Finding Magic

by Sally Quinn

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  I love the tarot. First of all, the cards are beautiful. Secondly, they tell stories. They represent the magic and the mystical. The actual cards represent so many different layers of our psyche, and when spread out, they can reveal parts of ourselves that we didn’t know or understand. I’ve found that the tarot is never wrong. But again, it is a matter of interpretation.

  A good tarot card reader can look at the cards and create a pattern in your life that makes sense. My favorite card lately has become the Fool, which I wasn’t drawn to before. He’s about faith. He looks as if he’s about to step off the edge of a cliff, as though he expects to land safely with no consequences. I never liked that kind of risk. What I now see is that I can’t imagine living without faith. Faith is not concrete. It is not clear, but it’s positive. It really is about magic and mystery and awe and wonder. And hope. As I say at the end of “Divine Impulses,” my video interviews for On Faith, “we are all looking for meaning in our lives, for a sense of the divine,” and I ask the interviewee what gives them meaning, what to them is the divine. I’ve never gotten the same answer twice.

  The tarot works for those with any religious beliefs and atheists alike. What the tarot does for me is lay out the cards with their characters and their situations and let me interpret for myself a story that helps give meaning to my life at that moment. It’s intriguing as well as fun. It really works and it always gives me a sense of hope. William Butler Yeats, William Blake, Carl Jung, and Italo Calvino all seemed to agree.

  From a very young age, I’ve gathered and kept talismans and amulets. They are objects that contain magical properties and protect the owner or wearer of them from evil. Most people I know have some sort of good luck charm or habit. For some reason even nonbelievers tend to believe in them and have them around. I have a friend who goes to Ethiopia quite frequently. When I was there I bought a Coptic cross that I keep on my coffee table. This friend gave me another one recently. He told me about being at an event with President Obama at the beginning of his first term and my friend gave the president the Coptic cross he was carrying. Several years later he ran into the president again and Obama pulled it out of his pocket and told him he carries it with him all the time.

  Crosses are an obvious talisman, as are mezuzahs, Stars of David, crescents, the hand of Fatima, a Ganesh (the Hindu god), the evil eye, Greek worry beads, rosaries, St. Christopher medals—anything can be a talisman. I have an evil eye hanging on the chandelier in our dining room. I wear a thin bracelet on my right wrist, given to me by a friend, with a small blue evil eye with a diamond in the center. I never take it off.

  When my father was in Korea his nickname was Buffalo Bill, and he sent off for bags of buffalo nickels to give to his troops. Everyone including my father carried one for good luck. The deal was that if you met a Buffalo, no matter when, you could challenge him to see if he was carrying a nickel. If someone was not they had to buy the other one a beer. I wear a buffalo nickel on a chain to this day and I have met many Buffalos over the years. Not one has ever been without his nickel.

  Around my neck I have two gold chains. One simply has a beautiful Indian gold Ganesh with a ruby at the top. Ganesh is one of the most famous Gods in the Hindu tradition, though followed by Jains and Buddhists as well. He’s sort of an all-purpose God. He rules the intellect, new beginnings, and writing. Most important, he’s the remover of obstacles. He is easily identifiable for his elephant head. I first learned about Ganesh’s powers when I started the website On Faith for the Washington Post. A young Hindu colleague told me about him and I immediately adopted him as the talisman for the website. What could be better than the remover of all obstacles? It was magical. The website was an early success, and one obstacle after another seemed to fall away. I wear another tiny gold Indian Ganesh with little diamonds on the other chain. On that chain I also have my buffalo nickel, a small gold labyrinth, a blue porcelain Fabergé egg with a very small evil eye inside, a gold heart with a small sapphire from my mother, and a gold shell from Santiago de Compostela. I’m totally covered and receive protection from all sides.

  On my left hand is the ring Ben gave me nine years after we were married—finally—and a diamond band he gave me for an anniversary, which he picked out and bought himself some years later. On my right hand is my wedding ring and my mother’s wedding ring, a West Point miniature with a small green tourmaline in the center.

  On my bedside table I have a picture of Ben and Quinn and me on the beach at La Samanna, on St. Martin, a resort Ben and I went to for nearly forty years. We had a ritual of going out to look at the sun disappear over the horizon every evening. We always went for Valentine’s week in February, and it was the happiest week of the year for me. It was our honeymoon week. Wrapped around the photo is a set of antique turquoise worry beads I bought on the Greek island of Hydra, one of my favorite places in the world.

  I have an exquisite, colorful enameled Ganesh on my bedside table as well, and a tiny white pillow with blue embroidered flowers that was on my mother’s bed when she died. On my bed I also have the shirt Ben died in. It’s a well-worn blue-and-gray-striped French boatneck, long-sleeve cotton T-shirt—his favorite. I still sleep holding on to it every night. I will give it up at some point—Quinn thinks I should, and sooner rather than later; he wants me to stop grieving, but it gives me such comfort at night when I pray to Ben for strength and courage, as I pray to Ganesh and my mother for the same things.

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  Over the course of my life, I had been to many astrologers, psychics, palm readers, and tarot card readers. Many of them, though impressive, were questionable, but when I started seeing Caroline Casey, I really hit the jackpot. Caroline has been my personal north star in interpreting the heavens. She’s been at it for forty years. I have never known her to be wrong or off base in her readings. She is brilliant at what she does, smart, creative, and original. Her readings are on a level beyond anything I have ever experienced. She mixes in philosophy, religion, history, literature, mythology, and symbolism, along with her specific interpretation of my chart in our sessions. She speaks my language. Readings with her are riveting and fun as well as informative. They’re not crystal-ball gazing. She interprets meaningfully, given the position of the planets at the time and day of birth. In an interview in the Washington Post Outlook section in 1984, Caroline described it this way:

  The chart is a map of somebody’s task, what they’ve signed up to do in their life. It’s a condensed piece of information, describes who someone is, what kind of family situation they were born into, what the major issues and traumas and talents of their life are and why. Like detective work, you’re putting all this information together and saying this constructs a picture, it implies a purpose.

  Astrology made great sense to me from the first time I was exposed to it at an early age, and it continues to imbue my life with clarity and confidence. I have had my chart done by different astrologers over the years, but always by Caroline at least once a year to see how things have progressed.

  When Ben was editor of the Washington Post, the paper ran the daily horoscope. As the Post grew in stature, especially after Watergate, he was roundly criticized for it, with some people saying it took up too much space and others, more substantive, asking how the Washington Post could be considered a serious newspaper if it ran a daily horoscope. “After all,” they would say or write sanctimoniously, “the New York Times doesn’t run the horoscope.”

  “Nothin’ but readers,” Ben would respond, always grinning.

  He was right. He knew how many of his “serious” readers actually read their horoscopes in the morning. He never considered not running it, though he would constantly tell me it was all nonsense. It was all nonsense to him, of course, until I came home from a reading with Caroline. His first question was always: “What did she say about me?” I never teased him about it. I didn’t want to turn him away from the idea that many people liked astrology and especially reading t
heir horoscopes. He was always grudgingly impressed with what she told me.

  When Caroline was asked in the Post interview why astrology was so popular, she answered:

  It represents a voice of the irrational, mystical, spirit domain which says that everything is interconnected and interrelated and that you can’t pluck one strand of creation without resonating it all. It corresponds to a very real hunger people have for mystery, for how things are mysteriously connected. Astrology says that cynicism is just intellectual laziness. There’s no future in nihilism; one has to believe and have faith in something, a larger process.

  * * *

  I began documenting my sessions with Caroline in November of 1981, when I was pregnant with Quinn. Ben had been going through a particularly stressful period. The Janet Cooke disaster had happened earlier that year. Janet was a young Washington Post reporter and had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, only to have it revoked a few days later when the Post learned that she had fabricated the story she had written and the Post had published. This was a huge upheaval for Ben and, as a consequence, for me, especially because of my pregnancy.

  Caroline told me in a reading that fall that Ben would see all the things he valued being destroyed but that he would survive. My role was to be the grounded woman to give him strength. She tasked me with being the “village shaman,” the wisewoman, and that the most important thing I could do was to “use my fantastic visualizing powers to imagine my baby circled in light.” The baby, she said, was what was grounding me. He was real and symbolic as well. My creative powers were more concrete than Ben’s. He had to decide what he wanted. I could assist him, she said. I could imagine how things would go for him.

  I took what she said to heart and it really worked. When I suddenly started being “Queen Serene,” Ben’s demeanor changed dramatically.

  In March of 1982, Caroline wrote to me, “It does seem as though your true mission is a much more serious one—the reconciliation of Visionary principles, in a serious fashion, into the grown-up social world. Recognizing yourself as a powerful imager-visionary, and holding out that possibility to others. That is the highest calling of a mature woman in these spiritually anemic times.”

  I have to say that letter surprised me. I hadn’t really thought of myself before then as a really serious person. It was only when Caroline articulated this impression to me that I began to think about what I was truly meant to do. I was so obsessed with my pregnancy and about my coming role as a mother that anything beyond that didn’t actually penetrate. The idea that I was a serious person was there in my mind and began to grow steadily and helped keep me grounded as I was launched into one of my life’s most important roles—one of great joy and great challenge—being a mother.

  * * *

  Two weeks after we got to Long Island in August of 1981, where we were spending the month, I knew I was pregnant and I was preening around sticking out my flat stomach so everyone would know. I was so happy. Ben would not allow me to tell anyone until I was three months along for fear I would have a miscarriage. When, finally, the woman at the grocery store checkout back in Washington asked me if I was pregnant, I hugged her and went flying back to the house to tell Ben and then got on the phone. That fall was heavenly for me.

  When it was time for me to have an amniocentesis, my friend Nora Ephron, who had had two sons, Jacob and Max, went with me for encouragement and to hold my hand. I had been going through the miserable divorce from Carl Bernstein with her and we had become very close. “Just don’t look at the needle,” she said, knowing from my days in the hospital in Tokyo that I was completely needle phobic.

  I was the model pregnant woman. I had actually quit smoking and drinking on my fortieth birthday, knowing that I would try to become pregnant. I exercised every day. I took no medicine, not even nose spray at the end when I couldn’t breathe. I drank gallons of skim milk. My one craving was for peanut butter, which I ate by the jar. Unfortunately I ate it on whole-grain bread. That’s a lot of bread!

  I did gain sixty pounds, which was more than I should have, but nobody seemed worried and I wasn’t either until I later tried to take it off. I listened to classical music to soothe my baby and talked to him or her all the time as I stroked my increasingly large belly.

  I was determined not to get upset by ANYTHING. Everything I had read said that the pregnant mother’s state of mind was a huge factor in the child’s emotional development. But I couldn’t help worrying about the results of the amnio. In fact I was so scared that I had directed the doctor to call Ben with the outcome so that if it was bad, he could come tell me himself.

  When he heard, Ben called me at my hairdresser and didn’t even say hello. “The baby’s fine!” he practically yelled. “It’s a boy!” He was so excited. I don’t know why but I thought I had desperately wanted a girl. I think it was spending all those weekends in the country with Ben alone in the cabin while he disappeared into the woods for hours at a time. I thought it would be wonderful to have a daughter to play dolls with.

  And then there were the clothes. How I had looked forward to shopping for frilly, lacy smocked pink things. I’m glad I found out before the baby was born. I spent that weekend mourning the loss of my daughter, knowing I would never have another child. We had made a deal. Then we named the baby Quinn, and I began bonding with him immediately. I was in love.

  Quinn was three weeks overdue. What a nightmare. I was huge. I couldn’t sleep, even though I was floating in a cloud of down pillows buttressing my stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I could hardly walk. But by God I was determined to go out every night, just to avoid the stress of waiting at home for something to happen.

  Finally my water broke. It was around four in the afternoon. I was totally calm. I just knew everything would be fine. I began having contractions. We were supposed to go to Senator John Heinz’s for dinner. Jack and Teresa were old friends of ours. Ben said absolutely no. My doctor said I shouldn’t bother to come into the hospital until at least three A.M. I was crazed. I couldn’t just sit there and stare at Ben while I was having contractions. We went to the dinner. We were late and everyone was already gathered.

  “For God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t tell anyone I’m in labor,” I said to Ben as we walked in the door. We had barely entered the living room when Ben said in a very loud voice, “Sally’s in labor!,” at which point they all backed away from me as if he had announced I had the plague. Only Jack Heinz walked over to me and gave me a hug. It was a typical Washington seated dinner party with several tables filled with members of Congress, the diplomatic corps, the administration, and the press corps.

  Dinner was a disaster. I was seated between Joe Kraft, the distinguished LA Times columnist, and the powerful Senator “Scoop” Jackson from Washington State. They immediately began discussing Boeing aircraft. If I had been in a normal state, I could probably have gotten them onto another topic, but I could barely concentrate on what they were saying. Every four minutes or so I would have a contraction and let out a low moan or a little yelp. The two of them were drenched in sweat, their eyes filled with terror as they wiped their brows with their napkins and talked over my protruding and rather active (from all the kicking) stomach.

  Mercifully dinner ended and we left, much to everyone’s relief. We didn’t go to the hospital until Ben finally panicked at three A.M. and insisted. It was still too early for an epidural, but it was really hurting so they called in a hypnotist. That was a bust. My Lamaze birthing coach showed up. Ben had gone to classes with me, but he threw her out after about half an hour of chanting insipid and New Age mantras.

  Finally that evening they gave me an epidural and I was feeling great. I decided I wanted to watch Dynasty at ten P.M. I was pushing as hard as I could but I’d had enough of Ben yelling “Pant, pant, blow” and asked him to knock it off until the show was over.

  Quinn was born at 12:38 A.M. on April 29, 1982. A Taurus. That was good. Ben was a Virgo, I was a Cancer. Two earth signs and one wate
r. What a copacetic happy family we would be.

  Quinn didn’t cry out right away, and the nurses rushed him over to a table to suction him out. I nearly fainted from fear. Then came the blessed shriek and they all burst out laughing. He had squirted one of them in the face. She said, “Oh, I’m in love.”

  There are no words to describe the overwhelming heart-bursting love I felt for Quinn the moment they put him in my arms, all wrapped up in a little blanket. Oh, it’s you, I thought. His eyes were so alert they just scanned my face, darting back and forth to make sure it was really me, the one whose voice he had heard all those months, singing and whispering and cooing to him. “I love you,” I said to him. “You can do anything you want to do in this life.” Pure joy.

  Before I knew it they had whisked him off to the nursery and I relaxed as Ben held my hand and hugged me. He was so proud of himself. This was the first of his four children where he had actually participated in the birth. It made him feel young again. He was even more cocky than usual.

  I sent Ben home to get some sleep and I dozed off. When they brought Quinn back to the room, he was as calm and cool and laid-back as you could imagine. The nurse said they had nicknamed him “Mr. Mellow” because, unlike all the other babies, he wasn’t crying. He was just casing the joint. Again, we just stared into each other’s eyes, mesmerized.

  The next morning was the most heavenly day ever, sunny, breezy, with butterflies flapping outside of my window and flowers, flowers everywhere. The breastfeeding coach came in and barely had to instruct us. Quinn and I took to it right away. I think that nursing him was the closest I have ever come to the divine. I knew there was a God, some spirit, some being that had created this moment, this extraordinary connection to another person and to a larger life.

  * * *

  My mother and father came immediately. Everyone was thrilled, beaming, and in incredibly high spirits. Ben and I were bursting with pride. Quinn was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. No, really, he was.