So Long

A friend of mine died June 9. I’ve written a few tributes to those who have passed but I don’t think what I can write would do him justice.

His friends, I among them, were trying to help him get past crushing poverty, devastating loss and depression, far enough at least to enjoy life a little. Have a little hope. Look forward.

He was brilliant, talented, kind. Book smart, street stupid, as even his own father assessed him. At his lowest points he had been robbed by crackheads, beaten up by bullies, abandoned by friends and kept at a distance by those who were supposed to love him, at least until I met him.

He was a self-styled hippie, an environmentalist whose often-changing college major finally settled on Earth Sciences after intellectual affairs with anthropology, archaeology, chemistry and astronomy. We called him The Professor. He might be the smartest guy I ever knew.

Tea Tarot
(c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord

He played hard in his youth, the lone Welshman among Clan Colin at the Northern California Renaissance Faire and Mr. Mould the Undertaker at The Dickens Faire, an SCA enthusiast to the end. He drank. He smoked. He swore. He joked incessantly. He overcame his natural shyness and enjoyed the ladies. He fell in love. He married. He moved from the places he loved in San Francisco and Santa Clara to a place he hated, Missouri, and more importantly a place that hated him because it was pretty clear he wasn’t from around there. He separated from his wife, painfully, never to be fully reconciled. He lost his job, his car, his apartment and everything he owned. He was stripped of everything that echoed his own identity. He was officially diagnosed as depressed. He lived in low-cost housing in a third floor walkup full of cockroaches that could never quite be driven back with his broken guitar, his few books, his six rescued cats and a lot of wine and cigarettes, and one deck of Tarot cards.

Friends had bought him a computer so he could communicate with the world. He wrote a blog on environmental issues, trying to point out practical solutions to real problems and debunk hokum and hysteria. He had worked for Greenpeace, exchanged words with Alan Ginsberg, corrected errors in nationally published scientific articles (for which he was thanked, not run off) and served as a Knight for His Fairest Lady, The Earth. While the world of people had turned on him again and again, he sought to preserve our Home for even those who did little to deserve it.

He was very active in helping out with feral cats, a passionate advocate for the practice of TNR (Trap, Neuter and Release) for feral colonies. He tried to educate people about how to treat those creatures who had been abandoned by those who should have been responsible for them. He understood “abandonment issues.” He was adopted himself, never to know his birth family although he wanted to.

He loved music, especially Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, and played guitar and, as he put it, probably anything with strings. He was a great fan of Tom Waits, Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Laura Nyro, Planxty, Steeleye Span.

He wanted to find the community that would not bully him for being whatever he was and finally, in his last year, found a small group of friends, remnants from the Ren Faire and Tarot groups who loved the coolness, the “joy in the toy” that is science. He wanted to be on Jeopardy but knew he would lose if one of the categories was sports-related. He loved Antiques Roadshow. He wanted to write a sequel to Goethe’s Fairy Tale: The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. He wanted to create a Tarot poster with hydrology as the focus. He wanted to move back to California where he belonged.

He almost made it. He ran out of time. Lung cancer savaged him, spread to his liver, brain and bones. His best assets began to fail him. He met some of his goals, but I suspect that his favorite one was the friendship, solid and loving friendship he found with those who shared his interests, humor, spirit, passion and irreverence. No one knows if he knew he was dying for certain but he suspected things weren’t good. He was taken to the emergency room, then the oncology ward where he found for certain he had cancer, then fell unconscious never to awaken fully. His family, from afar, tried to do what they thought he would want in the absence of any instruction and removed his breathing tube. And he died, immediately.

We friends of his now scramble to sort out our sorrow at the loss of this bright light, a genius easily mistaken for a homeless, drunken bum, a True Knight too easily mistaken for a Trickster, a heart so soft and a wit so sharp, intimidated by aggression and unkindness, delighted with the workings of the Universe.

We seek to make sure his cats, his true children, his surviving immediate feline family, have good homes. If you can help, please do. http://www.gofundme.com/a2pk2w 

If you can look around you to find those whose lives took turns they could not course-correct and reach out to them to help, please do. We are all Children of the Stars together. It is up to us to make a difference.

Rest, or play, in peace, Bob Carlson. You made it.

Best wishes, always.

How Was Your Week?

Greetings to all my friends at Readers Studio 2014 and all my friends who aren’t there, too! It turns out that it’s probably a good thing I didn’t come this year because I would have spent a great deal of what should be an utter blast (and from the pictures posted on Facebook so far, it is a blast) working for my Day Job.

I haven’t pulled an all-nighter in some time now but I did Thursday night. It was the usual world-will-come-to-an-end-if-this-stuff-isn’t-done-at-exactly-the-right-time sort of thing. Perhaps you have that kind of thing somewhere in your lives? Even a wedding or a birth can be a little flexible in its schedule, but not computer stuff that has regulations and oversight and other Important Factors.

I thought I would describe my week in terms of my Art Postcard Tarot.

Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

One thing that’s really accurate in this reading is the addition of a new floppy-eared fellow named Louie to my household. He arrived “after hours” one night in February and after trying to find his owner for a month, the Animal Control folks declared him officially mine. There’s some hunting dog gene in this pooch, a natural pointer, particularly in the assignment of blame phase of household disaster discovery. Louie points to the cats. The cats point back.

Louie’s best friend is Lizard, a soft squeaky green fellow who hasn’t got a lot to say unless he’s being chewed on by a little brown dog. Lizard has been part of the household since before Louie’s arrival, but only Binket paid attention to him and that only when she was working out her Puff Baby drama, a play of meller-drammer not yet available on Broadway.

Besides the accidental acquisition of an enthusiastic puppy, I have also purposefully acquired a new camera lens and have been going hog-wild with close-up photos of the flowers in my yard. It’s a “macro” lens that will just about let me count the hairs on an aphid’s nose. For those of you who are really photographers, I apologize but goodness this is fun!

I've been such a poor correspondent lately that my friend Sally, bless her heart, had to track me down and call to see if I were still alive. Oops. I've been busy. I had this birthday thing and, well, it's a long story. All of my stories are long stories.

I’m still planning on reprinting my decks later this year but currently have a few copies of the Dust Bunny Lenormand still available. To those who have asked, my Off-Center Lenormand will not be reprinted until my partner in that venture, Dan Pelletier of Tarot Garden, gives the signal. Dan tends to like collectable decks to be collectable and likes the idea of that deck being limited to its original 100 copies. Sorry to disappoint, but unless you see Off-Center up for resale on an auction, you are likely not to find a copy.

On the list are the Picture Postcard Tarot, the Art Postcard Tarot, the Victorian Trade Card Tarot and the Tea Tarot, again in limited quantities, later in the year. I’m gathering contact information from those interested in these decks, so stay tuned.

I will attend BATS again this year in San Jose and have a few other events in the works in the San Francisco area, and perhaps a new deck or two! Stay tuned for more fun!

Best wishes!

Looking Forward

While working too long this weekend on a job that is likely to invite me to leave if I don’t agree to move to North Carolina for a reduced salary, I mused that so many people including me want to know what’s coming up next.

Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

One of my clients has to know if a $100 investment would pay off because they really need the money. I hesitate to pull a card on that. Am I chicken or is it too much like financial advice, something specifically I won’t give, partly because of the day job and partly because of basic ethics: I’m not a professionally trained financial adviser? I pull a card. What a relief! It’s the Wheel of Fortune.

“It’s a crap shoot,” I tell my client. “Timing is everything.”

The $100 is a membership to be considered for work in a specific industry, the sales equivalent of buying leads, betting on some percentage of outcome based on your skills…and luck. I flash on Groucho Marx’ remark that he didn’t want to belong to an organization that would have him as a member. Something about that fits here, but can’t quite put my finger on it.

Knowing my client, they are going to do what they want to do anyway. It’s a free-will thing. I’m a big fan of free will. Little enough is up to us the way things are. I don’t like to see people give up their right to choose. My client doesn’t want to waste time and money on a fruitless venture. I sympathize, but I also think that when you focus on just one kind of fruit, you’re probably frustrated a lot. Maybe “fruitless ventures” are there to help us with some larger purpose.

Getting the Wheel of Fortune here at least validates my hesitation to say whether this will be a good deal or a bad deal. It’s a maybe yes, maybe no answer that maybe masks the real answer of there’s no sure thing in this life. That doesn’t keep any of us from wishing there were a sure thing.

People who are really good at what they do wish for a merit-based arrangement. The best should get what they deserve. People who suffer even a moment’s self-doubt wish for a stroke of undeserved good fortune. People want good things to happen for themselves and their loved ones. Sometimes good things happen; sometimes they don’t. And sometimes people who do what I do get an inkling of whether or not something will be a good thing. I don’t know why or how.

I don’t necessarily feel the need to attribute it to divine gift or the influence of evil, either, no more so than breathing, seeing, liking butter or being allergic to mold is a gift or a curse. It’s just a thing and, well, since I’m an optimist, I tend to think of all those things as some kind of gift. It takes less energy to say thank you than it does to spend time cursing. So, thanks, You Out There, just in case you intended my life to have these gifts and, well, thanks, too, if it’s just some accident.

I live in earthquake country in addition to wine country, agreeable weather country and any other description you might need. Because of that, I check out the USGS Earthquake site for recent activity, mostly because it interests me. While finishing up my degree in English, I nearly switched my major to geology, having become enamored of large systems and long-term cause and effect. In the end, I took a few geology courses and decided I needed the degree in the low-hanging fruit so I could get out into the workaday world. I still think it’s cool, though, that while people focus on, say, the devastating 1906 earthquake in San Francisco perhaps not realizing that what was really devastating was the resultant fire, unnoticed by most is that in the very few years (emphasis on very if you count geological time) around that event, there were major earthquakes all over the world. When it comes to plate tectonics, it basically works like that children’s song where all the piggies are in bed and they all rolled over and one fell out. It’s all connected, this earth, in a pattern larger than the burning of a city.

Of course, if the fire burned down your house, you’re going to focus on your immediate issue. If an entire economy is experiencing “piggy rolling” and you lose your job, you’re going to focus on that. You should. But larger patterns are likely in play, too. Sometimes the larger pattern is easier to see than the immediate effect; sometimes, the immediacy is all you can see. Reading cards can be like that too.

I have just as strong an urge to know what’s coming up as anyone else. So how can I be relieved that my reading for my client basically came up with, “It’s a crap shoot” for an answer? Maybe it’s because I’ve been working so hard on the microcosm all weekend, trying to get something done for Monday morning that in the grand scheme of things is not likely to prevent war, save homeless people or pets or cure even a case of the hiccups. But sometimes, it can be a comfort to focus on what’s right under your nose instead of being buried in the avalanche of what is to come.

What I do know is that I don’t want my client to be dependent on me as a card reader to be the determining factor of what they do in their lives. That’s my client’s responsibility, the burden, the obligation of free will.

The words we’re all searching for are “thank you”.

Best wishes.

Coffee

Uncharacteristically early for a rendezvous with the relatives, I sat down at a large round table on the back porch of the coffee shop. There would be at least six of us. The HUBS was parking the car, no small problem. Apparently, we in the SF Bay Area like to drink the morning after a sad defeat for our San Francisco 49-ers and we drink coffee.

We had met with Patti and Bob Saturday night in San Francisco at Capp’s Corners. Capp’s is just a block off busier Stockton Street, near where Chinatown and North Beach bump up against each other like the tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault. In this case, the plates are often more of the culinary sort and no matter which neighborhood you’re in, the food is delicious.

Capp’s is in the same block as Beach Blanket Babylon and has an almost-fixed price menu for dinner, pasta is something like $18.50 and other entrees are something like $21.50. Dinner comes with minestrone soup and a salad, both served family style on checked tablecloths. It’s like being at home in a way, but home is a place with a lot of noisy people after 7 pm.

At about 5 pm, though, I was the only one there besides a regular named Tommy who was leaving. We were supposed to meet at 4 pm but one thing led to another and we are relaxed with each other mostly. I wasn’t sure if we had reservations. I had my cell phone, checking for messages. I ordered a Zinfandel. I enjoyed it.

After a while we caught up with Patti and Bob and then Andy and his adorable friend Jeannette from New Zealand. She’s an orthopedic surgical nurse and we agreed that talking about her work in detail at the dinner table was probably not the best. She did confirm that tourists fall off mountains and drive on the wrong side of the road just often enough to keep her quite busy.

I had steak.

Andy and Jeannette had to drive to southern California the next day, so by Monday, holiday for me, breakfast in Alamo near Danville was at a place called Cherubini near the creek. It’s January after all so they had the outdoor overhead heaters on, but they weren’t really necessary.

We’re in a drought this year. Water is so low in the local reservoirs that they are talking about mandatory rationing. The newscasts are talking about the droughts in the 1970’s, before I came to California, but when I moved here in 1989 there was a drought too.

Every toilet flush, every glass of water at the restaurant, every load of laundry or shower was something to be mindful of. House-proud new homeowners in bedroom communities like Benicia saw their expensive lawns dry up to crackling. Xeriscape lawns became the rage, with stones and benches and wooden slat overhead trellises to create shady earth and the illusion of a cool retreat from the unrelenting sun.

Adding to the drought’s bad effects on tourism was the Loma Prieta earthquake in October 1989. In Monterey the following January, Cannery Row was a ghost town, the natural disasters having shooed vacationers to “safer” places. While I was there for a week, tagging along on HUBS2’s business trip, I had what everyone in California wants: I had the place to myself. I started conversations with otters and harbor seals. I continued them with gulls and ground squirrels. I watched the two scuba divers fiddle with their gear and waddle into the seaweed jungle of the bay. For a brief moment that week, time stood still again. But there was a drought, true enough. I had arrived on Thanksgiving Day 1989 in pouring rain and I didn’t see a drop until May the following year. I thought I was in heaven.

Now I’ve lived in California long enough to worry about the day-after-day of “perfect” weather, the low reservoirs, the anticipation of a bad fire season. I sat on the too-warm deck behind the coffee shop and waited for HUBS3 and his sweet family to arrive. I would wait to get something to drink. It’s a drought year.

I looked toward the creek nearby, wondering at the flowers blooming in January. I used to be startled at January flowers, having suffered too long in Missouri and Illinois winters whose only colors were white, and ice and grey and sometimes charcoal where a tarred road lay scraped and still treacherous or where dark tree trunks lined with clinging frost and snow slatted the edge of my sight. Color here in January may be white and green and pink and red and sometimes yellow. It is the time after fall and not yet summer here. It is the time when birds eat.

Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

It was a quiet time, as if January had taken a quick breath and held it for a moment. A few coffee-lovers nodded at me on the way to the bathroom, questions unasked about why one person sat alone at so big a table. And yet, wasn’t this the California everyone wanted? The one all to themselves?

I read somewhere that the Ace of Pentacles was the most fortunate card in the deck. It is the big round reality, the essence of material comfort like the sun’s big gold coin in the morning sky, like the big round table all to myself on the back deck of a cozy coffee shop with its good smells that made the air taste like omelets and pastry and java or cappuccino. Being here right now, that was the Ace of Pentacles. This one thing, this disc of the world in its tactile form, this table here was the Ace of Pentacles. I reached out and touched the edge of it in wonder of the tactile universe.

“I got you a coffee,” the HUBS said, setting the Cherubini’s mug with its corseted form in front of me. “I put in the cream but wasn’t sure how much sugar you wanted.”

I was only briefly startled and smiled. I picked up the mug and sipped.

“It’s OK,” I murmured. “It’s sweet enough.”

Best wishes.

Lost Treasure

While out for a reading and running errands Saturday, I saw a big blue box where people deposit clothes and shoes for people who need them.

“Just the thing!” I thought with relief, and popped my new camel coat with the hood , tags still on, into the bin. Well, yes, there’s a story there.

Now, I don’t mean to brag about my great generosity. I would probably have given the coat to someone I knew if I thought it would fit them. But that was exactly the problem, you see. I wasn’t sure exactly who would find it the perfect fit.

I had fallen prey to optimism again, one of my favorite afflictions. I bought a coat online. By all descriptions, it seemed like it should have fit. I loved the camel color, just what I was looking for, and the hood was a real plus. It shipped so quickly, too, all the way from the United Kingdom. But it didn’t fit.

All that and it didn’t fit. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say the ship of state has a notable prow and the coat was inches away from buttoning, no matter how enormous the size tag said the thing was. In fact, I had been concerned at first it would be too big, since the company had sent one size larger than I had ordered. I think perhaps they knew something though. All I can say further is that if worn it would have provided a notable gap in coverage.

With much of the country in the grip of worst-ever cold weather and so many sad and amusing photos of pizza shops suddenly converted to drive-in restaurants by uncooperative vehicles and all, I decided I wanted a decent coat. I haven’t had one since I left Illinois and that was a very long time ago.

Just before tossing it into the bin, I checked the pockets for treasures. It’s a habit. I put things in pockets and leave them there. These were at least still sewn together, still factory fresh in its never-worn condition.

I’ve been concerned that I’ve lost some things by leaving things in pockets. I can’t be sure, you see, because if they are never found, you never know where you put them. Right? That’s some law of the universe, like socks missing from the laundry. But knowing my habit, having found enough important things stuffed in my pockets in the past, I check pockets for cash, important papers, driver’s license, credit cards, jewelry, keys, electronic gizmos. Someday I expect toads or something like a naughty child’s pockets betraying the fun of the day.

When I found that the coat didn’t fit, I did look up the information to get a refund. The seller does have a refund policy but requires that the less-than-satisfied buyer return the coat through shipping with tracking. This is inexpensive and easy when the item is purchased in my own country, but annoyingly, international shipping with tracking costs a king’s, or at least a princess’ ransom. Calculating that the cost of the return shipping with tracking would easily approach the cost of the coat, I decided it was not worth the trouble to return it with a net gain of … well, not enough to buy a pizza. People here need coats. Give it to someone who needs it. They merely have to figure out the annoyance of ignoring the size number on the tag.

I bought a new camel wool coat, no hood, alas, but nice quality from a company in my country so just in case I suffered the same fate of misplaced optimism I could at least return the thing. Coat 2 fits, just scrumptious, thank you, and as I had hoped the “mid-calf” estimate of its length, true for most mortals, is the desired ankle-length on my Hobbit-like frame. When the red gloves I ordered came in, of course I stuffed them in the pockets of the coat. I am, after all, true to pattern. I expect I’ll find the gloves there when I need them.

Online shopping has its downfalls, but for the most part I like it, except for purchasing books. So while nosing through lists of things for sale that I hardly intend to purchase I found myself in the jewelry section. I remembered I am looking for two items that have been mislaid.

One has been missing since 1998. I know this because that was the time that I cleaned out the closet in that bedroom in the rental house I was moving out of in preparation to move to my current house. I had taken that opportunity to cull some items from my wardrobe and taken them to a women’s shelter, then discovered that a pin I had had made from other jewelry was gone. I had checked pockets! I had! I had checked lapels too. Had I checked underneath a lapel? Would I have pinned a pin underneath a lapel to hide it? I might have. And is it gone? Or, did it fall into a box of doll furniture? I miss it terribly.

And the other piece, a gift from a friend far away, a lovely pendant that was a very special present. It’s here. Somwhere.

Where the heck are they??

What’s a card reader to do? Pull a card, of course. So I did. 7 of Wands.

Hmm, I thought, at least this means there is some hope of finding them because the 7 of Wands is a card of success after all. The kind of success it means is peculiar to it. I would say when I find them, optimist that I am but also reading the card, I shall find them one at a time, perhaps stumbling across them while I’m doing something else. My success will be with effort and I will not necessarily be well-prepared for the task. This should be no surprise to me as I am seldom prepared for anything in the realm of housework. Last, while 7’s have a somewhat magical quality about them, I reflect how wands are fire and specifically wood. Perhaps, in the bottom of some treasure box with other goodies, in a drawer in a dresser, in a box of…hmm, furniture for dolls… perhaps. Best to clean out my dresser drawers anyway to get rid of clothes I no longer wear, mismatched socks and all that. And perhaps, I’ll find them.

Best wishes!

&&&^^^&&&^^^**** =^-^=****^^^&&&^^^&&&

Looking for a friendly Lenormand class in San Francisco? Coming soon Feb. 22, 2014!

http://tarotmedia.corecommerce.com/Workshops-and-Classes/Lenormand-Come-to-the-Table-The-Gran-Tableau-with-Marcia-McCord-Feb-22-2014.html

Welcome 2014

2013 sure had its ups and downs for me, almost the epitome of why, “May you live in interesting times” is called a Chinese curse. Yup, interesting times. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there and 2013 as the year of the Lovers was more like trying the find the puzzle pieces after the Tower fell down just to get something back together. Stability in work, relationships, finances, governments, health, even Show Biz was questionable all through the year.

Sometimes, all you’re looking for is just one more donut before you walk into Weight Watchers, you know? And yet, on the police scanner, there’s a report of someone sitting in their car for ten minutes eating donuts behind Target. Now, this in itself says a lot about life today and how the year might pan out for 2014.

When you have a New Year’s Resolution, you might want a really good swan song for that thing you’re trying to change.

I know that if I were going to give up donuts in 2014, and I haven’t quite committed to that although, in my own defense, I can’t remember the last time I had a donut, I might sit in my car for at least ten minutes savoring the last dozen or so. You can see that right? Kind of that 9 of Cups moment before the King of Swords takes over with good sense, you see?

So, yeah, I’m not doing the last dozen donuts thing but I did get this cool app for my iPhone to track what I eat. I know the pitfalls of this whole thing though. If you lie to your food diary, it doesn’t work as well. Why you’d do that is beyond me, but I recognize the phenomenon. Heck, I’ve been guilty of it myself. The levels of self-sabotage in improvements efforts are, to paraphrase one of my favorite philosophers, Sandra Boynton, without number.

Slimming down isn’t my only goal for 2014. If I had my druthers, I’d just as soon a few areas of my life regained some kind of sanity, like work, relationships, finances. Oh, and I need to gas up the car. Yeah, the mundane seems to have gotten a bit out of hand for me lately, too.

At least I’m not alone in the effort to resolve and re-resolve, refocus for better resolution and, if possible, avoid revolution. The cats’ personalities here at the compound have their own proposed 2014 resolutions.

Eleanor, who is a tremendous coward much more timid and terrified than any lion from Oz, has become a tiny bit braver lately. She’s black and white and scream all over, or she used to be. She’s still black and white but the volume of screams has reduced over time. She actually let me pick her up for a while the other day. This is a breakthrough because in the last 6 or 7 years being picked up and cuddled was obviously the precursor to being devoured by monsters. Or something. So this time she was on a purr-fest from being brushed and talked to specifically. A pet psychic said we should think more positive thoughts about her to boost her self-esteem. What could it hurt, right? And it seems to be working. So in the midst of this happy moment, I tried picking her up and I think we were there something like three whole minutes.

From this and from Eleanor’s recent ventures from the kitchen into the dining room and living room, I conclude her 2014 New Year’s resolution is, “I shall endeavor to be braver.” When you say this in your mind, you need to picture her with a hat and gloves seated for tea somewhere in the Midsomer Murders’ summer country in a sunny room waiting for the Detective Chief Inspector’s next question about what happened last Thursday.

On the opposite end of the psychopath scale in our little feline household is Pixie a/k/a Baby. All famous crime lords (ladies?) have nicknames, so it seems natural that our own little innocent-until-proven-guilty would have one too. Baby’s actually softening up in her adult years. She has only once in recent memory taken a flying leap and landed with all four paws full of claws on the HUBS’ back. He’s almost healed now, except that spot on his arm. And she only once tried setting the house on fire, knocking the iron off the ironing board and onto the floor, melting two of the floor tiles. She did this so well that the automatic shutoff didn’t engage because the iron landed plate-side down, like an iron should. One new iron and two replaced floor tiles later, plus airing the house out to get rid of that melted rubber smell and things are like new. I always did like Mr. Wolf in the movie Pulp Fiction, the guy wiseguys had to call when something unexpected happened, like accidentally shooting a guy in your car, and you need an expert to clean things up before the wife gets home.

Baby has actually gotten a lot cuddlier. She used to try to take my hand off after about the third stroke when I was petting her. She really likes the dog and the HUBS but not really anyone else. This is a heartache to me because I rescued her, one of my many little efforts to find a kitty a home that ends with the new home being mine. We naturally took her with us on vacation a scant two weeks after I took her in and I hoped it would be a bonding experience. It was, sort of. Two out of three ain’t bad, as Meatloaf sang, the dog and the HUBS. For some reason, she’s got the mother-daughter blues, a gentle reminder of the “Seven Years War” my mother and I had. Mom and I became good friends, so I hold out hope for Baby.

Lately she’s been letting me pet her more than just the three strokes and I’ve learned the subtle cues that mean enough is enough, like that banshee wail that starts out as a low rumble. And she does respond to gentle baby-talk and kind wishes, although I hasten to add that even the dog, big softie that he is, occasionally has to growl at her for eating his food or just getting too close. He does not do this to Binket, his other-species paramour; she can smear her whole self on him and he nudges her with his nose, gives her typical doggy sniff and the occasional slurp. It’s the picture of true love with those two.

Baby is destined to have more of a struggle in life, mostly because of her need to defend herself before a threat has emerged. I know people like that. But if the kitten can get better, there’s probably hope for the world.

Wherever you are on the psychopath scale, oh, let’s call it the empathy scale, hmm? That’s so much more upbeat. Anyway, wherever you are, if you make a New Year’s resolution, try to take the long view. Like the 3 of Wands, when you launch the project, look out beyond the horizon to the positive end. That way, if the boat tips a bit here and there, you’ll have something bigger and more important in mind than day-to-day ups and downs.

Happy New Year and best wishes!

Lovecraft’s Just Dessert

At the moment when my proposed literature advisers helped me make an enormous career decision, I wonder if there was an alternate reality, a parallel universe where I would have made H. P. Lovecraft my life’s work. Would I still be tickled by H. P. Lovecraft and his weird stories? Would I still be both amused and sadly empathetic with the odd man from Rhode Island whose marriage had resolved itself with the suggestion that he and his wife continue their relationship by correspondence?

I’ve been listening to the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft for a few weeks lately, like revisiting letters from an old beau, one that fate in this reality determined would drift away from the intimacy of post-graduate study. I had found him in a treasure-trove of some strange young man’s library gutted, no doubt, by his mother’s final disgust with his hoarding of the outré and merely speculative fiction. I was in junior high, pawing through the wreckage of the many libraries unloaded on the junk man in my small town in New Mexico. I learned to look for anything with the young man’s name written on the inside cover.

Tea Tarot
(c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord

I had wondered then if he had died. It was such a huge collection of sci-fi and horror and I could not imagine he had given up his books willingly. The books were cheap and I brought them home in shopping bags, much, I think, to the junkman’s delight. There were, of course, mainstream science fiction, if (I protest) there is such a thing: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke and delicious Heinlein. And then there were the odder items, Lovecraft.

My luck lay in having been moved, much to howling protest, to eastern New Mexico, a place that was not beautiful nor lush nor friendly to a child whose chief source of amusement at age 11 was to read every book in the compact but fairly well-stocked public library. I had always been a bookworm but the severe cultural and climate differences drove me to bookishness, so much so that even my mother, bookish herself, complained that I did not “go out and play,” whatever that meant. Was she concerned that my skin was pale like a frog’s belly in spite of the unrelenting New Mexico sun? The summer after my sixth grade year I read all the books in the library, just a few blocks from my mother’s antique shop, sometimes reading as many as four books per day. I absorbed whole Dewey Decimal sections including those covering the paranormal and mystical in hopes of explaining my own gelling talent for “fortune telling.”

Then, in the cold weather of junior high I found Lovecraft and the world of science fiction, horror and weird.

My brother and I had long been fans of space movies, Star Trek and “Thee-ater X”. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Night Gallery had been our delight. Occasionally, a story was too frightening but I began to notice that my brother was always first to turn off the scary stuff while I complained that I was still watching. I always lost those arguments, my mother never comfortable with anything that wasn’t based in tangible reality. It seemed natural to me that diving deeper into the genres would happen for both my brother and me; we squabbled over ownership of the complete works of Poe which made its way from one bedroom to another and back again.

Even in grade school he and I discussed the pros and cons of scary stories and television shows. I was not a “monster movie” or “big bug movie” fan. These were popular in my childhood, evidence of the nervousness about the long-term effects of the atomic age. Accidental resizings or rearrangement of parts through misuse of technology struck me as carelessness and not the least bit interesting. Godzilla and Mothra could duke it out elsewhere as far as I was concerned. But the unintended consequences of ego, assumption and curiosity, ah, that was always my interest. Who was to say we, as a species, were so smart? What if, for all our moonwalking and Tang, we didn’t actually know everything there was to know?

I was never anti-technology. No, I was more interested in the story of Icarus, a lesson in anticipating problems and avoiding them and what happens if we do not. I wanted to experiment as my own little inner mad scientist but I wanted to live through the experience too.

What if? It was the next natural question after the ever-present Why?

The message of the World in Tarot is fulfillment, arriving at the answer, resolving all the problems, dancing within your environment, surrounded by the energies and resources and even antipathies of life, dancing in your place, your time. And yet, to have arrived and never moved on to start a new cycle is more death than Death itself. Dance on your laurels but do not rest on them; stagnation is to cease to exist.

Over the years, I have continued to love H. P. and to become sure I am not a character in his stories, certainly not the main character. H. P.’s main character is certainly not the same person all along, but his protagonists have commonalities: they have assumptions about the stability of their world only to have that removed by the discovery of something…else. Often, his heroes protest they were never interested in anything remotely “other”; in fact, they are almost uniformly repulsed and horrified by anything I might consider an adventure. They are quietly racist, xenophobic, clear about what was beautiful and what was bizarre, certain they were advanced and cultured compared to “savages” in their world, only to realize that large, powerful, strange, ancient and indifferent beings from “otherwhere” and “otherwhen” were interested in the noble human for their own need to exploit resources and survive. Lovecraft’s monsters where those who understood dimensions man could not imagine, lived in colors and sounds man could only barely sense. They were wise and old. And man was, in spite of his hubris, young and stupid, a weak victim of a conspiracy beyond his ken.

In spite of Lovecraft’s often laughable overuse of adjectives, almost a lesson in what not to do in current writing style, despite the weight of overwrought veneer of man’s idea of his own civility and cultural achievement, somewhere in between the “big words” and vague descriptions, he gets down to one idea common to us all.

In our lizard brains, we know: There’s scary stuff out there in the dark and it might eat us, considering us as nothing more important than a potato chip. He may not realize he challenges us to ask which is true madness? Is it expecting the indifferent powers to respect and admire human cultural constructs and advancements? Or is it the scientific delight in finding something new without the understanding of future consequences? And for that his work is horror, even in spite of itself.

Ah, Howard. You can miss what you never had after all.

Best wishes!