Hands that glow

A promise in the middle of chaos

When I first moved to the city, I noticed them everywhere. Big glowing neon hands in first floor windows advertising palm readers. I lived next to the West Side Highway. I had a long walk through the Village every evening and every evening on my long walk, I passed a woman. She was in her sixties, maybe. She wore long layered skirts, a shawl, a wrap on her head. She sat on a folding chair outside of such a place and waved at people who passed by, not waved hello, waved come in.

I had been warned not to fall for a game of three-card monte in Times Square, not to hang my handbag on the back or my chair, or carry cash on my person. I was savvy enough to know not to fall for a beckoning palm reader, but every night when I walked by her, she made eye contact with me and smiled knowingly and said come, come, and I had to resist the urge to follow her into the storefront with the beads and brocade curtains and beneath the glowing hand.

Years later, when I was in graduate school and living in the suburbs, a friend and I drove into the city to visit a palm reader. We had our sights set on a place we had seen on the Upper West Side, a sign emblazoned with the hand hanging over a downstairs doorway. This adventure was a lark. We were writers looking for content. We were curious. I didn’t tell my friend that even though I held no faith in the veracity of a $5 palm reading, in a general way, I did believe in divination and all manner of mystical and psychic work.

As we walked toward the sign, my friend slipped off her wedding band and put it in her pocket. She wanted to see if the palm reader would pick up on the fact that she was married. I had no such ring to remove. We rang the bell and eventually, a young woman opened the door. She was not dressed in layers of scarves or hoop earrings. She invited us in to a tiny vestibule with a wicker chair where I took a seat while my friend followed the woman through a curtain for her reading.

I couldn’t hear them. I sat in the quiet of the small hallway and waited my turn. When that turn came, I followed the woman into a sitting room. I sat across a table from her. Another curtain separated the room from a kitchen and through a gap, I could see a man moving back and forth there, preparing food or tea - a normal domestic scene.

She asked me to place my hands, palms up on the table, which I did. She looked at them, traced the lines on my skin with her finger, then held one of my upturned hands in hers. She gazed at it for a moment then told me that she saw my soulmate. She told me his initials, which I now can’t remember. He was quite a bit my senior, she said. My family would not approve of him at first, but they would grow to like him.

She looked up at me. She told me that I was a psychic but had not yet come into my abilities. She told me I was going to have a near death experience that would bring my gifts to the surface.

Afterwards, my friend and I shared with one another the things the palm reader had told us. I like to think that we had this conversation over cake at Cafe Lalo, so I am going to say that’s what we did although in truth, I can’t remember. The palm reader did not pick up on the fact that my friend was married and told her about a man she would soon meet. We agreed that nothing we had heard about ourselves rang true (although I would be nervous about meeting with that near death experience for years afterward.)

Neither of us was surprised at the information we’d received. We hadn’t expected to learn anything of substance. It was a lark, remember, something we were doing for fun. Even so, I wanted some piece of the palm reading to be true. I wanted some aspect of the palm reader to be authentic, for her to not be a scam artist. I wanted to be able to ring the bell at a beautiful brownstone on a quiet street on the Upper West Side, sit at a fabric draped table, and learn my fortune.

I was not alone, of course. So many people wanted this to be true, the signs hung all over New York, in every neighborhood. Palm readers, tarot readers, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants. Everyday, some of us sat down and stretched out our hands and listened to descriptions of soulmates, or stories about how we, ourselves, were psychic and therefore, special, how there was a windfall of money coming, or a dream job.

Later in my life, when I did start giving readings - when I became the person on the other side of the table - I always did a lot of explaining about how I wasn’t a fortune teller, how nothing was written in stone. The purpose of a good reading, I said, was self-discovery. It was true, but I admit now that as a querent, what I was also always looking for, and what I know my clients were looking for, was divination.

Deep in its heart, the appeal of a reading, a deck of cards, a good psychic, is the promise that perhaps we will catch a glimpse of relief. Maybe we will learn that everything, or at least some thing, is going to be okay. Or that there is an order to all of this, a meaning amidst the chaos and suffering. We want to know what the future holds because perhaps what it holds a better feeling.

Just this past weekend, Tracy and I planned to go to a greenhouse to look at native plants. As we were getting ready to leave the house, an image flashed in my mind’s eye of a woman leaning over to kiss a plant. I thought nothing of it. Images flash in my mind’s eye all the time. But later, at the greenhouse, as we walked up the narrow aisle I watched a woman lean over and kiss a plant. I saw in front of me, in the physical world, the exact image I had earlier seen in my mind.

Technically, you could say I saw the future, but I’m not sure you should attach any meaning to it. I don’t believe there was a message in the vision. I had simply tipped into the energy of the day, time looping around on itself.

Visions and knowing, the language of intuition is all a part of being alive. There’s anything wrong with or weird about seeking or performing divination. The longing to know is natural and human. Reaching into the etheric connection between the worlds can be beautiful. The mysterious is often pleasurable.

The thing is, I suppose I don’t even think there’s much wrong with a woman sitting beneath a glowing hand, beckoning people to her, taking $5 or $10 bucks and performing a little show. You’re going to meet your soulmate, you’re going to achieve your goal, you’re going to be okay. Maybe that is what we all need to hear now and then, in order to keep going.