The chance to visit friends was one of the factors that determined our choice of north Florida for our late Winter trip. One of my former students settled in Gainesville, and I have maintained contact with him. For the purposes of this account, I shall call him My Young Friend, or MYF. Now his wife and he have a son who is close to the age that MYF was when I met him. I took a liking to the precocious Guy when he was still in primary school. Guy was an articulate, curious and creative child, as one would hope that the offspring of his intelligent and sensitive parents would be. I wanted to bring him a gift, something that would be of value, not a mere memento. My first impulse was to give him a beginner's deck of Tarot cards. I resisted the idea, wondering if Guy were too young to be introduced to the arcane knowledge codified in the cards. I went so far as to purchase something else, but it seemed trivial and unworthy of his attention. I could not ignore my urge to introduce him to the Tarot, so that is what I did.
Guy was not feeling his best, so he did not join his parents and us for a walk in the forest near their house. There is nowehere in Gainesville tht is far from woods and wetlands. My Young Friend and S., his partner, led us along the muddy course of a creek. It was cloudy and so humid that we might have been in a terrarium. When the skies darkened to slate and the thunder rumbled, we turned back towards' our hosts' home, only slightly wet from that afternoon's shower.
Remnants of the native hardwood hammocks border the housing tracts throughout north central Florida.
After I presented Guy with his new cards, I thought that I should teach him a little about using them. I travel with a compact Tarot deck, but I had not read the cards in quite a while. The truth is that I had avoided consulting the Tarot. I had not been prepared to take any drastic measures to solve a persistent problem, as the cards might well indicate. I laid out what I had meant to be a simple, sample pattern, explaining what I was seeing and how it might be interpreted. Or so I thought. The cards fairly leaped through my fingers. The spread, though it consisted of only five cards, transmitted one of the most significant messages that I have ever received. The air in the room quivered, and my voice faltered. I should have known that there could be nothing casual in my interactions with the Tarot, especially since I had postponed touching the cards for so long. Whether or not teenaged Guy derives any insight from his deck, I have benefited already from giving him his first taste of Tarot.
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