Cafe Girl Chronicles

I don’t think anyone can go to New Orleans and not leave without out at least having her cards or palm read. Psychics and readers abound, with a few of the more daring souls having set up shop with their folding chairs in front of the venerable old St. Louis Cathedral. As prognostication is a black art and usually frowned on by the church, I thought I’d play it safe and have my cards read around the corner on Royal Street.  But not before stopping into the old Cathedral, lighting a candle, saying a prayer, and making the perfunctory “first time” wish – granted to all Catholics every time we visit a new church.

Talk about hedging my bets.  Hey, we’re talking cards here, right?

Play the hand you’re dealt

I took the cards and shuffled the deck and laid out my choices before Shelley the Seer.  As I turned a card over and saw the very scary face of what looked like the devil – I wondered if I could trade in a few cards for a better hand.  I asked Shelly, and she told me, “This isn’t poker you know. You play the hand you’re dealt.”  Okay, okay I thought.  This is why God doesn’t allow us to see around corners, and why shortcuts to the future are only for fun.

Shelley gave me a dream reading, one that all single women would love to hear. The scary card was actually my karma card – uh oh!   And the card that went with it – some sort of tree with lots of branches – foretold a new love … a love like no other with someone I would recognize the moment I finally met him.  It was someone from a past life and thus the connection to karma. But she warned me that I had to be open.

What me, not open?  Of course I’m open – you only have to look at my recent dating / relationship history to see that I was perhaps a bit too open.  Upon further reflection, however, it occurred to me that there is a big difference between being open and being available.  And now fate was presenting me with a good opportunity to learn the difference.

In this case, being open meant looking at all of the possibilities regardless of who they were.  And since I have been wandering in a non-dating desert for several months now, any karmic strangers appearing on the horizon now would be hard to miss.  All I had to do was meet him for the first time – again.

The reading made me think of the newly released song, by Michael Buble about not yet meeting the right person.  It’s a love song about being open to the possibilities despite previous set backs in love.  It’s a song about keeping the faith with yourself and with the whatever the universe, or God, has in store.

Who knows if it’s really the cards or the candle that dictates one’s fate?   In the end it doesn’t really matter.  What does matter is the belief that secret hopes or silent prayers are always answered.  Perhaps it might not be in the way Shelley or I had imagined, but hey that’s the future for you; it’s always full of surprises.

Photo: © iStockphoto.com/creatista