78 Keys Read Free

decidedly inappropriate gift for a devout young Jewish woman. A few days later, I nervously nudged the deck away into a bat mitzvah mementos box and forgot about it. For years.
    I never was a  mystic seeker or believer in the arcane. Quite the opposite, in fact. My mother raised me conventionally Jewish in a conservative synagogue in Boston. My sharp-tongued father, whose parents barely survived Auschwitz, was tepid about anything Jewish and refused to attend temple with my mother and me. He seemed to live on the edge of a precipice of doom, and, for him, public displays of Judaism were the prod that would topple him over the edge. On the other hand, he was fluent in Yiddish, as was my mother. Consequently, I grew up steeped in two languages.
    Father died slowly, with ferocious, protesting fanfare, from cancer when I was twelve years old. He made clear in his final wishes that there were to be no Jewish or goyish rituals to mark his passage. My mother obeyed his last request probably to forestall any possibility that his ghost would return to kvetch at her one more time. Then she became doubly active in our synagogue community where, for the first time in years, she acquired comfort and friendship.
    My spiritual search consisted of questioning whether “going kosher” would hamper my dating life. I decided it would make things more problematic with the shiksa girlfriends, so kosher was ruled out. I did, however, require a low wheat and dairy diet to help manage my chronic allergies.
    I was a timorous hedonist looking for the next sensual experience while making sure I wasn’t in danger or exposed to some errant noxious germ. The crystal visionaries of new-age doctrine bewildered me, and I often found opportunities to mock them and their followers. Then I had a simple dream.
    I was sitting on a bale of hay at some sort of outdoor festival. A spread of tarot cards lay on the bale in front of me. I was bending intently over the cards, so much so that my usual tangle of black curls obscured a few of the cards. I saw my hand impatiently pull and hold the locks behind my neck. I could feel the prickling of straw through my lightweight cotton pants. I shifted to ease the tickling. On the other side of the card spread sat a rapt listener. Her mouth shaped in an astounded O , she believed every word I said. I looked at the cards and uttered to myself, “But I’ve never seen tarot cards before. In fact, I’ve never even seen a bale of hay before.”
    When I woke up, every second of that dream vignette was permanently scored in my brain. So I grabbed a chair, climbed into the rarely visited, spidery attic, and found the bat mitzvah memento box from twelve years earlier. Pushing aside mazel tov cards, petrified cake, and deflated balloons, I landed upon the still-shiny box of tarot cards. The box’s plastic wrapper was never opened. I could feel Aunt Ruthie smiling all the way from Florida.
    I was captured by the cards. They fascinated me and held me in a grip difficult to describe. But it was unbreakable. The symbols, each with several possible meanings, fanned before me were the book of life, the keys to knowledge beyond science.
    I didn’t have much money at the time, but what little I made teaching third grade at the Jewish day school, I spent on material about tarot. All kinds of books, pamphlets, software, anything pertaining to the cards, and I continued to collect for years.

    *

    My mother cheerfully enjoyed widowhood and devoted her free time to cajoling me into finding “a good Jewish girl with a respectable job.” She would phone my hovel of a Seattle apartment from Boston and tell me where to find a proper girlfriend and a better-paying job she could be proud of. She didn’t know I had found a Jewish love. Much of tarot cosmology is based on ancient Jewish Kabbalah.
    “Mama, your kibitzing isn’t helping. All good things happen in their time.”
    “Your aunt Ruthie calls every week and asks after you. What am I