(Funny how as one gets older and slows down, one's recent activities catch up faster. Two weeks of waiting for my computer to be restored and now I have tendonitis in my right wrist. So, this long story should be enough to keep you entertained for a while while the wrist heals. If I let it heal, that is.)
Right off the bat I want to say that what happened in Sedona
was neither my idea nor my fault. I lay
that squarely at the feet of the ones to blame—the other two thirds of the
Sisterhood of the Maui Splash.
I’m the third third, and all I did was go along, because
that’s what we do in the Sisterhood—we have each other’s backs. All for one and one for all, so to speak,
which smacks of plagiarism, but “What the hell?” I got that from Marilyn Monroe. She’s credited with saying, “Ever notice that
‘What the Hell’ is always the right decision?”
And I didn’t so much get it directly from her as I got it off the
refrigerator magnet that gives her the credit.
I figured that since Marilyn and I have so much in common, she must have
made it up just for me. I mean, we even
share the same names.
Marilyn is my middle name, something I tried to keep a
secret all my life but now I drag it out and tell everybody to convince them
that Marilyn meant for me to own that aphorism.
Okay, you can say that Marilyn wasn’t her real name because it was Norma
Jeane. See there? Jeanne is my first name, like hers but with
an extra “n.” And she had blue eyes,
too, which is right where the similarities stop, except for our over-developed
mammary glands, that is..
Anyway, as soon as I saw the magnet in the store in
Waikoloa, I knew Marilyn meant it for me.
It’s my favorite refrigerator magnet and it’s right above the one that
reads, “I love to cook with wine.
Sometimes I even put it in the food.”
A couple days ago I added another, one I’ll tell you about later,
because this story is supposed to be about what happened in Sedona.
The whole idea was Diane’s.
She had her palm read umpteen years ago by a psychic in Sedona, and was
pretty impressed, so she talked Barb and me into joining her. I’m not saying I believe all this stuff, but
my mind is open to new experiences. That
openness and Diane are what led me to a psychic reading in Hawaii last year, where I heard some
interesting things, so I was willing to go along. Barb, however, was a different story, and we
decided afterwards that what happened in Sedona was all Barb’s fault.
I asked Diane if Sedona was something special in the
mystical world.
“Only the center of the vortex!” she exclaimed. That got me laughing so hard it was almost
impossible to get the Coke Zero down the right pipe and not spray it all over
the room. The New Age thinkers in Sedona
claim there are four vortexes there, the vortexes being spirals of spiritual
energy. And, they don’t spell it
“vortices.” In case you didn’t know, we
have the New Age thinkers to thank for saving the world back in 1987. It seems that Jose Arguelles was privately
privy to some information about the earth slipping out of its “time beam” and
spinning off into space which would severely mess up our seasons and probably
screw with Daylight Saving Time, too.
Further, preventing
this was also supposed to have the side effect of making people stop fussing
with and hitting each other, ushering in a new age of harmony and love. Makes sense, I guess, because if I were to
find myself hanging onto a birch tree for dear life while the planet was
spinning off into Never Neverland, the last thing I’d be thinking about was
picking a spat with someone who was clutching the same tree.
In order to save the world from catastrophe, bevies of
believers converged on sacred places around the globe that mid-August
weekend. They used all their very best
psychic powers to keep the earth in its orbit.
Well, Sedona is one of the spiritually sacred places on earth, so many
psychics gathered there for the Harmonic Convergence, and concentrated real
hard. It must have worked because the
earth behaved itself and stayed where it was supposed to, though I’m not sure
about the harmony and love side effect.
Well, all psychic roads lead to Sedona and eventually there
we were, stuck in a five mile long traffic jam that crept along the main
highway through the rusty red sandstone and limestone bluffs of Sedona. When I say “rusty,” I mean exactly that and not
as a modifying adjective of red. Those
stunning geological masterpieces are the result of iron oxide coating the
grains of sandstone and turning into rust.
I’m quite sure this process, which apparently occurred over millions of
years, was continuing visibly before my eyes as we sat in that traffic
jam. When we finally arrived at our
destination, Diane whipped the car into the parking lot of a long two story
building next to a creek that actually had water in it, unlike most of Arizona’s creeks and rivers. Plastered all over the building were signs
that read, “Psychics, Palm Readings, Tarot,” and so on.
As I said earlier, this was Diane’s idea, so we let her do
the talking while Barb and I wandered around the shop looking at various
items. Rocks, beads, medicinal
bracelets, candles, books, and jewelry with allegations of special powers drew
our attention while Diane made arrangements for a group palm reading. The clerk set a three ring binder in front of
us and asked us to choose which psychic we wanted. I would have chosen the one whose last name
was Stillwater,
but Diane, being in charge, opted for…
I’m going to call him Nikolas. I
do so to avoid any future legal problems.
For that very same reason I will refrain from describing him.
The clerk called Nikolas on the phone, though why she didn’t
just use ESP or telepathy is something I’m still wondering about. Anyway, Nikolas appeared, and we followed him
up a narrow staircase to a small room on the second floor. As soon as I walked in I felt something
other-worldly—similar to what I imagine Alice
in Wonderland would feel if she were trippin’ on LSD. Children’s toys were everywhere. They covered every surface in the room, the
walls, chairs, shelves, floor. Toys were
suspended from the ceiling, suspended from each other. Dozens of Matchbox cars covered a chair next
to me, carefully lined up in formation along the outer edge of the seat
cushion. Strings of miniature Christmas
lights were attached to the ceiling in haphazard fashion. The whole scene was more than a little bit
creepy.
Nikolas threaded us through the toys to three chairs, where
we sat facing him. He looked at our
palms for about three seconds each. He
spoke of getting in touch with our inner child, the one that always looked
outside the box. I suppose that’s the
reason for the load of toys in the room.
Well, it’s either that explanation or it says something about the
peculiar little high-pitched giggle he made when he said something he thought
was witty. He went on for some time
about this inner child, telling us that our lives would change for the better
by listening to that inner voice, and letting its wisdom unfold within us. I don’t know about anybody else, but
listening to my inner child was responsible for a lot of spankings when I was a
child, and it still has the power to cause me a great deal of trouble because I
don’t seem to have an inner grown-up that cautions me to watch myself, or else.
Then he took a small pen light and gazed into Diane’s
eyes. He said nothing. He turned to Barb and looked deep into her
eyes with the light. “Aspirin,” he
said. “Sugar, salt.” It took a bit for Barb to realize he was
asking a question, and then she answered.
“Vicodin. Diet
Coke.” Barb had been having a lot of back
pain recently, hence the pain pills.
Nikolas was not happy with her answers. He launched into a
lecture on the evils of artificial sweeteners and the necessity of drinking
pure water, with distilled water being the ultimate nectar of the water gods. That segued into the importance of nutritional
foods. He advised against canned food,
frozen food, store-bought food. Buy from
the local farmers’ market, or grow it yourself, he counseled. Because the three of us had opted for a joint
session, Nikolas had three fifteen
minute time slots to fill, so he tended to repeat himself a lot.
I was wondering when he would get to the palm reading, so I
stuck my left palm in his face and asked, “What do you see when you look at my
palm?”
“Thousands of things,” he said.
“Such as?”
“I’ve already told you three things,” he said. And giggled.
I counted the inner child, distilled water and pure foods as
the three things, but I was still hoping to get Nikolas on track with the palm
reading, so I asked, “In what direction should I go with the rest of my life.”
Whereupon Nikolas said he never tells people about the
future because we could do something tomorrow that would change the entire
course of our lives, and the result wouldn’t jibe with his predictions or
advice. Beside me, Barb sat with her
arms crossed over her chest. Next to
her, Diane asked some specific questions, but Nikolas was having none of that. Inner child, distilled water, and pure food
were the extent of his advice.
By this time the whole thing was monumentally boring and
being inside a giant toy box was putting too much pressure on the
obsessive-compulsive neatnik in me. I
wanted out of there. We paid Nikolas his
over-priced fee and left the room without knocking over any toy displays. We kept silent until we reached the parking
lot, whereupon we decided that the Sisterhood should conduct its own harmonic
convergence over Margaritas at the bar across the street.
“I’m sorry,” said Diane in between sips of the frosty green
nectar of the tequila gods. “The last
time I was here it was wonderful. I was
hoping for a spiritual cleansing.”
“He cleaned us out, all right,” said Barb, her arms still
figuratively crossed. We decided Barb’s
initial skepticism and then outright hostility were to blame.
“You must have screwed with Nikolas’ vortex,” I
suggested. “Oh, heck, just look at it as
an adventure,” I said, giving a twist to Marilyn’s advice.
”Ka-ka,” said Barb.
I think she had something there, which is why the
refrigerator magnet I bought in Sedona has so much meaning for me: “Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let
in the light.”
-30-
April 6,
2008 Gullible
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