in it with them, which made the guys look at me as if I were stoned and not them. As musical, melodious and meaningful as the Kinks’ music was, that had to contribute to my hearing loss potential.

Still when the girls would get together, they would ask me how I could stand to listen to Led Zeppelin or Jethro Tull and I would blink because, well, I liked them, seriously. I adored Pink Floyd and I didn’t care which one was Pink.

You’d think I was some sort of rock and roll groupie since my second husband was a sound and lights man for live events. And I have to admit one rabid fan moment as a backstage groupie. Oh, it was nothing like one of my college acquaintances who crawled into a bathroom window with a cast on her arm just to sleep with a pop culture author she had heard speak at the university that evening. (Insert bug-eyed emoticon here.) But it was bold for me.

I had come along to a private function, a high-priced fund-raiser that took up the interior of a mall in the Bay Area somewhere near Silicon Valley. Dressed in my t-shirt and blue jeans and complete with a sinus infection that should have prevented most normal human functions, I was a stage hand helping with the miles of cable and plugs and tape and test-1-2, test-1-2 that is the setup of a live event. It’s a Page of Swords sort of job, technical, not pretty. You have to do what you’re told and do it right the first time. You’re not paid to give your opinion or enthusiasm.

Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

Most musical acts will do a warm up and sound test well before the concert in these small venues because the acoustics and placement of speakers and microphones varies each time they create a stage in a place where no permanent stage exists.

And there he was. One of my idols since, well, since I wasn’t really old enough to know better. Michael McDonald, once of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and now out on his own, was the featured act. Tall, dark, handsome, with a liquid voice that could make even my high school biology teacher weak in the knees if she’d given him a chance, he gave a sound check which was his entire concert. It was my own private concert. Heaven!

Shy, still, I quietly approached Mr. McDonald’s personal sound technician, not wanting to disturb The Artist Himself.

“Do you think he would mind,” I snuffled, “if I asked for his autograph?”

The sound guy looked at me, so obviously not a stage hand, covered in dust and grit. Was I the only 40-year-old groupie who had asked this question?

“Naw! Him? Are you kidding? He’d love it!”

I figured the sound guy was lying to me. Or not. Either way, if I wanted an autograph before I died of the sinus infection, I had to make my move. I stepped softly across the flimsy stage and tapped Michael McDonald on the shoulder softly but definitely. He wheeled around, surprised.

“I’ve been in love with you forever!”

My dirty hands flew to my mouth as my face grew red. The room spun or it could have been the ear infection. Mr. McDonald had half a grin on his face, perhaps looking for a security guard. I nearly melted with embarrassment. Smooth, I thought. Very smooth. I shoved my crew ID badge and a Sharpie marker at him.

“Can I have your autograph?”

We were both relieved that was all it was. He signed my badge, “Love, Mike McDonald.” I succumbed to my dread and infection, retreated and drove home, unable to speak for many reasons. I still love “What a Fool Believes.” I still have that badge. I want to keep hearing the music, if for nothing else than for nostalgia’s sake.

Best wishes.

Fighting for Love

Tony and Binket don’t get along. This is like saying that the tsunami in Japan dampened spirits a bit. Cats when annoyed with each other usually pose sideways, dance around, fluff up their fur and make noises anywhere from severe automotive trouble to people being tortured. There’s a lot of spit and threats and insults thrown. There can be a retreat after both cats have decided that each could take the other with one paw tied behind his or her back and a lot of mumbling and might-have-beens afterwards. That’s not what happens with Tony and Binket though.

Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

Binket, in her defense, did get here first. She was a rescue baby from southern California, just a tiny handful of calico fluff from an abandoned defense manufacturing plant. The property owners sent a few stray cats to clear out the mice. The people with this easy mouse-control idea forgot that cats left unneutered will multiply almost like mice. Now rescue groups will scoop up what they can from the grounds to see if they can be neutered, rehabilitated and placed in loving homes like mine.

Binket came complete with a roaring case of ringworm, a fungus that spread to the dog, the other cat, my husband and me. We all got the treatment. The dog lost his “job” as a volunteer companion for severely handicapped people. The rescue people said that couldn’t possibly happen when I called to warn them they might want to up their disinfecting so other rescues weren’t affected. I didn’t want to argue with them. These were two addled ladies who were trying to hold back the tide of unwanted animals in Orange County, just barely keeping it together to save the ones they could with nearly no money. If they bought bargain brand bleach, it was probably watered down and less-effective in killing the fungus, God love them.

Even though Binket was raised from just a few weeks by the softest touches in the Universe, my husband and myself, she ended up being a cranky kitty, so much so that I started to look up the theories of inheritance of disposition in cats. Apparently, if you’re a cat and if your father was a cranky kitty, you’re probably a cranky kitty. That’s what the latest cat science had to offer me. So I was a little dismayed that cooing, cuddling, coddling nurture did not have as much effect on No No Bad Cat’s nature. She buffaloed her older adoptive sister into submission which didn’t seem remarkable, except that she’s slightly smaller. Napoleon complex, maybe.

Peepers is the kind of cat to open pantry doors and snooze undisturbed for hours. More than once we’ve heard strange noises coming from the kitchen only to find that we do not, in fact, have a poltergeist. It’s only a 10 pound Siamese mix who has had her linen drawer closed and is now ready to get up and go about her kitty business. She really isn’t pleased that there is anyone in the house with her besides me in the first place but has grown used to Binket. Her way of dealing with conflict is to burrow until the blast is over.

Our little feline family grew and Eleanor joined us. I had thought I met Eleanor on the worst day of her life. It turns out that every day is the worst day of Eleanor’s life. She is the Omega Cat. No matter what the contest, she comes in dead last. Strangely, Binket, who by now had fallen deeply, madly in love with the dog, a romance still in full flower, adjusted well to Eleanor’s arrival. I think she sensed immediately that Eleanor was no threat to her Alphaness and dragged her around like a feathery 5 pound toy. Eleanor seems to like this sort of abusive affection from Binket so we determined not to interfere. After all, when you have a cranky kitty, any sign of positive relationships is a sign of hope.

It all came to a crash when I brought home Tony. True, Tony’s a male cat but I venture to say that never a more unsuspecting, unambitious, shy on brains and soft in the middle male cat has ever graced my doorstep. He’s like an animated stuffed toy and just about that smart. He seldom has an idea about anything other than warming up on the nearest warm thing, often my laptop computers. He steps on the telephone when I’m on conference calls, has a couple of favorite soft toys including one we call Stewart Little, is jolly with the dog, is scared of his own shadow and otherwise takes up cat space. He’s an unusual looking cat, considering he’s just a brown tabby. OK, he’s downright funny looking. I took him to the vet to see if his physique was in any way a dangerous health deformity. She laughed and said, yes, he is funny looking and it’s likely his parents were funny looking too. Instead of being that sleek, long luxuriant short-hair that model cats are, he’s a lot like a bean bag or turtle with an itty bitty kitty head. There’s quite a bit of extra Tony to Tony so he weighs in at about 16 pounds.

We went through all the standard instructions of how to introduce the new kitty to the household. Peepers seemed to think he was OK as long as he didn’t do anything aggressive and Tony’s not that kind of guy. Binket, though, went ballistic. Even when I put them on either side of an interior doorway with catnip on both sides to associate each other with psychedelic herbal pleasure, Binket did everything she could to kill Tony. She crammed as many paws and claws under the door, hissed and spat, and tried to figure out how to open the door by pounding on it. Tony immediately went on the defensive, which for him meant he tried to compact his generously padded and floppy frame into as tight a ball as possible and whimpered. This adds fuel to the flame for Binket. She knows now that her mission in life is to destroy her enemy. It doesn’t matter that he’s nearly twice her size.

She’ll do anything to slip into the section of the house where Tony is and attack him. Tony wets his pants, screams and cries and is generally dumbfounded at the assassination attempts. Naturally, I try to prevent this scenario, if for nothing else the cleanup needed afterwards.

Recently, though, Binket got a surprise. Tony fought back when she cornered him under a desk. She had grabbed his ear and he, amazingly, chomped down on her foreleg. A lot of screaming and flailing later and Binket retreated long enough for me to separate them, clean them up, comfort them both. Binket’s bite needed tending by the vet after a few days and she came home bandaged with anti-biotics.

Tony is his usual floppy, purring like an Evinrude, delighted to a frenzy over my just-washed hair, snuggly on cold mornings self. His ear has healed and you’d never know he’d been hurt. Binket has changed a bit though. She’s become snuggly instead of cranky. She wants to be a lap cat, now, after 5 years of dancing on the tables and shooting out the lights. She still doesn’t like Tony but she isn’t on the attack so much. Now she just wants to dash in and sleep on the bed. I’m good with that. She doesn’t resist being picked up and carried around and petted like she used to. Maybe this was a good thing.

This has been a 5 of Swords moment in our little family. What looked like a win when Binket exerted her aggressive bullying had always been a loss. But this recent battle lost seems, in the long run, to be a win overall. Binket? Happy? Who knew it was possible?

That win-lose scenario plays itself out in our human interactions all the time too. Sometimes winning the battle is losing the war. And sometimes, just sometimes, losing the battle means getting what you wanted in the first place. I think Binket had to push her limits to allow snugglies in her little cat life. I know people like that.

Best wishes.

Happy Families

Cousin RoseRed says she’s a bit phobic about the 10 of Cups. This astonishes most of her acquaintances since most people think of the 10 of Cups as that Happily Ever After card. The RWS (Rider-Waite-Smith) shows hale and healthy Mom and Dad arm-in-arm under a rainbow set in a clear sky with ten cups perched on the rainbow. Their two children laugh and play nearby, paying no attention to their parents’ happiness, no news being good news and apparently good news being no news either.

But that’s a little strange, isn’t it? Rainbows are created from rain in the sky with the sun shining on it. The drops act as a prism, like the suncatchers in windows, and split pure light into its separate colors. And yet our 10 of Cups shows a clear day. From this we could not only get the “happily ever after” interpretation but an indication, no matter how subtle or beautiful, that the rain still exists. Is the rain the range of emotions that turn our lives from black and white to techni-color? Is the rain the vehicle for the delivery of nourishment that would be forever stuck in the earth otherwise? But in this picture, the rain is actually stuck in the sky. We are shown the rain, the happy side of the rain, the colors, the hope, the promise. It’s like what I used to call the “OK music” that monster movies play after all the scary stuff is over and vanquished and the movie ends.

Our lives aren’t movies, though. Happily ever after, if you really mean ever after, doesn’t really exist. It’s great for stories and it’s better to tell the kids about a happy ending to a story so they have hope that at least sometimes things turn out all right. But our lives go on after the end of the “movie” or “story” we’re telling. Other things happen, some good, some bad. Ultimately, for all of us, our story is over.

I admit I take some vicarious pleasure at Cousin RoseRed’s horror of the 10 of Cups. I’m sure experiencing the full measure of it is not so much fun, so my immediate apologies, cuz. But it’s the same vicarious pleasure we take in watching scary movies or listening to scary stories. They are titillating and they are, importantly, happening to someone else. Maybe we tell these stories to ourselves to build a sense of emotional distance so that when it counts we can laugh or better yet stand up to what scares us. This is counter to what most of us think we and the rest of the world need. Why should we teach ourselves purposeful insensitivity especially at a time when being kinder all around is the clear need in our world? For survival, for one thing.

After all, who can’t appreciate the irony of having survived a plane crash only to die of a snakebite? Just because one hazard has been overcome, one sorrow has been survived, one evil has been eradicated, nothing says more trouble won’t come later. So that feeling of everything’s just perfect is unsettling to my 10-of-Cups-phobes who are pretty sure there’s another velociraptor waiting around the next kitchen counter. Anticipation isn’t always a pretty sight. But the 10 of Cups tells us that we need to enjoy those moments when everyone in our little community is happy, really feel them, even if the rain never hits the ground to be truly nourishing. That rainbow is still a wonderful thing, if fleeting.

Often the 10 of Cups means that the whole family is happy. I’m not sure I remember specifically a time in my childhood when that occurred but like the two kids playing at their parents’ feet, the absence of a remarkable and memorable bad time resulted in a vague and seemingly endless good time. Its memory is more of a feeling than the stop-action horror film that bad times could be.

I still have to remind myself and others that what makes one community or family happy does not always please everyone else. One could point to US politics for that. In our political scene here, what appears as the 10 of Cups Happy Family to one group of people can be a killing blow, say, a 10 of Swords moment to another and perhaps just an undue burden like the 10 of Wands to another. It feels cheeky to say that Happy Families are relative, but there you have it.

Without drawing on recent events that could bring out the swords or wands or cups or even pentacles as a reaction, I can point to one Happy Family whose rainbow was not everyone’s 10 of Cups.

John and I traveled to southwest Scotland years ago. “Roots tour?” our occasionally helpful good Samaritans eye-rolled to us. We nodded sheepishly. As far as I can tell, Cousin RoseRed and my common family lived in this part of Scotland along the Galloway coast. It looks a lot like the coast of northern California, trees, cows, green, fog, sea. California has this interesting thing called sunshine which happens sometimes along its north coast and a somewhat more interesting thing called earthquakes which, thank goodness, happen even more rarely than sunshine. Galloway has a pre-historic ring of standing stones called the Tor House Ring, a stone circle that would be a terrific calendar if the sky were clear enough to figure out where the sun, moon, planets and stars were. I’m pretty sure they could tell sometimes. Galloway also has, or rather had, Sawney Bean.

In short, Sawney, his wife, and maybe 50 children and grandchildren lived in a cave or caves (you’ll see why the reports aren’t particularly clear) along coastal Galloway and were known terrors of the travelers.

Before I go into more detail, you should know that the word “scot” means “bandit” and getting away “scot free” is something more like that 7 of Swords thing, meaning the bandit mugged you, took all your stuff including your clothes and left you for dead, which you likely were if you lay there overnight because it gets cold in Scotland.

Sawney and family took this concept a step further. In short, they ate people. Invoking Sawney’s name was basically to call upon the boogieman of southwest Scotland and scare children into being careful if not good. But think of things from Sawney’s point of view. A fat traveler in finery traveling alone or perhaps in a small group is overcome by a family of incestuous cannibals. I’m sure Sawney and family were delighted. Roast tonight! Their 10 of Cups was very much the travelers’ 10 of Swords.

Now there are sources that say Sawney was a real person with a real family who lived in real caves, born in the late 1300’s and preying upon travelers in the 1400’s, coincidentally about the time that the Tarot was starting to become popular with the common folk. There are others who maintain that Sawney was a scary story invented in the 1700’s to strike fear in the hearts of outsiders traveling through this often difficult and disputed territory. Most agree, though, that things were desperate enough in Scotland from time to time that cannibalism did occur.

Sawney’s story, in fact, inspired such schlock-horror as the movie “The Hills Have Eyes,” which countless teenagers have screamed and laughed at. Sawney’s story proves at the very least that family happiness is relative. You do need to know whether you’re having dinner or being dinner at least.

Within our lives, families can be horror stories or a place of loving refuge. They can be familiar evils or remote fairy tales. The 10 of Cups can be the ultimate of an emotional cycle, a happy ending, the realization of hopes and dreams for more than just yourself. It can also be the last time we were ever together and happy. Every family has its rain suspended in the sky. It is up to us as family members to concentrate either on the positive or negative face of the family with the understanding that we cannot have rainbows without a little rain.

Best wishes.

***

My heartfelt sorrow and sympathy to the friends and family of slain Vallejo police officer Jim Capoot.  He dedicated his life to making ours better.  May he rest in peace and may his family take some tiny comfort in knowing that he was loved and will be remembered by the community he served so fully, so selflessly, so freely, so kindly, so well.

Straight Face

“My little sister ate my homework.”

The worst problem I had when I was student teaching was keeping a straight face. I had defaulted to majoring in English in college and figured I wanted to teach. Junior high, I thought, was a lot like combat duty. You get all the thrill of a fidget in overdrive, raging hormones, defiance, a couchful of insecurities for each person involved, budding senses of humor and a crack of dawning civilization. They can be more adult than most people you know in one minute and sharing variations on the theme of rude noises the next. Combat duty, I thought. I’ll teach the little rascals some English. I had no idea they were going to be so funny.

I did my student teaching in a small town in southern Illinois. The State of Illinois is long enough that the northern part has little in common with the middle part and the middle part is fairly divorced from the southern part. When I lived there in the river bottom land, it was still a pretty good place for people hiding from authorities to hide until the heat was over. It’s woodsy with lakes and extensive limestone structures including caves. It’s more like The South than people think although my trips just across the river to Paducah, Kentucky convinced me that no horse money had made it across the river to southern Illinois. Paducah’s finely manicured lawns were a stark contrast the mining and farming towns at the bottom of Illinois.

Tea Tarot
(c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord

I was compulsive about trying to bring new, concrete experiences to young people to widen their horizons anyway. I wanted to give them something they didn’t already have. The urge is a Queen of Pentacles thing in me more than the Hierophant. I never felt I was the keeper of all knowledge spooning it out to acolytes in the small doses they could handle. I wanted to give them the whole wide world, to show them the wonder of this life. Maybe it was subversive in a way, but I wanted them to love this life and their world so that they didn’t have to cling to religion as their only respite but could choose it with joy as a supplement to their beautiful world. I wanted to teach them how to hope and how to make hopes real, that they could with their own choosing make their lives better.

There were a lot of people who went into teaching with ideals like this. I was the tail-end of the hippie generation and bought goodness and peace hook, line and sinker. I had seen what kind of transformation opportunity and positive thinking could bring to people, how fairness, justice and encouragement were fundamental. I still think those things but my own Queen of Pentacles realizes these things move ever so slowly, ever too slowly.

I had tried to show kids interesting stuff all my life including leading biology field studies for the little kids on my block when I first started college. What they learned wasn’t so much about the diversity of nature in the woods of south central Missouri then. They learned that if their gerbils escaped to hide in the sofa, they could call upon me to reach my hand into the foamy depths and risk getting bitten by the indignant little squees, all to save the neighbor kids from punishment when their parents got home. Gerbils have sharp little teeth. Teaching is a learning experience too. We all lived happily ever after that day, but I approached all future gerbil emergencies with caution.

Mrs. N was the regular English teacher at the junior high in the small town in southern Illinois. She was a sturdy, self-assured and practical woman who had hoped to expand little minds into public speaking at some point. She smoked the thinnest possible little cigars, saying she had to get all her smoking done in one preparation period, so a concentrated experience was required. I soon learned that getting the 7th and 8th graders to speak was not the problem; it was getting them to say something repeatable that was the challenge.

I had picked junior high for the challenge, thinking also that I had half a chance of being as tall or taller than the kids. I was right about the challenge, wrong about the height thing. It wasn’t that I needed to tower over them. I just wanted to see the kids in the back of the classroom. Quickly I learned that meant standing all day long and I adjusted my meager wardrobe to include the thickest-soled foam scuffs I could find in as many colors as I could find. They looked stupid, but at the end of the day my feet had not turned into something like pizza, cheesy, hot, bubbly, and seared.

But no one told me they were spit-your-drink-out-your-nose funny.

“Where’s your homework?” The condemned child looked forlorn and shuffled his feet. Apparently there was a story here. He answered.

“Your little sister?” Tears brimmed in my eyes which might have been mistaken for allergies in pollen-rich river bottom land. I did my best to keep the Queen of Pentacles’ calm but fact-based face as I looked at him.

“Can you bring your little sister in tomorrow as evidence?”

My student looked confused. Apparently no one had demanded proof before of the homework-eating toddler. I thought an experiment might be a good idea. After all, if she ate his homework, she might eat something else. The kids could write about it. It could be a lesson in how everyday life provides plenty of fodder for exposition and thoughtful reflection.

“Bring her in tomorrow along with your redone homework, but try to keep the homework away from her this time.”

The child blinked and nodded, still unsure of his ability to produce the human paper recycler. I moved on to the lesson of the day.

Mrs. N was right. Whatever you had during the one-hour of preparation period, you needed enough of it to last you the whole day. Instead of tiny cigars, I usually had to go to the teachers’ lounge and laugh until I cried.

The assistant principal frowned on this. We weren’t supposed to be having this much fun. We were supposed to be terrified of school administration and pass that terror along to the children. He had a line-‘em-up-and-shoot-‘em policy with the students. He was known to select one student teacher a year and pick on them until they broke. He picked me that year. He broadcast my classes live over the speakers in the principal’s office, hoping to get me fired before my student teaching stint was up because I couldn’t line anyone up, let alone shoot them. He didn’t get me fired but I think the office got a good laugh out of it. I know I did.

The last laugh happened later when I graduated, applied for jobs and got a job offer to teach at a small Catholic school 45 miles from my house. The school was in the process of closing but they advertised the job as a “foot in the door” for someone who wanted teaching experience. It was all subjects for kids in 7th and 8th grades with a student population in those grades of fewer than 10. The pay almost but not quite covered the gasoline to drive back and forth to the school.

At the same time I had been offered a position as a legal secretary at an established law office less than a mile from my house at nearly twice the pay. I caved, true to my Queen of Pentacles theme, and went for the bucks. Once again, I had been hired for my grammar, the product not of my college education but of the patient nuns at a Catholic grade school years ago.

And I never looked back, except to laugh. I never met that kid’s little sister.

Best wishes!

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!