When I was in graduate school, my friend Lori-Lyn and I went to the Upper West Side for the day. I forget the agenda, though I remember buying stacks of obscure literary magazines (Egg! The Daily Slab! Quiddity! Pickled Herring on a Stick! Forgive me if any of these are actual). We stopped for snacks at Cafe Du Soliel. Fancy, demure, delicieux.
We also went to a palm reader--I believe this is the only time I've been to a palm reader, though I did practice white magic in first grade from a little booklet with my friend Lisa Smith at the back of Brownie Troop 518, and my friend Lisa Bail and I used the Ouija board with conviction, bored summer afternoons, or homework done, skipping chorus rehearsal because the walk was too much to ask when we could ask, instead, about the future. There were long planning sessions for Halloween costumes, and the game of Careers in the long red box. I'm not sure novelist was an option--Lisa became a lawyer. I have had many Lisa friends, very different from each other, and all of them wonderful. But I digress.
The palm reader spoke privately with Lori Lyn for a long time. I believe it was of use to LL, who is mystical and quite magical herself.
I was more of a fascinated skeptic. The palm reader told me I would have twin girls. I don't, and though I will never say never, that particular bit may not make fact in this particular incarnation. She also told me I'd left a career hanging, a passion, and that I was making my way back. About this she was correct. I was in graduate school for writing, something I'd loved as companion and entertainment and frame for the whole wide world since I could remember. My grad school fiction thesis became my first novel.
And though I never had the twin girls, I have thought about them, these matching people. Which is another seed in the garden of The Orphan Spoon. I had to explore what it meant to match, but be different. To belong possibly more than desired. I had to try on the hat of a twin, even if I hadn't carried them in my arms.
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