Landslide by Minna Proctor

Author:Minna Proctor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

A Mystic at Heart

“If your mother had brought you for a reading the day you were born,” said the Astrologer, “I would have said: Mom, tell this kid that when she gets to ’07, she’s going to enter into a very nutty time. And nothing in her life is going to go according to schedule, and it’s not of her own doing. If before ’07, she settles down in the suburbs and has two-point-five kids and an SUV and one-point-two dogs and a white picket fence and all that stuff, she’s just going to end up walking out on her family, saying ‘I’ve had it.’ ”

So, this was destined to be a period of destruction, dismantling, and derangement in my life. There were too many stars vying for predominance. I couldn’t be true to any of them; I couldn’t be partial to some of them. They all had contradicting imperatives: take heed of your mortality, live large, lighten up, get serious, fall in love, date a lot, get married, have kids, travel, laugh, cry, feel shame, stop living for other people, buy shoes, be thrifty, go barefoot, cut the cord, hang tight. Or, as the Astrologer put it, “You’re in a crucible of chaos.”

My Brooklyn neighborhood was kind of like a suburb. I didn’t have the white picket fence and two-point-five kids, but I did have a new marriage to a man I’d been with for a long time and loved entirely, I’d recently published a book, I was in excellent health, I was on boards of charitable organizations and a Jewish group, the house was tidy and attractive, our cat was a stunner, my family was proud of me, I was proud of me. And then I did just pick up and leave. And I had a baby. And my mother died. Everything that I didn’t know about life converged on this astonishing moment. It’s Pluto’s fault. He kills everything so that it can be reborn.

I am a skeptic. The Astrologer confirmed it: “In youth, your chart is that of the disbeliever,” he said, “the one who doesn’t want to give over, the one who asks a lot of questions, too many questions.”

Or I was a skeptic. “The older you get,” he continued, “the more this turns into the chart of the mystic.” I was a communist at four; a sharp-tongued atheist by fifteen; at twenty-five, I was, like my mother, occasionally curious about but essentially uninterested in Judaism except with regard to the Holocaust. I was also at this time transitioning out of a collegiate aversion to identity politics and into an incipient sentimental yearning for “family” (though I didn’t know yet exactly what I meant by that). When I turned thirty, my father, whom I worshipped but who always lived too far away, told me he wanted to become an Episcopal priest. The depth of his spiritual life and religious convictions came as an embarrassing surprise to me—a demonstration of how partially I was involved in

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