Tracey Loves John

I hated high school.  I don’t mean dislike.  I mean bonafide loathing.  People who consider high school the best years of their life are entirely foreign to me. I just don’t get it.

My first two years in high school were spent staying aloft in the chaos that was my mother’s life, fighting stress, and taking refuge in dancing school. In my junior year, over the weekend of the junior prom, circumstances with my mother and the psychopath she married got violent, so I left to live with my grandparents.

  

I lived with Thelma and Ed on the other side of town, but still went to Jonny Law High.  Each day when school was over, Miss Connie would be outside waiting to give me a lift to her dancing school where I assisted and demonstrated for the classes she taught. She was special to me. She bought me my first car, an old powder blue Rambler I named Gladys after Judy McIntyre’s grandmother. It took me close to a year to decompress after leaving the flea infested hovel my brothers and I lived in with my mother. Some days, I’d get all the way to school, driven by my grandmother; only to feel so burned out I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t bother going to first period when that happened.  I’d call my grandmother, and she never, ever squawked about turning around and driving all the way back across town to pick me up. 

“Okay, honey, I’ll be right there.”

I felt lost in high school. I didn’t fit there.  I bet many kids felt that way, but the only place I fit was at Connie’s school. I was upset, confused, and ever so full of myself. My friends kept me afloat in that sea of turmoil.  I had some good friends.

I hung out in the school library with Tracey.  She was a diehard Beetles fan and was desperately and very seriously in love with John Lennon. I went to her house once after school and was floored by her homage to the Fab Four. She seemed to have the entire upstairs to herself. One room was her bedroom, and the other room, a little bigger than a walk in closet, was devoted entirely to the Beetles. Every inch of every wall was plastered with pictures. It was the coolest, most profound demonstration of true and obsessive love I’d ever seen, and it towered miles high in devotion over my shrine to Dolly Parton, whom I adored.  I’ve never forgotten that room.

Tracy and I would spend entire class periods hanging out in the library’s private reading room listening to John Lennon and Dolly on the record player.  We were juniors when John Lennon was assassinated.  I was sitting on a desk in Advanced Biology, and Tracey appeared at the door with a black band on her arm and fresh tears of mourning streaming down her face.  She’d lost her first true love.  To this day, Tracey still carries a torch for John, just as I will always adore Dolly. Some teenage crushes never go away.

I completely lost track of Tracey after high school.  I got involved with Leslie, and our relationship moved me 3,000 miles across the United States. We had a baby; we’ve bought and sold houses, and moved across country twice.  I’m still here 27 years later.  A few years back, Tracey appeared on Facebook.  It was crazy to hear from her again.  She gave me hell for changing my name because it made me difficult to find.  We’ve been Facebook friends ever since, reliving old times and getting reacquainted.

Tracey has been married to the same man for years. She got her teaching degree and taught elementary school in Floyd County in between having four incredibly beautiful and well-adjusted children. She’s highly opinionated, politically minded, and is an advocate for the LGBT community in the college where she teaches. She runs a learning resource center, and a bunch of people report to her. What’s more, she loves her job and the people who work for her.  She’s a success story.

When my unemployment ended unexpectedly in mid-September and Leslie and I felt the bottom fall out of our financial security, Tracey was one of the few who offered us substantial help.  I got a message from her on Facebook asking me if I wanted to remotely tutor her students.  There were papers to be reviewed, and things to do!  She offered me a temporary, part-time position that I desperately needed.

I talked to Tracey over the phone the other day, and doing so was a blast from the past. She sounds much as I remember her, but she’s picked up a regional accent that I find delightful. I had trouble expressing my gratitude.   

You know, we grow up with certain people in our lives, and they have so much to do with how we navigate our world.  When I was a teenager, my friends anchored me, kept me from floating away, but I didn't expect most of them to hang around for long.  I rarely look to the past for my solace, and have gotten the hang of living in the now.   That’s what makes Tracey so remarkable to me. She wasn’t content to sit in the past on Facebook.  She insinuated herself right into my present, and she did it when I needed her the most.

Thank you, Tracey.

Dolly Sings ...

THE LOVERS, Major Arcana Card #6

This is an excerpt from my website www.donnalouisefaber.com where I'm publishing my own pop-culture tarot deck. You can read more about it in the previous post here.

Author's Note: This card and everything written here is dedicated to my old high school friend, Tracey Coffin Mattson aka Mama Mattson, whose heart was broken the day John Lennon was killed. She's since healed it with a large and beautiful family (more testimony to the healing power of true love), but I'll never forget the day she stood in the doorway of Junior Advanced Biology with a black sash on her upper arm and tears streaming down her face. All we need is love, right Tracey? D♥

THE LOVERS

CARD #6

KEYWORDS: Relationship, Sexuality, Personal Values

The tarot’s major arcana cards represent universal experiences that we go through in our lives, no matter what our background or how we were raised.

Love, in it’s truest form (as opposed to ownership or possessiveness), is a magic elixir, the universe’s greatest cure all. When our chalice is filled to the brim with this selfless and unconditional nectar and we drink of it without expectation, we are transformed by true love, healed by true love, and urged to our potential. Our lives become graced with divine alchemy; we dance vital karmic dances, and discover our most genuine selves through interaction with others. The door opens and all we need do is walk through it.

This photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono done by Annie Liebovitz for the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine in 1980 epitomizes The Lovers Card. Their relationship was complicated, true, but they loved one another deeply. So deeply in fact that Yoko has iconized Lennon’s name and image as a brand for world peace. The image portrays romantic love so well, but what Yoko did thereafter reminds us of our responsibility to love one another, the entire world ... that all we need is love.

Excerpted from “Behind the Photo: John & Yoko” posted on www.RollingStone.com on September 30, 2004 …

The session took place in a bright, sunny room overlooking the park," says Yoko Ono of her and John Lennon's photo shoot at the Dakota, their New York apartment building, on December 8th, 1980. "We were feeling comfortable because it was Annie [Leibovitz], whom we respected and trusted, so John seemed not to have any problem taking off his clothes. John and I were hugging each other, feeling a bit giggly and up."

"I was thinking that they had never been embarrassed to take their clothes off, that they could do a nude embrace," says Leibovitz, who was photographing them for a Rolling Stone cover to mark the release of Double Fantasy, their first album in five years. "John took his clothes off in a few seconds, but Yoko was very reluctant. She said, 'I'll take my shirt off but not my pants.' I was kinda disappointed, and I said, 'Just leave everything on.' We took one Polaroid, and the three of us knew it was profound right away." source

The Lovers card is all about how we relate to others, but it’s also about being true to ourselves. Each of the four tarot suits are present in this card symbolizing the phases we may go through when dealing with love’s many aspects. Our emotions act like a magnet carrying us toward friends or lovers. This is the blessing of the chalice, which is filled to the brim with opportunities for love of many kinds including divine, platonic, and romantic. Through the sharp edge of observation and consideration, the swords help us determine what relationships are good for us. As we contemplate sexuality, physical attraction, desire and intimacy we are reminded to remain true to ourselves. The way we respond to these thoughts and feelings is inherent in the suit of wands. Finally, pentacles are indicative of how those decisions and their subsequent actions manifest in our lives.

The pomegranate in the card’s border is symbolic of the sex act itself, inclusive of la petite mort, or the little death. Through the little death we are repeatedly resurrected, which is highly symbolic of the transformative powers of love.

In a reading …

When pulled in a reading, the Lovers card can be indicative of a relationship that is based on deep love but is not sexual in nature. Perhaps there are sexual undercurrents, but it is how we act on those currents, the choices we make and the actions we take, that matter. In this way, the card can indicate the presence of a moral or ethical choice or crossroads.

When this card is opposed by the Hierophant, we may face a situation in love that challenges our belief system. When it opposes the Hermit, it encourages interacting more with others and finding the courage to step outside of ourselves. When this card is pulled in a reading with the Empress, it may point more toward non-sexual love, but when pulled with the 2 of cups, it leans more toward romance.

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See more of this deck at www.donnalouisefaber.com.