I’m not the type to read my daily horoscope or put too much stock in my astrological sign and forecast (though that said, I will say that reading it I find it to be disconcertingly accurate, which I ascribe to sweeping generalizations that could be true of everybody, such comments as “you are neat and organized and a real go-getter.” Who doesn’t want to believe this of themselves? I could real Libra and find things there too an certainly in Scorpio I find a lot of things that could likewise apply (you are a deeply passionate person, a terrific lover” - okay, that last may not be entirely true, but the point is, who doesn’t want to believe that?
We all want to believe we are every positive quality we read and while some may seem truer, read any one horoscope your whole life and maybe you begin to pride yourself on the qualities it says you have and so you go about honing only those and priding yourself: the horoscope determines you. So I’m a bit of a cynic here. I also don’t hang crystals in purple-curtained windows and sit, dressed up like Stevie Nicks in some leather and lace outfit with a bit of velvet thrown in, in some magic circle chanting to the moon goddess as I sit encircled by precious stones, my magic chalice and wand at my side. Nor do I believe in street or sidewalk psychics; those who set up shop in towns like Salem an charge fifteen or twenty dollars a reading and whip out their Tarot cards and make sweeping generalizations about my life that again, in my view, could largely be said of just about anybody.
I’ve gone this route, had my palm read by gypsy, she said, in Greenwich Village. She had a neon sign pointing to her basement apartment that smelled of boiled cabbage. Her kids ran rampant and she shouted at them in what sounded like Portuguese and then took me to a weird corner of the room and pulled back a (velvet, of course) curtain on a pole and read my palm. I’ve done the Salem psychic thing several times, and more than once, been told that I too was psychic and didn’t “need to be here” by a fellow psychic. And it was true: I had predicted my sister’s pregnancy, I had known about a car bomb before it went off, I had known Ian was in trouble and he was; come to think of it, a lot of the women in my family seemed to have a gift or intuition or whatever you want to call it for knowing when one or the other of us was in some kind of trouble or had a life-changing event occurring. For all of my cynicism an disbelief, from those depths, some part of me believes because I have known things myself and have seen my own mother just know when things were horribly wrong and there was no other way she could have known. To me, that was proof enough. And all without cards.
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