By the end of this, some of you will be rolling your eyes, I guarantee it.  So up front I’m telling you this is the god-honest truth.

Right now we’re in the middle of Mercury Retrograde when electronic gadgets (like computers!) go haywire, transportation ‘snarls’ more than usual, and, to put it bluntly, we all do more stupid things than normal.  It happens 3-4 times a year for 3 weeks at a time.  This stint is from August 20 – September 12.

Please hold that thought.

The older I get, the more I want to find out about my heritage.  Does knowing where I come from help me know where I’m going?  I have no idea.  But take my two grandpas, for instance, both of whom I never met….

Dad’s dad, Thomas, was born in 1847 and served in the U.S. Civil War.  He was 70 when Dad was born in 1917.  Dad was 78 when he died in 1995.  So if you do the math, my grandpa served in the Civil War as a teenager…while his own son, my dad, served in no wars because he was a preacher and was thereby exempt.  What was Thomas like, I wonder, and how did that war affect him, Dad…or me?

Mom’s dad, Sidney, was born in 1892 and so happened to be one of America’s prominent astrologers in his day.  He published under the pen name Wynn and “began Wynn’s Astrology Magazine in 1931, and for the next two decades it was one of the most influential in the emerging field. He also contributed a column to the New York Daily News and wrote a number of popular books.”

What I knew about my astrology grandpa while growing up in my conservative preacher’s home was that I shouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.  I even felt guilty about reading the horoscope, so I didn’t.  But when Bill and I divorced in 1990, I suddenly needed to find out why I wasn’t supposed to ‘touch’ astrology?  Would it kill me or my faith?

Since I had already fallen from grace (my last post), I decided there was nothing left to kill, so with a passion I touch-tackled astrology in every way possible.  A lady at work aided my intrigue and put me in touch with a guru of sorts who taught me much.  I purchased top-of-the-line software to work up natal charts and personality reports, which I continue doing to this day with great pleasure.  One of the things I learned along the way is you can get an astrology quack every bit as dreadful as a Bible interpreter quack.  I began to see my life making connections to my past in ways I never thought possible.  Kinda like criss-crossing grandpas.

Now go back to Mercury Retrograde.  I once tried to jokingly explain to do-not-touch-astrology Dad what MR was and he immediately said, “Oh, you mean like when I drove the car from Virginia to Michigan with my glasses caught in the corner of the luggage rack on top of the car…and I couldn’t figure out where I had put them till I got home?!”  Yup!

Okay then.  One more week of this madness and all you need to do is pay attention.  Expect delays and try not to take glitches personally.  Before you know it, life will move into the fast lane and become normal again.

“As in the heavens above, so on earth below.”   That’s why you should always look up!

Are you rolling your eyes?  But I bet you believe in the effects of the full moon, right!  Now that reminds me of when I worked in assisted living….

Many years ago my good friend Jimmy introduced me to a man that I came to love, Paul Auster.  I bought each and every novel and basked in the early days of love with a new author.  The book dates were endless as I entertained the books in his vast repertoire one after another.

Several years later I had lunch with a fellow from New York, he was reading a book, The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt.  He had borrowed it from the Brooklyn Public Library.  We talked books while we waited for a mutual friend to arrive and I made note I of that book on a post-it note and promptly tucked it away where it stayed, in a place that I could for the life of me never remember.  I began to obsess about the book’s title and author.  You might ask why I didn’t get in touch with the friend but he worked for 60 Minutes and was out of the country most of the time and truly I didn’t really have any connection with him.

I consulted with my friend Jimmy and the two of us searched high and low for a book that had the word Blind in it.  Canadian and book releases are not quite as fruitful as they are in the US and those were not the days of Internet searching.  Meanwhile I continued to cherish my true love, Mr. Auster.  Imagine how berserk I was when one day, years later I found the note. Shortly after that Jimmy found one copy of The Blindfold in a bookstore in Florida.  It was just as wonderful as we had imagined.

My dear friend died several years ago and his wife gave me all of his Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt books, even though I had my own copies.  For those of you who know Auster’s work you will remember that many of his books are set in Brooklyn, and one is even called The Brooklyn Follies.  Ironically it was in the Brooklyn library that the original book was borrowed from.   Of all my books, and I have many, the work of these two authors are my most treasured.

Imagine my shock when I discovered that Siri and Paul were not only side-by-side on my shelf; they were sleeping together in real life.

How could Jimmy and I have never known that they wed in 1981?

It’s your birthday again. You start it of at midnight, in the pub, with your friends. After all you are an adult now.

You can do whatever you want, without asking permission or approval from us. You could rob a bank, or buy a yacht and disappear on the horizon forever, or move to Timbuktu, or start a harem of gorgeous dark-haired and brown-eyed women all madly in love with you. You could even marry a princess and make blue-blooded babies, built a weapon of mass destruction, invent a cure for cancer, establish world peace, prevent the Martians from attacking, be a stand-up comedian (oh wait, you already are!), cut of your ear and paint sunflowers with it, and write some new best-selling novels on wizards or werewolves.

You can do all of that without our help or guidance….

In December 1990, being already very much pregnant with you, I was admitted to the hospital with a double pneumonia and, at that stage, was only suspecting your presence. The long specialist wanted to give me tetracycline, to beat the pneumonia quickly, so I would be back on my feet in no time. I protested and told her that I might be expecting as I had missed a period after my recent miscarriage, 5 weeks earlier. She laughed and told me that was as good as impossible so soon after a miscarriage. As I persisted in refusing all medication, telling her that I was the one of us that DID have sex and she had to do something or I would simply die on her, she agreed to a blood test after all. And there was the proof. HCG hormones all over the place, very, very pregnant. Medication was considered that would not do my baby harm, and I was so happy that I had been able to protect you already!

We hope the path we have drawn for you, and the sea we sailed together with you, was the right one so far. We hope you will continue to be the fine, empathic and really funny young man you have developed into. We wish for your dreams to come true, for your happiness to grow consistently, and for your love to spread around your world. We don’t expect you to do great wide scaled things like Gandhi or great, but narrower scaled meaningful things like Majoor Bosschardt. But we expect you to be great in being you, which is more than enough to make a difference. Please make the right decisions for yourself, but always bare others in mind with everything you do. You go ahead, sail your own sea, fly your own flight!! Whatever choices you make, we are so very proud of you!!

Oh, and if you rob that bank, I promise you we won’t tell anyone, if you buy us a little farm on top of a cliff in Ireland.

Mom.