78 Keys Read Free Page A

to tell her? She worries.”
    “Somehow, I think you’re the worrier and Aunt Ruthie is just making polite conversation. If you want to worry about something, worry about this spot of eczema I’m growing below my left ear. It bothers me, and I wonder if it could develop into something worse.”
    “Dev-uh-lah, a little dry skin patch by your ear is not a sign of eczema or, God forbid, cancer. I don’t know where you get this tendency to make every bodily tic into some horrible disease. You need a nice attentive girlfriend to take your mind off yourself. You two could find a good Jewish boy to donate his help and give me a few grandchildren and—”
    “Enough, Mama, enough. I’ll let you know when I fall in love, okay? Right now I’m sure this dry skin is eczema or maybe psoriasis. How do you tell the difference?”
    I really didn’t care about getting a girlfriend while I researched tarot. Oh, I dated, had sex, sent flowers, and batted my eyes with the best of them. I was complacent and smug that women found my yoga-sculpted physique irresistible. But a steady girlfriend would have distracted me from my real mission: to understand the cards. So I remained distractedly single, defying my mother’s obsessive dreams of grandchildren and nursing my phobic obsession with physical symptoms.
    For three years, I studied cards while sitting at my wobbly, chrome and Formica table in my cramped kitchen. It was the ancient symbols, their multiple meanings and their connection to something beyond me, beyond this physical realm that enthralled me. I came to understand metaphor and how each spread is a metaphor for the question at hand. And the metaphor came from somewhere else, an ethereal hand, writing a message in a universal language of symbols. Each card, its picture, number, or place in the spread held information.
    I reasoned that tarot was a method to communicate with “the other side.” A technology, if you will, but not a technology they study at MIT, as my mother would have reminded me had she known what I was doing. This was a technology made of seventy-eight cards, and these cards were phone lines to the keepers of infinite knowledge. By sitting with the images, information came to me, larger truths about life, about the connectedness of everything in the universe. I was on the edge of knowing all, each card a key to wisdom.
    I felt wired into something far larger than the mundane world around me. Some days, I’d reach such a deep, stimulating connection with universal truths that I’d have to run the few miles to my yoga instructor’s studio, take a couple of grueling classes back-to-back, and run home, just to be able to function in the mundane world of grocery shopping and classroom lesson plans.
    For months, I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I was embarrassed about taking up something so meshugana , crazy, as card reading. Eventually, though, I couldn’t not talk about it. The cards, their stories, were becoming a part of me, defining my experience. It was as if I’d learned another language and was translating all my experiences into my new symbolic vocabulary. My knowledge of Hebrew helped, along with my comfort with Jewish symbols. And I’m certain that during that time of personal awakening, my dairy allergy was a little better.
    Eventually, an astonishing thing happened: when I talked about tarot to my friends, they wanted me to do a reading for them. Very few looked at me like I’d gone over sanity’s precipice. More often, they looked at me like I’d know too much about them, but they couldn’t resist asking for what I could find out from the cards. Reluctantly at first, I became a professional reader, but then I morphed into a darn good one after a few years. I made some money and decided to substitute teach instead of hold a full-time job. I finally stopped teaching altogether and moved into a bigger apartment.
    After a few years of being an excellent, but normal, tarot reader, I had the