By the time I hit high school, I felt hemmed in as much by New York’s pressure to succeed, as I did by the blocks and blocks of tall skyscrapers reaching high above me, obliterating the sun by day and the moon at night.
During my senior year while my peers talked about their exit to colleges, I let them know I was heading to California. When they asked why, my mind flipped as I tried to conjure a lie, but I always offered the truth. “I’m going because of ‘Mod Squad,” I told them, slightly embarrassed for admitting that a TV show was directing my objective.
Mod Squad was popular from 1968 to 1973. Each episode had a sunny California back-drop, where every person in every scene wore sunglasses, ran on the beach, and was cool and sexy. Julie Barnes played by Peggy Lipton had straight blonde hair (duh) and even though my Jew hair was brown and frizzy and I couldn’t run due to my gimpy leg (been disabled since birth) I still wanted to follow in her foot-steps.
Less than a month after graduation, I left the Bronx heading for that city by the bay. It was 1975. San Francisco would be home for the next fourteen years.
Shortly after my arrival, I moved in with four free spirits who were leading lives on their own terms in a city with cloudless iridescent blue skies. I wanted to feel as free. I jumped right into that communal lifestyle so I too could find out what freedom might offer.
What I discovered was a fearless curiosity I didn’t recognize about myself. I mean I knew I was a rebellious kid — middle birth order pretty much pre-determined that. But in California there was an adventurous, open, expansive nature that infected my soul. I took to it with the same desperate hope I saw in movies of parched victims crawling their way through desert sand to a watering hole.
Re-imagining that time today, I now understand why I wasn’t freaked out when Julie — a self-proclaimed witch — and yes coincidentally, the same name as the blonde Mod “Squader,” suggested she read my Tarot cards. What was Tarot? I had no idea. But as I shuffled the deck, I knew that whatever happened, sparked a new, different, and non-mainstream path. I was all in.
During that first reading the cards accurately described my situation. My friend’s ability blew me away and so did the subversive nature of Tarot. That aspect was part of the attraction. I wanted to learn its secrets.
By then I’d rented a small one-bedroom apartment in Oakland, so I took a bus to San Francisco’s seedy North Beach to visit the one metaphysical shop Julie mentioned. The owner plucked Eden Grey’s “Mastering the Tarot” from a shelf and placed the book in my hands.
I pawed through the information every day. I studied each card and in so doing, Tarot offered the opportunity to learn about me. I took its main tenet: “know thyself” to heart. Working with the cards focused my awareness on the crap thoughts I carried and the negative beliefs about myself that weren’t serving me.
My whole life plagued with the sort of self-doubt that stemmed from the mind junk cemented to the synapses of my brain. I spent most of my life comparing myself to others, drawing the short end of that stick by doubting my worth in comparison. Not to mention how I often second guessed if I’d made a fool of myself in the company of others or said something wrong that would have someone not like me. In short, I was extremely insecure.
When I started pulling Tarot cards for myself, some, (I should have written “few,”) of those cobwebs getting in the way of self-acceptance and self-love got wiped away. It would actually take many more years for “few” to turn into “some,” to become “lots,” of cobwebs destroyed in order to see myself in a truer more beautiful light. At that time however, it was a revelation that I could change at all. Tarot was helping me to understand.
After a couple of years of reading for myself, I told my sister about studying the cards. To my surprise, she didn’t think it was odd. She too had left New York. She moved to Seattle, another western city that like San Francisco turned its nose up at stodgy, while giving a middle finger to the soul crushing manipulating pressure of expectations.
Leslie became my guinea pig. The first person I read for. My beta tester that enabled my skill as a Tarot reader to grow.
With each Tarot reading, she validated how right the cards were and soon began to tell her friends and then her friends told their friends until I was taking appointments from strangers. I wasn’t even getting paid back then. Reading for others provided great practice.
Yet reading for people I’d never met brought a kind of bodily anxiety and nervous tension that made me want to puke when a client rang my doorbell. Without the emotional protective support from friends and family – people who loved me, I felt vulnerable when I read for people I didn’t know. I suffered with persistent self-doubt about my skill every time I started to shuffle cards for these strangers. Would I be able to do this again? Would they like me? Would they like my readings?
And yet, despite my lack of confidence, anytime someone called, I penned them into my appointment calendar. I might have been lacking faith in myself, but I had every faith in Tarot and the Universe’s ability to help, not only me, but those who sought me out.
For over forty years, I never denied anyone an appointment. For most of that time though, no matter how many clients offered positive feedback about their experience, I remained twitter pated about whether I had the right stuff to point the Universe’s advice and Tarot’s teachings their way.
I was in my early sixties when I began to question this lack of confidence in myself. I saw young people, Tarot readers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, all offering readings. Men and women whose forthright stance showed no hesitation about telling the world that they read cards. Nor were they concerned about repercussions or negative comments. They exuded confidence.
Where was my confidence? What was I truly afraid of? Why was it so challenging for me to simply be proud of what I’d been doing for most of my life.
Was I concerned that if my confidence level matched my Tarot reading and channeling skill level, I would take my skill for granted. And if I took my skills for granted, would I become arrogant? Become a know it all? Become full of myself? Would I lose my compassion? Be driven by ego along?
How do people who are excellent in their field keep a level head? How does Larry David do it? How does Bonnie Raitt or Julia Louis Dreyfus do it? For God sakes, I love Madonna, but I don’t want to end up like her.
It’s times like this, when I’m pondering these questions, that I remember a racoon who long ago used the cat door to gain entry into my kitchen when I lived in Berkeley. It happened a few hours after dinner. My room-mate had gone out leaving me on my own. I was watching TV in the living room when I heard an odd loud noise in the kitchen, like a shuffling sound I didn’t recognize.
I got off the couch to explore. The kitchen door was propped open as usual. The overhead light was off. I’m no fool. There’s no way I was going to enter that dark kitchen having heard a noise I didn’t recognize. I reached blindly on the wall fingering for the switch and turned on the light while I remained standing in the doorway. A large adult raccoon turned around.
I froze for in disbelief trying to comprehend a situation that I could already tell might not go my way. In that nano-second of thought, I expected the round-eyed creature to turn and run out the cat door the moment it saw me. But that didn’t happen. Instead, he lifted his front paws off the linoleum, then stood straight up on his hind legs matching the height of my five-foot frame.
With his paws high up and out in front of him, the stance looked like the universal human signal for “I give up.” This offered my shaking heart one false moment of hope. But raccoons don’t know this symbol. They’ve never watched a western or been approached by cops. Raccoons are not humans and this raccoon proved it. He maintained that position facing me. His eyes penetrated mine as if to say, “I dare you.”
I turned the light off slinking back into the living room without making a sound. The white flag I waved was a definite nod to the beast that his cat-food stealing ways along with whatever the hell else he wanted to do in that kitchen, was fine by me.
The image of that raccoon’s unapologetic confidence in my house – MY house — slips into my psyche every now and then when my lack of confidence gets the better of me.
I recall his stance, his ball-busting no-nonsense attitude as if he had every right to be in my kitchen enjoying the cat food I paid for. It’s then I wake-up to the fact that he didn’t give one shit about what I thought about his intrusion. He didn’t suffer from a past that grew insecurity so large it arrested his development.
My mind still holds an unending amount of garbage that I hope I can continue to clean-up. But in the meantime, I conjure the memory of that raccoon. My mentor. My muse who reminds me that I too should stand on my own two feet and I too should not give one shit about how people perceive me or my Tarot reading channeling skills.
You are amazing. This is a perfect follow up to Hannah’s and my conversation this am. Great writing. . Thank you