Making Fortunes

On her last flight, Jack’s mum served a psychic. The psychic offered to tell Jack’s fortune for free, if Jack’s mum was carrying a photograph of him. She was. This morning on our way to the streetcar, graciously ignoring my rude interruptions, Jack recounted to me the psychic’s predictions.

“She said I was very smart –”

“No question there.”

“And I would become very successful –”

“Uh-huh, can’t see why not.”

“And I would live in a really big, white house with ginormous pillars in front –”

“You’re going to be a bank teller! That’s terrific!”

“And she saw me standing in front of a large crowd –.”

“Just before you get hanged?”

“Well, I think it sounds like I’m going to be President!”

“Except you’ve got two passports, and neither of them is American. Wouldn’t you at least prefer Rideau Hall or Buckingham Palace?”

Then I gave him a quick recap of what Victor Hugo had to say on the subject of fortune telling back in 1831, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Esmeralda has been raised with the gypsies because they stole her as an infant. They were able to kidnap her because her mother asked them to read her daughter’s fortune, and then left the baby alone in the house while she ran to brag to her neighbours about how great her child would become. Oops.

“And you think my mum would let the gypsies steal me?”

“Oh no, she would never be that foolish. My point was that fortune tellers will tell you what you want to hear. Victor Hugo was being very clear that fortune telling is baloney. And it’s still baloney 150 years later.”

And it’s still baloney about three thousand years after the Hebrew Scriptures warned against divination of all sorts. And as with just about every other passage in the Bible, unscrupulous advantage has been taken of this one. This “proof text” has been used down the ages to rid communities of marginalized old women whose best source of cat-food money has been to carefully examine a troubled face, and tell the listener what he most wanted to hear.

Because wouldn’t we all like to know what the future holds, and better still, to know that it holds good things? Flip the tarot cards then, draw up the horoscope, tell me what my name means, find a hook for me on which I can hang my hopes! Tell me what I want to hear.

I do think that in a way, fortune telling can be helpful. It can help to clarify our desires of who we want to be. For example, my astrological sign says that I am good with languages and with numbers. I agree with the first part and dismiss the second, not because there’s any truth or untruth in either statement, but because the second part is not what I want. I want to be a story teller, not a bank teller. So my gut reactions to various occult assertions about me help me to confirm what I want. In that case, why is it such a bad thing?

I think the Bible speaks against fortune telling for the same reason that, for every claim it makes, it elsewhere makes a counterclaim. Hate your parents and siblings for the sake of the Truth; but if you say you love Truth when you don’t love your siblings, you’re a liar. Don’t let witches live; but be merciful and humble. That kind of thing. Each time I think I’ve got God securely fastened into my butterfly collection, I come back after lunch to find another empty pin. There are no “proof texts”, I think, because love is a risk. The God of Love calls us out of our security and into scary, risky places; the god of Certainty is a hollow idol.

My partner and I are standing at the edge of a canyon just now, beside a rope bridge. E.g. has seen the other side, but is afraid of heights. I don’t mind the rickety bridge, even if it is missing half of its planks, but I don’t know where it leads. We’re both afraid. We both agree, though, that we need to cross that bridge.

Okay, let’s go — you first. No, after you. No, I insist. No, I couldn’t possibly.

Maybe we could draw cards?  

Two Spirits

Glory be to God for dappled things!  — Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”.

In my short career as bloggist, whenever I’ve received a comment, I’ve gone to check out the commenter’s blog. This past week I had two blogs to investigate. Both were written by men, and both have a certain bluntness to them, but the similarities pretty much end there. It was a sheep-and-goat experience for me, to retain one blogger’s comment (and therefore his link) and to delete the other.

The zapped blogger sent me to a page which made me think he hadn’t seen enough of my writing to notice that I’m an Irish-descended queer from the colonies. Breathtakingly offensive. But enough of him.

The other blogger…man, this guy works hard! Urban Observation’s  stuff is gritty and honest and courageously personal. From the few pages I dipped into, I learned that he’s an American of African descent who grew up in the Bronx ghetto. He studied well enough to land a decent office job when he grew up. For his pains, he’s been labelled an “Oreo”, a traitor to his race. And yet — if I got this right — he’s come home to his neighbourhood, the ghetto from which he had always been encouraged to escape.

Let’s see, get out the books on myths and archetypes, flip-flip-flip, protagonist leaves ordinary world, goes to other world, returns with increased wisdom to own world, that makes him… a hero.

An earlier entry of mine, in which I explained how my pets got their names, was called “Adam’s First Task”. Long before Adam became a dirt farmer and sweaty baker, his first job was to name all the animals. Naming is fundamental to human language, which in turn is fundamental to human interaction. A string of letters becomes a word only by consensus, which means that at least two people must agree on its meaning. Unfortunately — ironically? — to define a word is also to limit it.

Apparently, to some of Urban Observation’s acquaintances, the meaning of “black” doesn’t include “decently-paid office worker”. A South-east Asian classmate of mine referred to her husband as a “banana”, which is the Asian equivalent of an Oreo. Most, if not all, lesbigay Christians have had the experience of other people believing that “queer Christian” is an oxymoron. And on it goes, with language, the tool that should increase the human capacity for love and acceptance, being used instead as a weapon to tamp us into restrictive little boxes and jab us with narrow pointy sticks.

Once upon a time, certain tribes preferred two-spirited people — those who had an innate understanding of both masculine and feminine ways of being — to be their shamans. They were the holy men and women, the unusual ones, the ones who had visited two worlds.

I need to rush off to work now, but I will leave the final word to a Cardigan Welsh Corgi whose wisdom I missed the first time around: Checkers suggested, during the “Name-and-genderize-the-sea-turtle-stuffy” contest, that the turtle’s gender should be green.

Stretch of the Turtle

When I started this blog, I was afraid. Partly I was afraid that no one would read it. But I was also afraid of who might find it: a dognapper; a cat experimenter; a stalker; the nerdy guy from grade 10 who, three decades later, still plays trombone in his little church band. All scary in their own ways.

So far, though, I’ve gotten only positive feedback. No zero-hit days. No visible rise in creepy people in the parks. No high school hauntings.

I’ve also gone sidewisedly way more public than I’d meant to. My partner hinted the other day that, with her beautiful photos not linked to her Flickr site, invisible creepy people visiting my blog could pretend her intellectual property was theirs. So I fixed the photos. Now, with just a click of the white cartoon glove, you can glean all sorts of information about me, my partner, and our pets. The shriek of the turtle is heard in our land!

Hmmm. Maybe Turtle should stop panicking, and consider just how much personal damage has been caused by her partner’s three years of Flickring. And the answer is, None. No damage. Her partner has improved her photography and made friends from all over the world. She has basked in kind comments, and left kind comments for other photographers. She wears her Utata sweatshirt with pride. Harm? Not.

Maybe Turtle could stretch just a little farther.

Symbol of the Turtle

 

About twenty years ago, I started joking that if I were a member of the First Nations, I would want to belong to the Turtle Clan because I carried my life on my back. When there weren’t books in my bookbag, there were groceries. For a year or so when there wasn’t a bookbag, there was a cloth baby-carrier. Over the past ten years, my bookbag has held binoculars and field guides; kitty nummies from the pet store; biblical Hebrew textbooks; one change of clothing for a three-week hostelling trek through England; a soft-sided water dish, and sometimes plastic containers of kibble mush, for outings with the dog; nursing shoes; office shoes; gym shoes; sixpacks of microbrew; and paints, paper, and pencils for art classes. Name a part of my life, and it’s probably been placed on my back.

Only sometimes does my bookbag seem a burden; usually it feels protective. It reminds me I have a life; it makes me bigger; it gives me warmth; it keeps my hands free. Once it even helped me up. When I tripped on the pavement and pitched headlong, my overstuffed bookbag caused me to judo-roll and be back on my feet before you could say, “Nice patches! You’ve been to New Zealand?”

A few years ago, my partner and my mum and I went to visit the Petroglyphs at Peterborough (Ontario). I stopped to read the story of Turtle in the interpretive centre. It seems that Turtle spent so much time at the bottom of the lake studying all the interesting things down there, that he was late for the job fair. By the time he surfaced, the Great Spirit shrugged and said there were no more jobs left. Turtle, somewhat miffed, overturned a few canoes. I read this, thinking, “Oh, crap! That’s me!”  — all the courses I’ve taken, all the jobs I’ve tried on for size, with nothing ever seeming to really fit. It’s enough to make me pretty grumpy sometimes.

But the grumpy turtle plods on. The grump crumbles away. Things that don’t fit slide off. No accumulations of wealth — oh, but the vistas I’ve seen! The things I’ve learned! The creatures I’ve greeted! The stories I could tell you!

Maybe Turtle is a storyteller.

Little Things

Peach. Sweet orange. Cornsilk. Light avocado. Proof that one should never shop for paint on an empty stomach.

Actually, it took my partner and me two hours of communing with the paint chips before deciding on these four colours plus the equally delicious Passion blue. We knew that five colours for a two-bedroom apartment was pushing the limits, but we liked the idea. Eight months later, we still do. This is our first two-storey apartment, and the first place we actually like being home in. I think the colours give this place a happy playground feel.

Here you see the top bit of the wall around the stairwell (blue for the wall side, orange for the handrail side), the peach main bedroom, the orange activity room, and the passionate hall lightswitch. You can also see nice white stucco ceilings, which hadn’t been painted for 25 years, and were a nasty grey by the time we got at them. Oilpaint. Stucco. Ceiling. Don’t get me started.

I like this picture for all the little things in it. They’re a sort of alphabet that spells out a lot of information on my family life.

Peeping out of the peach room are the frames of two original paintings bought by my partner, waiting to be hung on the wall, and the tabs of the over-the-door hook thingy for our housecoats.

The orange room is partly decorated in Ikea (shelving and floor lamp), and shows a futon bed and the edge of a wicker chair. On the wall, half-hidden, is the intarsia raccoon my father made during his retirement, one of the last things he made for me. One of the first things he made for me sits just above the soccer ball, a little wooden bookend with my initial on it. It’s keeping my medievalia and cookbooks upright; above them are the nature books, and above those are the art books. Right at the top is the goldfish plant I found abandoned in an apartment in another city about 12 years ago.

On the narrow shelf can be seen three containers of yarn, cases of embroidery floss, a blue bin of sewing paraphernalia, the stuffed cat my partner’s mother made, and the teddy bear my grandparents sent when my son was born nearly 26 years ago. Beside the shelving unit is a music stand, for holding my recorder music when I’m in the mood for a toodle. The soccer ball is in a cardboard box that holds some belongings of the boy I babysit; this is his room when he stays with us a few days each week.

Little things — needlecrafts, musical instruments, wildlife books, handmade gifts, original artwork, little boys, rescued plants, medieval recipes, fuzzy housecoats — little things can have a lot of meaning.

In Like a Lion

It’s just after 9 pm. Directly at my back, the window is rattling with the latest blustering storm. The snow will be changing to maybe six inches of ice pellets around midnight. A siren is wailing a few blocks away, but here in the living room all is peace. If I stretch my arms out backwards, I can touch each of our pets: to my left, the cat is curled up on his carpeted tower; to my right, the dog is nestled in the papasan.

On the other side of the living room, bundled in a velours housecoat the colour of a Good Humour Strawberry Shortcake ice cream bar, my partner softly rattles the keys of her own computer, writing her latest blog entry.

I’m finishing a small glass of Drambuie. It’s been a busy day, and yesterday was a very long one, so I’m going to follow the lead of our pets and head for bed. Maybe I’ll manage to read one or two pages of Emily Carr’s Growing Pains before my eyes stop blinking and my lids still for the night.

Death: the wrong channel

I had just settled down with my laptop when I heard the firm, friendly “shave-and-a-haircut:-two-bits” knock. The people on this section of the street are very close, organizing everything from block parties to snow removal. So, thinking it was a neighbour, I answered the door.

It was a local political candidate. His hope, he said, is to tighten legislation against possession of guns. He rhymed off the length of his party’s proposed sentences, and named a woman who has recently lost a second son to street violence. Then he asked if I would like a lawn sign. Not bothering to explain that I was merely the catsitter and this wasn’t my home, I said I wasn’t sure; but we shook hands, and off he went.

I can barely imagine a woman losing two sons; just one death was enough to make my family disintegrate. I was 10 when my oldest brother was struck by a car while trying to fulfill  a dream, a long-distance bicycle trip. My mother drooped and faded; my father disappeared into his work. My remaining brothers spent as little time at home as possible. Not allowed to hitch-hike to the village, I withdrew into myself. A quiet, paradoxical hopelessness took root. Mustn’t get too good at anything; mustn’t aspire; mustn’t shine; that way lies death.

I once chuckled at a birthday card depicting a hilltop guru explaining his secret to longevity: “Refrain from dying.”  The other day, while washing the dishes, I recalled that card and wondered if I’ve spent my life adhering to the corollary, to whit: To avoid death, refrain from living. 

The knob was hard to turn, but it made a satisfying chunk-chunk sound when you did. Two, Four, and Seven were Buffalo; Six was CBC; Eleven was CHCH Hamilton; and Thirteen was Kitchener-Waterloo. But the other channels rendered fuzzy grey snowstorms that said “Shhhhh!” In my preschool years, I much preferred the non-fuzzy channels. How can I develop the remainder of my life into one of those, a peopled channel, a live channel? After all, I’m not, in fact, dead yet; how can I make the best use of that happy little fact, the fact of my being alive?