T a r o t with L o v e

Evelyn seemed to be someone who had never really had the opportunity to be a child.  She looked older than her 40-ish age, which I attributed to her early marriage and having had children as a young teen.  She wore a very librarian-like appearance.  Her usually stoic face was adorned with dark, old-lady, thick-rimmed glasses and mousy brown Cher hair with bangs. She was clearly proud of her unusually long hair.  Like many women with longer hair, she would strategically swing it to get it all situated properly on her back.  But rather than casually tossing her head to do so, she enacted a full upper body movement so as to maintain the stiffness of her neck and shoulders, very robotic.  Her mind reflected that same rigidity, she believed nothing that her eyes could not see and she made no secret of her skepticism.

I worked with Evelyn in a small office with only a few other employees.  My desk was directly across from hers.  She and I didn't talk that much, we had little to nothing in common.  Still, we were cordial to one another and had an occasional personal conversation.  Of the staff, she had the highest status in the office, I was the "low man" on the totem pole.  I was young, this was my first office job, an excruciatingly boring job.  My primary responsibility entailed poring over multiple stacks of almost identical computer printouts as well as auditing other routine paperwork.  It wasn't until years later that I learned that such perfect monotony can easily put one into a very intuitive state of mind.

Although, at this point, I didn't even know the word "metaphysics."  I did recognize that my life had been sprinkled with a number of  psychic or highly intuitive experiences.  And although I was becoming increasingly interested in the paranormal, I didn’t take my psychic experiences seriously.  I never thought it was something that could be tapped or channeled in a beneficial way.  To me, it was this wild and kind of exciting thing that just popped up at odd times.  I had always lived in this same exceedingly non-progressive area and had never met anyone with whom I felt I could comfortably share my experiences.  Yet I yearned to share them, and sometimes in this particular office I would daringly throw out, "I'm kinda psychic," carefully wrapped in a facade of jest just to see their reaction to it.  Evelyn would invariably shoot a look over to her female counterpart across the room and they would quietly roll their eyes in unison, seemingly oblivious to my awareness of their mockery of me.

When I look back, I remember there were several occasions during this job that seemed to hint at my psychic inclination.  But when I think of this one day…ahhh, this day was especially sweet, an incident that would long be remembered with a special kind of satisfaction.  The heavenly nectar of witnessing a staunch skeptic, as Evelyn most assuredly was, being force fed a little dose of the paranormal.  It was rich with goodness...indeed.

Evelyn and I were the only ones in the office when it happened, everyone else had gone to lunch.  She seemed to be in a rather happy mood and that made it easier than usual to talk to her.  The radio was on and as we were "making nice" with mindless chit-chat, I zeroed in on a Taco Bell advertisement that was playing.  Since the radio was almost always on, and I had probably heard this same advertisement at least a million times, it later intrigued me how this time it spurred what might be referenced as a psychic “hit.”  It brought up an old memory, something that had happened many years ago. 

I immediately felt compelled to share this memory with Evelyn…  One afternoon, I was visiting a friend and co-worker who had been ill that day.  She was still wearing her pajamas.  But she told me she was feeling better, so I asked her if she wanted to go to the Taco Bell drive-thru with me.  Julie initially declined because of her attire, but I convinced her that no one would see her and that we'd just “buzz through the drive-thru and come right back” to her house.  So, she finally agreed. 

When we got there, I pulled up to the drive-thru window and as my car idled, we waited and watched as the people inside were hustling to get our food to us.  And then...my car died.  I flashed a wide-eyed, somewhat comical look of concern to Julie.  With eyes bulging and cheeks freshly colored with rosy-red on an otherwise very pale face, she declared without taking a breath, "(Dove)-you-better-get-this-car-started!!" 

Although momentarily I truly tried to refrain from laughing at my pajama-ed friend, I couldn't help but laugh as she freaked at the possibility of having to exit this vehicle in public view in her PJs.  As my laughter became uncontrollable, I was surprised when she also started laughing.  At that point, the workers inside the drive-thru window started laughing.  Their laughter just made us laugh even more.  The car did finally start and Julie didn't have to walk home in her jammies.  It was so funny though, even as I shared the story, I was laughing so hard my eyes were wet.  Evelyn seemed to love the story and was laughing with quite a bit of gusto herself.

As she laughed, her phone rang.  I quieted my own laughter as I anticipated the call to be business-related.  I was watching Evelyn and really enjoying the fact that I had made her laugh.  I continued to watch as she put the phone next to her face bright with the joy of my story.  That joy seemed to melt off her face almost instantly into something that appeared to be horror as she listened to the person on the other end.  The call lasted only a moment or so.  While still listening to the caller, she looked over at me with strange eyes.  And, as I described earlier, she had trouble hanging up the phone as her hand seemed to shake as well as the rest of her. 

"Whaaaat?"  I asked, after the phone finally left her hand. 

She seemed to be lost in a fog as she slowly responded,
"That was...my son...his car just died...in the...Taco Bell drive-thru."  Her son was apparently in need of her assistance.  She glared at me with her mouth slightly agape and a big question mark on her face.  She must have felt like a vulnerable child in that moment, no way to escape into her comfy skepticism this time... 

A kind of a sweet, warm peace just fell over me as I feigned a look of casual acceptance, as if such things were commonplace in my life.  All the while, I was containing a rush of glee exploding inside of me.  A sly little grin crept up on my face.  Nothing like being validated by a total disbeliever.   I simply couldn't resist saying, "See Evelyn, I told you I was psychic."  Still obviously a bit shaken, Evelyn made what seemed to be a solemn vow to me in her delirium, "From now on (Dove), I'm going to listen to everything you say."  I just responded with a chuckle, while secretly savoring the deliciousness of the moment.