Mine is creepy. Swell.

Well, that’s par for the course.

My mother, you see, always warned me against getting my fortune told; not because she thought it didn’t work, but because she thought it did and it couldn’t be the forces of light and goodness that were sneaking tips from the future into our space and time. She figured it was a very Dark thing, and from my experiences, she was right.

Mind you, she’d get her fortune told at least once a year. She got her palm read once and the woman said she’d very soon be going to a hot, sandy place and that she’d have a health scare first that would get cleared up but later would come back to haunt her. Five years previously she’d applied for a job in Saudi Arabia, and six weeks after the palm reading she got a call out of the blue: she was hired.

But first, she’d need a clean bill of health.

Which she got, except that the first time they did the chest X-ray it came back with a spot on the lung. The radiologists thought it was a flaw on the film, so they did it again, more carefully this time. It was clear, and away to Riyadh she went.

Only to return, eighteen months later, with a fatal case of lung cancer.

It just hit me: I’m actually older right now than my Mother ever got. Somehow that feels like a betrayal, although she wouldn’t see it that way and in fact I can hear her lecturing about it right this second.

But, be that as it may, she always warned me against fortune telling, because while it might work, you’d be dealing with the dark side and there’s no way to do that and ultimately come out a winner.

She was odd, for a Buddhist, my mother. She used to hang out at the Pentecostal Church because she loved the music. I think I got it from her, my tendency to shop at Buddhist shops for exotic, flashy Christmas ornaments.

But I have a couple of friends who are good with the tarot, or so I’d heard, so one day I pestered one of them into doing my cards for me. He laid out the cards with great solemnity (I should explain at this point that when I get my cards done, which I’ve only had done about four times in my life, it is always primarily, if not entirely, Greater Arcana, and I tell the card reader as s/he is laying them out that they’ll be mostly Greater Arcana and they all chuckle and say, “I don’t think so. Do you know how rare that is?” and I actually freaked one of them quite out because it was all the CGA of Particle Accelerators and the Ninety-Nine of Spades and the Grand High PoohBah of Wonderbread and many other Greatest Hits of the Greater Arcana; she paused, sat back, goggled at me for a bit, and tried to duck out of reading the cards. She, herself, did not want to know) then snapped to full height with a crack like whip, sucked in his breath right sharply, and put both hands to his mouth.

Suddenly, I was not feeling optimistic.

There was a lengthy pause.

A.

Lengthy.

Pause.

“Um,” I said, firmly. Or maybe not. “Um, so I don’t mean to disturb you, but what do you see?”

A.

Lengthy.

Pause.

with bonus guilty expression stealing across his difficulty-having-when-lie-telling face.

“Weeeeeeeelllllllllllll,” he said, “What would be your idea of ultimate luxury?”

“I guess to wake up whenever I pleased, never have to answer to anyone, not have to be anywhere at any particular time, and read whatever I liked, all day long.”

He paused. Again. Then he said, “that’s all going to come true in the coming months.”

Then he grabbed up those cards like they were kittens he was saving from a rabid wolverine, stuffed them into the silk sack and abruptly changed the subject. I think he asked if I wanted to see what was on tv, but I could be mistaken about that. And, no matter what, he would never tell me what else it was that he saw.

And, a few days later, I noticed some bumps at the base of my throat and thought I’d be all proactive-like and go to the doctor about them. Fourteen days later I was in chemo for third stage cancer, and I took an entire year off work during which I woke up whenever I pleased, never had to answer to anyone, never had to be anywhere at any particular time, and read whatever I liked. All day long.