Just now I posted something that I wrote about Debbie back in 2013. I should have had the presence of mind to add it to the blog at the time, but that would have required a smidgen of self-awareness. In other words, no such luck. Anyway, since it's likely that nobody is scanning back years to look for anything added, consider this a pointer to it.
The post is called: "Wise and good."
My weekly phone call with Debbie ran two hours tonight. She had broken one of the bones in her foot, so we talked about that. I talked about the professional conference I was at earlier in the week, and about some possible job opportunities that might materialize in the future. Also I've bought plane tickets to go visit her and her family next month, so we talked about that.
After two hours, or almost, I suggested it might be time for us to call it quits. She agreed that she really had to go pee. But then she said, "I need to tell you something."
You remember that at this point she is living with her daughter Mattie, with Mattie's husband, and with their two sons—Debbie's grandchildren. And she explained that yesterday there had been a bit of a conflict of some kind. She didn't say what it was over. She did say that it had all been resolved. But she added that she had felt at the time like she really wanted to talk to me about it. And this feeling had made her realize "what you do for me." And she wanted me to know that.
I added that, for my part, the reason I spent so much time talking about these highly theoretical future job opportunities was that I really wanted to hear her take on them, that knowing her opinion would make a difference as I tried to settle on my own. And then we finally wound up: "Love you, talk to you next time." And closed the Zoom session.
I will always love her. And it does seem to be mutual, more or less. It's a nice thing to think.
The professional conference that I mentioned recently ended today, and I headed home. The conference itself was interesting, and I learned a lot. Part of what I learned is how very much more there is to know about this field than I ever knew. So in a way it's a shame that I'm near the end of my career and not right at the beginning. Maybe I could have done a better job all those years if only I'd known what I was doing.
But during the conference I heard a funny story ... or maybe just an odd one. We'd just finished listening to a talk where the speaker encouraged creative problem-solving: the kind of advice where, if your team of engineers is stuck on a problem, he tells you to add an artist or a theologian to the team [those were his examples] because he or she will "think differently" and therefore "break the logjam." And one woman asked a question that amounted to, "How do we persuade management to accept this idea?" But in the process of asking her question, she told a story.
Some time ago, she was working for NASA. One particular launch had just been scrubbed because of some equipment failure, and she was on the team that was supposed to analyze the failed equipment to find out what went wrong. The failed equipment was being sent back for them to study, but it had not arrived yet. But it so happened that at the same time, she was starting to learn to read Tarot cards. She did a reading for the problem, and identified exactly what was wrong ... before the parts ever arrived. Analyzing the parts after they arrived simply confirmed the diagnosis that the Tarot cards had already made. And her fellow team-members enjoined her, in the strongest possible terms, "Never tell anyone. Never speak of this again."
Funny. Or I thought it was.
I mentioned in this post a month ago that Kathleen and I had agreed to have coffee or something. Well, even though she now lives a lot closer to me than she did before, she's still not exactly local. But this week I'm attending a professional conference in another city, and that put me close enough to her to provide an opportunity. So we decided to have dinner tonight.
(As an aside, it's a little funny that I'm going to a professional conference when I'm unemployed and possibly retired. But so I am, because of ... well, reasons. It gets complicated fast, and none of them is very interesting.)
You may remember that I introduced Kathleen to this blog in this post, a little more than a year and a half ago. So far as I know she was never aware of any of the subtext that I read into the dinner in that post, and you will recall that even at the time I didn't believe in it either. It was a purely intellectual construct, just for the hell of it. Anyway, in case there was any doubt whatever on this point, she invited her husband to come along. The two of them sat on one side of the good-sized table, and I sat on the other. No possible subtext. And that's absolutely fine with me ... I feel like I'm getting a little old to want to have to worry about the risk of flirting with anyone any more. Nice to know it's a non-issue.
And dinner was fun. We talked about the company where she and I both used to work, and how they are making this and that bad decision in the business unit where we were. I learned what her husband does for a living, and told them some of my stories from earlier employers when they were relevant. We drank beer and ate barbecue and generally enjoyed the time. Because they live a few hours away from where I live, it won't be a regular thing; it might not repeat at all, for all I know. But it was a nice way to spend the evening.
Back before Wife and I were married, she missed her period one month. I don't remember if we bought a pregnancy test, but we were convinced she was pregnant. It was definitely a bad time to have a child: we weren't even married yet, she had a job, we were trying to get into graduate school—life was busy and confusing. A child would have upended it completely. But we also felt queasy at the idea of abortion. (We could bring ourselves to support it politically, in the abstract; but actually going through one? Shudder.)
While we were still trying to decide what to do, the full moon rolled around and we went to her coven's Full Moon ceremony. Part of the ceremony was regularly given over to magical work, if anyone had anything they wanted done. Sometimes the whole coven worked on something together, and sometimes they just backed up a single person who did some work alone.
Wife announced that she wanted to place a petition with a deity; and after thinking it through she decided that she wanted to petition Cerridwen, the Crone Goddess of her pantheon. Cerridwen later became Wife's patron, too, but at this point Wife wasn't consecrated to anyone yet. Anyway, she said she wanted to make a petition, without (apparently) having discussed the idea with her High Priestess or anyone else. So the rest of the coven backed her up, while she called to Lady Cerridwen, and asked for her help in eliminating this "misbegotten" child. And then she went on to say, "In return I promise that I will bear a daughter and raise her to be a priestess for you."
There was a silence after she finished, and it seemed to go on for a long time. Finally her High Priestess broke it with a soft, hushed "So mote it be." (That's what her coven used in places where a Christian would say "Amen.") And I really don't remember if there was any discussion after about whether that kind of promise was a good idea.
Anyway, the baby born from that pregnancy was Son 2. A boy, not a girl. Not a daughter, and not someone that could end up a priestess. (Also, Son 2 has shown no interest in Wicca, for whatever it is worth.) Did that mean we were going to have three children, two boys and then a little girl? We talked about it as a possibility. Once upon a time, three children wouldn't have been at all remarkable; maybe it's still not.
But Wife's doctors started to tell her that a third child would be a really bad idea. Son 2 was born early, because her condition was starting to deteriorate. They waited long enough that they thought his lungs ought to be fully formed (I think that meant 36 weeks) and then scheduled a Caesarian section to pull him out before her health got any worse. They told her it was likely that another pregnancy would cause her to have a stroke. And then, before we could make any hard and fast decision about what to do, she entered menopause very early and the decision was taken away from us.
Once, at a subsequent Full Moon ceremony, she asked the Goddess what happened? Wife reminded Cerridwen that she (Wife) had promised to bear and raise a daughter as a priestess for her, but added that she couldn't do that if her body wouldn't bear a daughter. Before Son 1, she apparently couldn't get pregnant at all; less than a year later she was pregnant with Son 2; and after that she was told not to have any more children. How exactly was she supposed to fulfill her promise?
Cerridwen's reply was simply, "He was Our choice." No further explanation. [Update: Turns out I got that quote slightly wrong. You can find the whole conversation in this post here.]
And that might have been the end of it. Maybe it was the end of it. But a couple days ago I got an idea to pose another question to John Michael Greer. I didn't give him all the details, but just asked this much:
What happens if you make a promise to a god and then don't keep it?
To be clear, I'm NOT planning any such thing! It's about someone I know who promised something years ago and hasn't done it yet, and now there's no way it will ever happen. (Not in this lifetime, at any rate.) Also her life is kind of a mess. Is that a coincidence? Also, do promises like that carry over from one life to the next?
His answer was short and grim.
You'll keep it. If not in this lifetime, then in another, and the grief will just keep on piling up until you do so. No, the smoking crater of the person's life is no coincidence. That's what happens when you break a promise to a god.
So now I wonder. When Cerridwen said that They chose Son 2, did that let Wife off the hook? Or does Mr. Greer's remark answer my question in this post?
Or is it None Of The Above? Maybe that's always an option too.
P.S.: I realize I also allude briefly to this story in my post "Suzie's Dream."
There are stories I haven't told you yet. Actually there are a lot of stories I haven't told you yet. For all that this blog is over 1200 posts old, there's a lot of older stuff I never got around to. Maybe some day I'll scan through to see if there are stories that I promised one day and never told—and then tell them. Wow, completeness. What an idea.
But in some cases it's not just laziness or indolence. In some cases I feel genuinely funny telling the stories. Of course, that's why I have the blog in the first place: so I can tell true stories without having them traced back to me later. So here goes.
I've mentioned several times now that I've started following John Michael Greer. He writes about a lot of things, including politics and magic. And I'd noticed that several times he mentioned casually in passing that it's a bad idea to do magical spells to ask for money to drop into your lap. So one day last fall I sent him a question asking why.
I know someone that I think may be doing some kind of magic for money to drop into her lap. (Haven't confirmed yet, but from circumstantial evidence.) [Of course I was talking about Wife.] I know you have said this is generally a bad idea -- I mean, as opposed to doing magic that some venture turn out successfully, which is different. Have you ever written a full post explaining the likely consequences? If yes, can you please point me to it? If no, what are they?
His reply was straightforward:
That's one of the classic mistakes beginners in magic make, until they get enough instant karma to teach them why it's a bad idea. What happens is this. If you do magic to get money without earning it, your intention implies that someone else ought to earn money and not get it. That guides the blowback straight to your door. Everyone I know who tried this kind of magic ended up suffering a sudden financial loss -- their job went away, or their investments took a nosedive, or their car got totaled and the other guy's insurance refused to pay, or something like that. It's as reliable as tomorrow's sunrise.
If you want to do magic to become wealthier than you are, on the other hand, that's easy. Do workings to help you find opportunities to make money, and then follow through on them. You'll have to work for it, but you can do very well indeed that way.
Fair enough. I contacted Wife, asked her if she was doing such magic (She said, "If you were in my situation, wouldn't you?"), and sent her this information. I told her I had stumbled randomly across it on the Internet.
Also, Mr. Greer regularly claims that magic is an empirical science. He claims that you should be able to trace cause and effect in magical workings. So I thought about it, and tried to figure out if we had experienced the kinds of sudden, unexpected financial losses that he talked about. Here's what I came up with.
1984: Wife and I marry. We both start graduate school, at the same place.
1985: Wife's graduate department accidentally screws up her paperwork, with the result that she loses her funding.
1986: Wife interrupts a burglary. For various reasons she decides she has to drop out of school and leave town. I take a leave of absence (that later becomes permanent) to follow her. Wife gets a well-paying job right near the new town where we settle. A month later, she's fired. She gets a second job doing something similar, also paying pretty well if not quite as much. After two weeks, she's fired. (Finally she gets a third job, with a 37-mile commute. I get a job.)
1987: The heat in our apartment goes out in February. (Strictly speaking, this is the landlord's expense.) Later, we move. At this point we are both driving old hand-me-down cars from our parents. Her car dies. After a lot of searching we buy her a new car. Then my car dies.
1988: We buy me a cute little second-hand VW Bug. Then its reverse-gear breaks. For several months, until we can afford to get it fixed, the only way I can back up is to put the car in neutral and push. Good thing it's a VW.
Also this year (I think it was the same year!), Wife decides we need a chest freezer in our garage. That way we can buy meat in bulk, you see, because it's cheaper-per-ounce that way. So she buys the chest freezer. Then she plunges into an orgy of shopping, and fills the whole thing with meat. A little later, we are doing some kind of work in the garage that requires temporarily unplugging the chest freezer ... and we forget to plug it back in. All the meat spoils. The stench is so overpowering there is no way to clean the freezer. There's a construction site across the street, and we get their permission to toss the whole works―freezer, meat, and all―into their dumpster. I have no records to tally up how much money went straight down the tubes because of that foolishness.
1989: Wife gets a new boss, whom she hates, and leaves her job. (I forget if he fires her or she just quits.) She gets a new job that she hates even more. Also my job is thrown into tumult. The contract is being changed at a high level; and even though my role is pretty insignificant, I somehow get caught in the gears. In the end I learn enough diplomacy fast enough to save my job, but my two co-conspirators both lose their jobs with extreme prejudice.
1990: Wife is admitted to another graduate school in a new town, so she quits her job and we have to move. My car is totaled on the freeway. I "borrow" my grandfather's car. Its radiator explodes, and I borrow another old car from my parents.
1991: I don't remember. There was probably something.
1992: My work relocates three hours away so I have a crazy commute on weekends and have to find a way to stay there during the week. Somewhere along the line the car I've got from my parents also dies.
1993: We buy another new car. Wife fails her qualifying exams and leaves her graduate program at the end of spring. She finds short-term jobs, but not until November 1995 does she find a job that she can hold more than a year. Also in 1993 I get my first solid (non-contracting), professional job in the field that leads to my career.――The next year (1994) we buy a house and start to think that we are joining the professional middle class. After a while, Wife stops doing magical spells to get money to drop into our laps.
... or at any rate she pretty much stopped until we sold the house and she was once again living on her own. I don't know what she did after that, but I think she started up again. Also her financial situation started deteriorating.
My memory is a little sketchy for this kind of detail that far back. (I can remember stories; but after a while the dates blur.) But I'm pretty sure this is close to accurate. And it means that for most of the first ten years of our marriage, Wife was doing magical spells to get money to drop into our laps. And for most of the first ten years of our marriage, we had at least one major financial crisis each year. So yes, maybe that counts as being "as reliable as tomorrow's sunrise."
If so, a concatenation of that many dramatic coincidences does kind of suggest that magic may work. Also, don't try this at home.
Wow, another post referencing Homer in just under a month! I guess I must be on a roll ... or, umm, something ....
I thought about posting these over on the Patio, — just because they are Greek and pretentious, I guess. But there's really nothing philosophical about them. They are hymns, sort of — supposed to be in the mode of the Homeric Hymns. The first four are, indeed, directly adapted from specific Homeric Hymns, and date from the autumn of 1990; the next two are merely inspired or suggested by Homeric Hymns, and date from the last week or so.
For other dactylic poems of mine, you can look here and here.
To Athene (Hymn 11)
I sing of Athene, who watches our city,
With Ares she thrills to the waging of war!
Who keeps safe from harm the host charging to battle,
From shouting and plunder to come home once more.
To Hera (Hymn 12)
Golden-throned Hera, the daughter of Rhea,
The Queen of Immortals and fairest I sing,
Whom all of the gods high on lofty Olympus
Do honor with Zeus the loud-thundering King.
To Demeter (Hymn 13)
Awesome divinity, bright-haired Demeter.
You and your daughter, dear Persephone,
The fairest of maidens -- I sing in your honor.
Hail Goddesses! Guide both my city and me.
To the Most High, Son of Kronos (Hymn 23)
Of Zeus I shall sing now, the greatest in heaven,
His far-seeing wisdom puts all to the test.
With Right he takes counsel -- she sits near beside him.
Be gracious, O Kronion, noblest and best.
To Hermes
Cyllenian Hermes, begotten of Maia,
Who shyly stayed home in her cave, out of sight.
Olympian Zeus came to visit in secret;
And they lay in love through the dark of the night.
Fortunate Hermes – your first day of life, you stole
Phoebus’s cows while pretending to sleep.
You strung the first lyre and high in the mountains
Of grass-rich Arcadia tended your sheep.
Luck-bringing Hermes, the master of speeches,
whose honey-dripped words can achieve any aim.
Guardian of travelers and merchants and thieving,
For whom all our finding and losing's a game!
Olympian herald, you shepherd dead spirits
To meadows of asphodel, pallid and grey;
I sing of you now, and will sing again later.
Be gracious and grant that I not lose my way.
Pallas Athene, spear-brandishing goddess,
Who bears the Gorgoneion — terrible shield!
Fearsome in battle, you scatter your enemies,
Stealing their wits till in terror they yield..
Pallas Athene, the guardian of cities,
Rejoicing in Justice and Right undefiled;
Who teaches the know-how of civilization,
That sets us apart from the beasts and the wild:
The bridle for horses, the loom to weave fabric,
the flute to make music, the olive for oil.
All these and more are the tools that you give us,
To bring productivity out of our toil.
Friend of the crafty and peerless in counsel,
Your sight probing deeply, your eyes shining grey;
I sing of you now and will sing again later.
Be gracious and grant that I not lose my way.
[To be clear, I am writing this post at the end of June 2022, and back-dating it.]
This will be brief, and there's nothing profound in it. I'm adding it—well after the fact—for the sake of narrative completeness and nothing more.
Debbie has been in town for the last five days or so. She had to fly out to this state because of business related to settling her mother's estate. While she was out here, she drove up to this town because she still has so many friends here. As for me personally, she and I have gotten together only three times in the last five days and she's staying with somebody else; so clearly it's not all about me. [Read that remark however you like.] We've gone to two different art exhibits (I describe one of them here), and today we went hiking.
I'm writing this almost two months after the fact, so I don't remember a lot else to say. But just so you know that it happened.
