In back of a crowded wine bar the other night, amid the din of a jolly Friday evening crowd, I discovered a friend who has an unexpected gift known since human beings crawled out of the primal ooze.
He reads palms.
“I don’t tell many people about it,” he explained with a quiet little smile, “and I don’t do it very often anymore. But if you’re interested, I’d be happy to take a look at your hand.”
I’d had just enough ginger beer to be durn curious, and a personal family history I’ll explain in a Sandhills minute. So I thrust out my hand.
He looked. His eyebrows arched.
“Oh, this is very interesting,” he said. “I’ve heard about this but never seen it before.”
I glanced down at my palm, wondering what he saw there: feast or famine, boom or bust, epiphany or egads, a sudden windfall from a rich unknown uncle, or me collapsing and dying in a crowded shopping mall in Florida.
For some unexplained reason, though I harbor no particular fear of death, I’ve always had this completely cockamamie fear of collapsing and dying in a crowded shopping mall anywhere in the state of Florida. You tell me.
“Trouble?” I ventured.
“Oh no,” he said, offering only a slightly reassuring smile. “The lines indicate you’ll be very famous. But, well, after you are gone.”
I breathed a sigh of relief — and disappointment. Was that all there was? I told him not to bother a fig about the message in my palm. Being famous has never appealed to me, I explained, because no famous person I’d ever met seemed all that happy. And, besides, I added, with a year and a half of college tuition yet to come up with, I’d much rather have the rich uncle who sent me a mint. I asked if he would mind taking a second look, just to be sure.
He laughed. I guess he thought I was kidding.
Unfolding on the cusp of seasons, the moody and unpredictable month of March — named for the Roman god of war — is perhaps the fitting month for fortunetelling or soothsaying or just a spot of friendly old-fashioned palm reading.
The art of palmistry has been around thousands of years, a branch of Indian astrology widely respected by the sages of the ancient world, and something of a cliché upon the landscape of the vanishing rural South where every crossroad no bigger than the hips on a garden snake was typically home to a small frame house with a sign out front featuring an upraised palm and the occult practitioner’s name — “Madame Arcana” — announcing her roadside craft.
When I was a teenager on a leafy suburban street in Greensboro, my father of all people had a palm-reading routine that was a big hit on the neighborhood barbecue and cocktail party circuit, particularly with the prettiest and vainest wives.
He was an award-winning adman and former newspaper publisher who had a country-porch talent for spinning tales — or in this case making up people’s fates and adorning them in the most shameless, flattering and verbal embroidery. For this reason and other deeply embarrassing acts of genial sociability, I took to calling him Opti the Mystic.
“You are justly known far and wide for your great physical beauty,” he once told statuesque Mary Lou Kuppenheimer, the neighborhood’s only divorcée whose frequently visible brassiere straps were the inspiration for endless conversation among our gang of teenage turks, not to mention their fathers. “But your real strength is that of an inner character that will take you to exciting new places and provide you with an exciting career opportunity you never could have envisioned. I could easily see you becoming the first lady ambassador to Portugal.”
Or this gem I recall to a regular golf buddy’s domineering wife, who constantly harped that her cheap husband never took her anywhere: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more intriguing Girdle of Venus. That’s the line meant to reveal your emotional intelligence and ability to shape the future you desire. You are greatly admired for your natural female wisdom and a sense of brilliant timing. It appears something involving exotic travel and meeting extraordinary new people is in your immediate future. Tell me, have you ever visited Khartoum during the rainy season?”
It was, of course, all in fun, an entertaining party stunt. And it went on for years – almost to the end of his life.
Like the Stoics of ancient Rome, thinking back, Opti the Mystic embraced the notion that each of us does have a destiny that must be played out against the vagaries of the present world, a fate shaped through the small trials and triumphs of everyday life, perhaps even pre-ordained by some all-wise higher power, intended to put us through the refiner’s fire and a step closer to God, though as far as I know he never placed the least bit of stock in whatever he saw, or simply imagined, written in the palm of an offered hand.
Still, as late as our only golf trip to Scotland — our final golf trip anywhere, when he was pushing 80 and several months from his own quiet passing — Opti the Mystic was up to his old good-natured tricks.
While we were sipping Churchill’s favorite brandy after a meal in a pub outside the spires of St. Andrews, he offered to read my palm for the very first time. I sipped my cognac and gave him my hand.
“Am I going to be rich?” I asked. “Please don’t tell me I should run for the senate or something like that.”
He shook his head. “This is very interesting.”
“Interesting good or interesting bad?” I asked.
“Good and bad. You’re already rich, but you may not realize it. I see other things.”
“A hole-in-one? A new Chevy Blazer or John Deere lawn tractor at the very least?”
Opti shook his head, uncharacteristically solemn. “Those things aren’t important. I see some interesting change coming in your life, some important connections of the heart you will finally make ... things you will pass along to your children. Your children are your real job, you know.”
Just then our waitress appeared, a large, jolly gal with a mop of curly blond hair, a real-life Wife of Bath.
“What’s he doing?” she demanded to know.
“He’s telling my fortune,” I explained to her.
She grinned lustily. “Aw, go on. Is he any good at it, the fortune-telling bit, I mean?”
“He predicted the end of the eighties and the demise of the leisure suit,” I assured her. “Even before they happened.”
She thrust him her pink, plump palm; Opti smiled and dropped mine like a stone.
He told her she was going to have a long life, several gorgeous healthy children, a nice house by the sea, and possibly win some kind of national acclaim owing to border collies.
The Wife of Bath let loose a delighted shriek. “Good heavens! I have two border collies! You are the most amazing man I’ve ever met.”
And with that she bent and planted a large kiss on his blushing forehead and trundled away our dirty dishes, muttering delightfully to herself.
“You sure know how to warm a big bonny lassie’s heart,” I said to Opti.
“That’s my job,” he replied with a wink.
The funny thing about my father’s thoughts about my palm is this: He was right.
Not long afterward he passed on, and I went through some tough times and emerged, I think, a better and wiser person for all I’d been through — closer than ever to my children, more in touch with the world around me, happier with the way my own life was headed.
Of course, every human soul has its ups and downs, its daily trials and triumphs, its own trip through the refiner’s fire, especially as middle age comes on.
So maybe, as I suspect, old Opti the Mystic was merely an astute observer of the way life works — and a fellow who understood that a little well-placed positive reinforcement and encouragement from the gods, even if it turns out to be more wishful thinking than hard science, can make a wonderful difference in a perfect stranger’s life.
Or even a son’s.
Whatever our palms may tell us, the future is really now. Our true happiness comes with the grace of God, and the joy we make every time we reach out that human hand to another human being. PS
