A Time To...

  She was busy placing strange picture cards face-up on the table from a deck in her hands. The Frank Sinatra song “Young at Heart” played softly on a phonograph: “You can go to extremes with impossible schemes. You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams.”

  “Are you here to talk with Madame Marie?” she asked without looking up from her cards.

  Al hesitated for a moment before replying, “Yes. Yes.”

  The woman raised her head and said empathetically, “Of course you are. Madame Marie knows all. Don’t be afraid. I can see your future. You are so young, with so much life yet to live. For just one dollar, I will tell you what your life will be like.”

  “What can you tell me?” Al replied.

  “I can tell you many things. What do you want to know? Madame Marie knows all.”

  Before Al answered, the Frank Sinatra record came to a premature, distorted end when the power went out. The dying turntable moaned, “And if you should surrviivveee toooo.”

  “What the hell?” blurted an annoyed Madame Marie.

  “I got it. I got it,” trumpeted her husband from another room.

  “You got what?” countered Madame Marie.

  “A fuse. I got a fuse.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Don’t know. Just turned on the air-conditioner and kapooey.”

  “Hey, I told you that thing is broken. Don’t mess with that now. I’ve got a client.”

  “OK. OK.”

  “Now, where were we?” Madame Marie asked Al.

  “Can you tell me if my loved ones will grow old? What my purpose in life is ... if I’ll live my dreams ... what my biggest problems will be in life, and if I’ll solve them?”

  “Of course, of course. Madame Marie knows all. The answers to all your questions are right here in these cards and in my crystal ball. But are you sure you want to know the answers to these questions? What will you do? How will you feel if what I tell you isn’t what you’d like to hear?”

  “I’d rather know. I don’t like painful surprises,” Al said as he pulled from his pants pocket a wadded up dollar bill and placed it on the table in front of Madame Marie while the Frank Sinatra record began playing again.

  “Fairy tales can come true, they can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.”

  “I fixed it. The power is back on,” roared her husband proudly from the other room.

  “Yeah. Yeah. And, don’t mess with that air-conditioner again,” she said while turning off the record player.

  When she sat back down, Madame Marie swiped the dollar bill off the table and stuffed it in her blouse with one hand before grabbing the deck of cards in her other hand. She closed her eyes and shuffled the deck several times before placing it on the table in front of Al.

  “Watch what I do,” she told Al as she cut the cards and placed the deck back in front of him. “OK. Now, you do it,” she said, pointing to the deck.

  Al cut the cards. Madame Marie then took the deck and turned up five cards side by side on the table. After studying them briefly, she looked at Al and shook her head slowly a few times before telling Al, “Not all your loved ones will live to an old age like your grandmother. But she won’t grow much older herself. She’ll leave this world soon. It will be a natural passing and she will be at peace. You will miss her—her words of wisdom, her pride in you, and her love that she expresses in so many ways. But part of her will live on in you for the rest of your life, the part that gives you a quiet confidence when things don’t go the way you would like.

  Al closed his eyes and quietly reflected on this premonition.

  “Not so fortunate will be a friend of yours. Tommy will go to jail for killing someone. It will be an unfortunate accident, but you will feel responsible and it will haunt you for the rest of your life. You’ll always wonder if you could have prevented it.”

  “What can I do to prevent it?”

  “Discourage him from joining a street gang.”

  “I will. Now that I know, I’ll discourage him. I won’t let him join.”

  “Good. It will save a life and keep Tommy from throwing his life away. It will also keep you from suffering a lot of pain.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The Fortune Teller

  Madame Marie then replaced the five cards back in her deck and laid the cards on the table off to the side. She reached for her crystal ball and slid it in front of her. After passing her fingers across its surface, the ball glowed from its core. She stared intently into the light, squinting as she said, “The cards can only say so much. My crystal ball will tell us the rest.”

  Crash! Screeeech! Came the disturbing sounds from a nearby room in the house.

  “Damn!” an angry Madame Marie yelled. “What?! What? What now?”

  “I was changing the light bulb on the kitchen ceiling. The light fixture slipped out of my hands and kabang, all over the floor. It almost hit the cat,” her frustrated husband explained.

  “No. Not now. Not now. Go outside,” Madame Marie implored.

  “I’m cleaning this mess.”

  “OK. Then go,” said Madame Marie while shaking her head.

  Madame Marie collected herself and refocused on the crystal ball that began glowing again. “You’ll spend most of your life searching for your purpose in the world. You’ll look for it in the people around you, in your work; in the things that give you pleasure. At times you’ll think you’ve found it, but then something will happen and you’ll be disappointed. You’ll feel like a leaf blowing in the wind, which will create lots of anxiety. This feeling will come and go as the years pass and as you find pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of your life that fit. One day you’ll wake up and conclude that your purpose in life is to complete the jigsaw puzzle.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. How could you? You’re only eight years old.”

  “Can’t you tell me in another way that will help me understand?”

  “How about this? A jigsaw puzzle has many pieces, just like your life. But they only create their picture when all the pieces are connected in the way they were made. And the only way to put a jigsaw puzzle together is by trial and error. It is really a process of elimination to find out what works and what doesn’t. It will be the same thing with your life as you try to learn your purpose. Jigsaw puzzles can be very frustrating when you can’t easily find the next piece you need. The same thing will happen in your search. It takes time, but with persistence the jigsaw picture reveals itself. That’s the best I can do. Does that make sense?”

  “I don’t like the trial and error part,” Al replied with a pained expression.

  “Ha ha haa. Yes, nobody does,” Madame Marie acknowledged. “Now let’s look at another question you want me to answer. You’ll have many dreams for your life as you grow older. Most of your early dreams will be about what you want to do in life and who you want to be like. For a while, you’ll want to be a professional baseball player because you’d get paid lots of money to play a game and you’d be famous. But you won’t want to be just any player. You’ll want to be the next Mickey Mantle and play for the Yankees. Ah, but that’s not to be. You’ll be a very good baseball player on your local teams, but you won’t play professionally. When that dream begins fading in high school, you’ll replace it with one about following in the footsteps of America’s astronauts who’ll walk on the moon. But the closest you’ll get to the moon will be a visit to New York’s Planetarium. Then you’ll …”

  “Wait! Wait! You’re telling me about dreams that don’t come true. Isn’t there something I can be doing now to make at least one of them come true?”

  “Not unless your hand-eye coordination and your eyesight miraculously improve. You’ll need these gifts if you’re going to hit good pitching and to pass the eye exam for pilots.”

  “If that’s the case, I won’t waste my time dreaming about these things.”

&nb
sp; “OK. That’s your choice.”

  “I don’t want to be a failure. Now that I know, I won’t dream the impossible,” Al declared.

  “OK. Now I see a dream that will come true. You’ll want to travel the world to visit interesting places and meet interesting people. And you will. For two years, you’ll live in a land where the first humans walked on earth a couple million years ago … a land mentioned in the Bible. For many there, life will still be the same as it was over two thousand years ago. You’ll be there at a time of upheaval, when people question their government and their leaders. And you’ll question things about your life then, too.”

  “Will it be a good experience?” Al interjected.

  “For the most part. And I see other good experiences. You’ll be happily married and have a loving family. You won’t be rich and famous, but you’ll have a variety of rewarding jobs that use your talents. And while you’ll always wish that the jobs pay more and you won’t like all your coworkers, you’ll be happier than most.”

  “What jobs will I have?”

  “Well, you’re an adventurous spirit, curious, and a risk taker, so they’ll all reflect that. You’ll be a journalist and a corporate public relations counselor and a risk manager, in that order.”

  “That sounds interesting. So will that be my last job, a risk manager?”

  “Probably. A big cloud is blocking my view of your later years. I’m guessing it means that you won’t live long enough to retire. I’m sorry.”

  “Am I dead? Ah, I mean, I hope you’re wrong.”

  “I hope so, too,” she replied. “But I can say without question that your big problems will include failed school courses, lost friends, lost loves, lost jobs, money, self-esteem, injustices of all kinds, and the anxieties these experiences all bring. You won’t have the answers to all of them. In fact, at one particular time in your life, when the problems pile up, you’ll have no answers. That’s when you’ll turn your back on God because you’ll feel he turned his back on you. And, your life won’t be quite the same after that.”

  “Do you smell something burning?” Al asked.

  “Burning? Oh, no! I forgot all about it!” Madame Marie shrieked as she ran into the other room.

  “My bread! Will you just look at it? It’s ruined.”

  With that, Al’s imagined fortune-telling experience ended and the scenes from his life picked up at Coney Island with him and his classmates standing in front of a barker who was promoting the world’s only three-ringed flea circus.

  CHAPTER 22

  Imagination

  “Yes! Yes! Step right up to see and hear the most talented fleas in the world. You’ll wish you could do half the things they do.”

  “What’s a flea circus?” Al asked Miss Weir.

  “Well, I’m not quite sure. It sounds interesting,” she said while smiling and winking at one of the parent chaperones. “Why don’t we see for ourselves?” she offered as she ushered everyone in their group through the circus entrance and into a small room that barely fit them all. There were no seats, just a three-tiered floor where the audience stood in a semi-circle around a miniature circus tent that sat on a platform about half the size of a ping-pong table. Happy calliope music coming from inside the tent set the mood and generated anticipation for the show. A banner above the tent stretched from one end of the platform to the other and read, “Luke Harder’s Amazing Little Big Top Flea Circus.”

  As the tent rose up above the platform, the music grew louder and revealed three performance rings. The tent stopped about five feet above the show, serving as a festive umbrella.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to ring number one, where Tiny Tarzan is now climbing the ladder up to the high-dive platform,” advised the ringmaster. “He’ll dive into the tub of water beneath the platform that holds about as much water as a coffee cup. We need to give Tiny Tarzan a lot of encouragement because the height he’ll be diving from is the same as a small mountain would be for us.”

  With this direction, Al and all the others began cheering, “Yeah, Tiny Tarzan! You can do it! Come on!” while they clapped and clapped.

  “OK. He’s made it onto the platform and is stepping onto the diving board.” The diving board then began to bounce up and down, but Al didn’t see Tiny Tarzan or anything else on the board.

  “What a showman, that guy. Look at him bowing and waving to everybody. He really appreciates your support and will attempt a very difficult dive just for you that he’s never done before. It’s a quadruple flip with a double reverse spin and a triple twist in the pike position. Since he does it so fast, it will be difficult to see all his moves, but we’ll know it was a success if we see just a small entry splash. He could be killed if it’s unsuccessful because he’ll hit the water at such high speed.”

  Al strained his eyes, but he still couldn’t see Tiny Tarzan, only the bouncing board.

  “I’ll ask Beethoven, our musical director, to stop playing so Tiny Tarzan can concentrate on his dive,” the ringmaster announced.

  The music then stopped, as did the bouncing diving board. An eerie silence filled the room for about ten seconds. The diving board then began to bounce again, followed by a drum roll that continued until a big splash emptied a lot of the water from the tub. A drum cymbal clang punctuated the splash.

  “Oooo. Ahh!” the audience sighed in amazement and appreciation.

  “Uhh, oooh! That isn’t good. He’s never made a splash so big before,” reported the concerned ringmaster. “Is there a doctor in the house?” he implored. Immediately, a toy ambulance sped out to the diving pool, zigzagging its way after emerging from behind the show curtain as a loud siren underscored the emergency. After parking by the pool for just a few seconds, the ambulance returned to where it had come from behind the curtain.

  “Don’t worry, folks, we have the best flea hospital in the world just a few blocks away,” advised the ringmaster as the siren faded to silence.

  Boom! WENT the cannon that billowed smoke on the other side of the circus floor in ring number three. It startled Al and the others, who reflexively jerked their bodies away from the cannon while turning their eyes to see what had caused the blast.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re not already looking at ring number three, please direct your attention to Big Bob, the most powerful flea cannon in the Western Hemisphere.”

  It looked like a painted test tube from Al’s toy chemistry set, with a spoked wheel on each side holding it up. After a closer look, Al saw that there was writing on each side of it that said, “Dutch Masters Cigars,” like in the ads he had seen on billboards covering the sides of buildings in his neighborhood and around the city.

  “The Fantastic Flea Fireball just tested the cannon to make sure it’s working properly. Since the test was successful, he’s climbing into it now,” advised the ringmaster. “He’ll shoot out and fly into that big net on the opposite side of the show floor,” he added as the calliope began playing a suspenseful tune and the cannon’s head slowly raised until its barrel pointed up at a 45-degree angle.

  Al looked at everybody around him, who were wide-eyed and spellbound while staring at the cannon and cheering wildly. Frustrated because he couldn’t see what everyone else apparently saw, Al squinted and thought he perceived a tiny spec move in the cannon head when the music stopped. Without missing a beat, the cannon fired with a loud boom again. A flame shot out, then a cloud of smoke. Al blinked, lurched back, and turned his head toward the net on the other side of the circus floor. A couple seconds later, the net bounced several times.

  “Let’s hear it for the Fireball! He does it again! Isn’t he fantastic?” the ringmaster proclaimed. And everyone, including Al, clapped long and loud.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to ring number two. Einstein, the world’s smartest flea, will demonstrate his extraordinary intelligence. And since you know that fleas can’t talk because they don’t ha
ve vocal chords like you and me, he will communicate with us by using Morse code. Don’t worry; if you don’t know Morse code, I will interpret what he says.”

  In front of the wall was a desk and on its left side was a model of our solar system, on the center of the desk was a teletype pad, like the one Thomas Edison invented in the nineteenth century that let humans communicate instantly across very long distances for the first time.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I will now take your questions for Einstein and he will answer them by jumping up and down on the teletype keypad to generate the Morse code’s dots and dashes that I will translate for you. Ask him anything you want to know about any subject. Einstein has the answers to questions about anything in the world … ah, I mean the universe.”

  “Click, click, click, click, click,” came the sounds from the teletype machine. “Einstein says, ‘Hello.’” The ringmaster said as he pointed to the teletype keypad.

  Al and the others looked at the keypad that barely, almost imperceptibly, moved up and down rhythmically to the Morse code cadence. Al didn’t see Einstein jumping on the keypad, but he accepted that he was there, just too small for him to see. The bouncing, clicking keypad validated Einstein for Al and most of the audience. So, the questions flowed like water from Niagara Falls.

  “How many miles is it around the earth?”

  “Click, click, click …”

  “Einstein says it’s a little less than twenty-five thousand miles.”

  “How many miles is it to the moon and the sun?”

  “It’s about six hundred thousand miles to the moon and ninety-three million miles to the sun.”

  “How do the earth, moon, and sun compare in size?”

  “The earth is about four times larger than the moon and the sun is about one hundred times larger than the earth.”

  “Wow!” Al thought that was amazing because the sun and the moon looked like they were about the same size in the sky. He could hardly believe that we could even see with just our eyes, something that was ninety-three million miles away. He was stunned when Einstein told them that millions of stars were hundreds of times larger than the sun, and millions more miles away from earth. Al couldn’t comprehend the sizes and distances of the universe as Einstein described, and he was glad when the questions turned to things he could understand.