Granny and Me

 I picked up my first deck of Tarot cards in the 1970s as a teenager, and have been reading professionally, on and off, since 1981. I started off fairly conventionally, with a Rider-Waite and a Marseille deck. I gradually added a few others to them over the years.

In 1993, as a new-ish mother, I had little time to myself. One day my then-partner stepped up, and acted like an actual parent, giving me a day off. Such a precious thing, a day off! The down-side was that I was taking the two-hour commute to Sydney to have a job interview, as we were both getting sick of poverty but my partner showed no inclination to work, so it wasn't a real, proper day off. 

Being left alone with the baby for a whole day was a kind of test: would I be able to work full-time again, and trust my pit-crew to do the job, day after day? Let's just see how they coped with a full day, I thought cynically. So I put on my Responsible Adult Clothes, and left the house.

Job interviews are job interviews: I always laugh, and always seem as if I can do the job. I wasn't worried. When that was over, my time was my own. I made a beeline down the other end of the city, to the Theosophical Bookshop, at that stage been managed by Laurie Harris, whom I fondly remembered from when he was running his own bookshop, Mr Books, in Martin Place during the eighties. Mr Books catered to the commuters with crime and romance, but had a very decent mystical and philosophical section down the back, always a magnificent thing in a bookshop.

I browsed. I probably bumped into Laurie, or other people I knew. I moved to their divinatory section, and a title sprang out at me. The Granny Jones Australian Tarot. Well, why wouldn't it stand out? I read Tarot, I was a fervent Australian, and even in my early thirties I had more than a whiff of the Crone about me. I was always going to buy it. 

There were six copies of the boxed set on the shelf. I bought one, I found myself a cafe, ordered a late lunch, opened the boxed set and flicked through the book. It didn't look impressive. Then I cracked open the cards.

They did look impressive.

Very impressive.

They were illustrated in a naive style, a style reminiscent of children's drawings in coloured pencil or crayon, but packed with depth, glowing with numinous meaning. I left the cafe, and found my way onto the right train. All the way back to the Gosford station, I was going through them with a greater and greater thrill.

I got off the train a little after dark, and walked home, this great treasure in my bag. I wanted nothing more than to sit down and play with it. Instead, I was greeted by a sticky baby with a loaded nappy, and a partner complaining how hard their day had been. 

I am by nature a collector and now I have around three hundred decks - I had about ten when it bought it - and I love most of them, adore a score of them. But Granny is different. She stands out against the rest of the pack. She lives permanently in my handbag, so that if anything happens to my house while I am out, she will be safe. 

I don't use her when I am teaching Tarot classes: the Rider Waite gives you a solid base that you can translate to most decks and most people know the images even if they don't know the name. I don't use her when I am reading for strangers. She's special. She's mine. Friends see her, but she is mine.

Recently, in the weeks leading up to the Dubbo Writers' Festival, I taught one of the pop-up classes, called "Tarot for Writers", where I taught people to use Tarot decks not for doing readings, but for developing plot-lines, developing (or understanding) their characters' personalities, and for breaking writer's block. It was well-received, but not too many people turned up because the pop-up workshops didn't get as much publicity as the festival itself. I'm really hoping that next year the committee will invite me to hold that workshop again as a part of the main festival.

I've been working on my book - with the working-title of "Under the Sign of the Raven", for months. It's coming along nicely, and I haven't had to pull out a Tarot deck once. This morning, just before I woke up, I dreamt the last chapter. Now, I've known for a long time what will happen in the last chapter. But last night I dreamt how I would actually write it. And what stays with me now, is the final two word sentence.

After that, I desperately needed a cup of tea, and a warm, wise, older woman to give me a cuddle. So, of course, I went to Granny Jones.