Blast from the Past

Say what you will about astrology, for some reason I find it easier to get my head wrapped around that concept than I do the concept of God. Please, don’t pray for my understanding. Or go ahead and pray if it makes you feel better. I think I have the same concept of God as Major Major’s wife in Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. When she admonished Yossarian for taking the Lord’s name in vain he asked why it would bother her, as she was an athiest. She replied, yes, but the God she didn’t believe in was a good and kind God. Enough about deities. Let’s get back to the main subject at hand, astrology.

Currently we are on the first tail end of the third mercury retrograde of 2004. I’d forgotten it was coming until the icemaker in the fridge quit working for no apparent reason. One day it made ice, the next day it didn’t. Nothing had changed to cause the icemaker quit working. No one was under the sink messing with the petcock, the temperature in the freezer had not been adjusted, and I certainly did not pull it out from the wall for the annual vacuuming of the coils. (That should be an Olympic event, don’t you think? And now, representing the United States in the annual vaccuming of the refrigerator coils event, Beth Lock armed with her Rainbow vac….nevermind.)

Two days later the toilet went. The water to the bowl would not stop running. My husband fiddled, adjusted, fiddled, adjusted, swore when he stood up and bonked his head on the open bathroom cupboard door, fiddled, adjusted, and finally turned the tap off. It was midweek, we were both busy, so he cut down a used cranberry juice container that we could fill with water in the sink to pour down the bowl after doing our business. For the major jobs we’d reach down and turn the tap back on for the duration.

Then the cable went out. We called the cable company but there was no problem on their end. The next day it was back on. I’d get emails asking why I hadn’t responded to a prior email. It was because I had never received it. Likewise some of my sent mail went missing in the ether.

These clues were all I needed to check the mercury retrograde calender, me being attuned to such matters, you see. Sure enough, we were smack dab right in the middle. Mercury retrograde is not bad, per se. But it is not a time for starting new ventures, rather, it is a time to rethink, repair, rewrite, return to the past. And that, dear readers, is the point of this story.

In June of this year I wrote about Gordon Vales, a simple man with an extraordinary talent. As this mercury retrograde started, I had an email from a man who knows Gordon, was looking for information on the film that was produced about his life, and stumbled across my blog via google. (Isn’t the ‘net cool?) It has been great returning to this bit of my past during this time, catching up on Gordon’s life and gaining a new correspondent in the process.

You may think this is coincidence and has nothing to do with mercury retrograde. I agree it is a bit of a stretch, being as I wrote the article in June and all that. Today’s inbox though, made me think twice about it being a coincidence. See, two years before we made the film about Gordon, we made a film about a woman named Barbara Rothacher, who was a hermit. Barbara lived on a mountain top fifteen or twenty miles outside of Sandpoint, Idaho. Her property was surrounded on three sides by national forest land. It was two miles straight uphill on a dirt track to her house.

Barbara was a woman with strong convictions. When we met her in 1976, she had been retired for several years from her job as women’s athletic director of a state university back east. Barbara protested the war in Vietnam. During the war, the story goes, Barbara would calculate her income tax due and bank it in a safe deposit box, then write to the government to say that when the war was over she would remit in full. The IRS was not fond of that notion and prepared to take some assets. It was at that time that her son graduated from college and she was eligible for early retirement. She already had purchased the property in Idaho so she gave up her job so that she would not have to contribute any further taxes to support the war. (I should point out that once the war ended, she remitted the full amount due from the years she withheld the money for the government.)

This morning I received this email: “Just a real off the wall question, Did you know a Barbara Rothacher? I live near where she lived and I’m trying to understand her better.” Barbara passed away in 1996 and to be honest I haven’t thought of her in years. I wrote back to him, thinking I may have mentioned Barbara in an article or blog before, to ask how he had found my name. Turns out this gentleman lives near her property, and recently was asked to caretake it by Barbara’s son. He found a journal with my name in it. Googled me, etc. (Isn’t the ‘net COOL?)

Watch for the happenings in your life during the next two weeks as mercury continues this retrograde cycle. You may be surprised at the extraordinary things that come your way via the past. Oh yeah, and make sure you back up your computer files. You just never know.

Peace, love, and fluffy bunnies.

The CKS/bl Tridiot Rating was calculated on this machine, and after several mercury retrograde glitches it spit out the extraordinary 103.875% rating.