tullamore dew with a guinness back

It’s strange some of the things I brought with me to my new ‘living in the desert in a trailer' life. For instance, I brought my deck of Tarot cards which I had not touched or looked at in years. Once settled into my spot at the Home of Dashed Hopes I began pulling a card each morning as a form of meditation – pondering the meaning of the card – but also as a form a divination about how things were going and what I should be paying attention to. During my time with The Jailbird, these cards came up a lot: The Devil (bondage to things that aren’t particularly good for me) and the Knight of Swords (a self-centered SOB) and the Knight of Cups (a romantic, the guy in shining armor), the Knights representing both sides of The Jailbird.

I stopped pulling the cards when Death began showing up – a lot. Death doesn’t necessarily mean physical death; it can represent a death and rebirth of all kinds of things like an old lifestyle or pattern of behavior or a change in spiritual beliefs. But to me it felt too much like death in the real sense.

One of the reasons I went in search of a new life was that a lot of people in my old life were getting cancer, going through various forms of therapy, and then dying or not, having undergone feats of amazing strength in the face of often difficult choices and even worse therapies. As a single woman with a mortgage and no safety net, should I be the next domino to fall, I would be screwed. I decided to get out of Dodge as quickly as possible and put as much distance as I could between me and that cancer mushroom cloud. I swore off traditional medicine and doctors, yearly physicals, mammograms, the whole kit and kaboodle (easy to do when you don’t have insurance) and embarked on an ignorance is bliss lifestyle.

In the end of November I stopped pulling Tarot cards. In December, the woman who had bought my house died from a fast-moving cancer – it snuck up on her around Thanksgiving, manifesting as a serious bout of the flu – and within three weeks she was dead. She was in her late 30s. Then my old boss got lung cancer and after all these months of chemo he died in August. A co-worker’s husband died of stomach cancer which had been diagnosed just a few months before. And now, one of my friends who battled breast cancer seven years ago is losing the fight to a cancer that cropped up somewhere else in her body. I will never see her again.

Ah jesus, this cancer thing sucks.

One year a bunch of us did the Race for the Cure. Three of us in the Race were Capricorns: My friend's husband (she could feel him worrying in the bed next to her), me, and another long-time friend. Us Capricorns kind of bitched the whole time (good-naturedly) because exercise is not exactly our forte. We dragged our sorry goat asses around the streets of Portland until one of us had the brilliant idea of going to the pub after the race for a shot of Irish whiskey with a beer back. Man did our paces pick up and we practically ran to the pub. The rest of the group all tsk tsked and shook their heads and pretended that we were indeed a pathetic lot while deep down thinking ‘damn, what a great idea, a shot with a pint of Guinness wouldn’t be too bad’ and thus the ‘The Race for the Shot’ was born and we couldn’t wait to do it the next year and the next.

I have lots of fond memories of my friend and her husband, going back, shoot, nearly 30 years. I can’t really write any more about this, it’s just too sad. All I can say is, choose a life that makes you happy and then go live it.