Fashion (Sub)concious

Every once in awhile—okay, like maybe once in the last twenty years, until one recent day—I will look at a word and not know what it is I am seeing. The letters seem vaguely familiar, but that’s about it.

Sure, I have often seen a word and been bothered by the fact that I don’t know what it means. I have some four million year old SAT scores as proof.  But there is context and a dictionary to solve that sort of problem.  And with a son on the verge of taking his own SATs, I am overcome with the urge to learn a whole bunch of new words.  Really.  Maybe with a glass of wine and a nibble of cheese.

But, what I mean to discuss here is this:  Even if only once or twice, I have looked at a word, one that I have both seen and used before, and then turned it into something it is not.  The first time it happened, the word was heredity.  Heredity.  The noun.  Genetic makeup.  You know what I am saying.  Heredity. 

On one particular day, though, all I could see when I looked at the word heredity [huh-red-i-tee] was something that sounded out in my head as [here-ditty]. Rhymes with, “Here, kitty.”  This was a long time ago.  I have even laughed about the experience, unusual only in that I did not see it as a sign of some sort of fatal brain malfunction.

Now here I am, some (plus a few more) years later. I go out to my car. Folded over in the door handle is a flyer.  Ordinarily, I would crumple up something like this without reading it.  I don’t know why I look.  Maybe it is the joy of it not being a parking ticket. 

I don’t know how to scan things, so I am going to try to recreate it here, in my own, old- world way.

                       PSYCHIC

             “SOULMATE SPECIALIST”

                    Reuniting Lovers Permanently,

                              even if taken by another.

                         i    can    help     you

                   In Love Business and Health

                Palm and Tarot Card Readings $5. Special

               CALL NOW!

This is exactly how it was written.  I have left off the phone number and address for obvious reasons, the first two being to save you the $5 and to save you from making a fool of yourself—because, yes, I am that nice.

Here is what I saw in first looking at the flyer: PSYCHIC, which had turned into a word that sounded like [sy-sheek]—a made-up word, perhaps, but not one without meaning. I do believe that what I thought was being advertised were the services of a fashionable person who is also in the business of psychology.  Maybe, I surmised, the woman was a psychoanalyst with that extra ounce of panache—or, someone who was offering their expertise to a psychiatrist in desperate need of a wardrobe makeover.  Finally, it started to sound like the title for a magazine article about what the well-dressed psychologist might wear.

Obviously, I was wrong.  This was just another psychic flyer (no, the flyer itself was not psychic), one of the many that finds its way to the windshields and door handles of cars all across Los Angeles.  I read on.

“SOULMATE SPECIALIST”

Reuniting Lovers Permanently,

even if taken by another.

I guess it’s got something to do with “soulmate” being the important distinction here. Yet, I started to wonder about what would happen if a person were to be reunited with his or her lover (“even if taken by another”).  What if the “another” came to the psychic afterwards, looking to be reunited with the lover who is now “permanently” back together with his or her ex?  Isn’t this already a Taylor Swift song?

Then I started to worry.  Three years ago, I wrote a blog piece about a fortune-teller and her daughter who had been murdered by a client seeking to be reunited with her ex-boyfriend.  I don’t know what worried me more—the prospect of another homicide or the fact that I thought I had written that other blog piece like, maybe, a year ago, not three.  I thought about calling the psychic from the flyer to warn her about crazy people, but I decided that if she were worth her salt, she’d know already.  Clearly, the deceased fortune-teller had lacked some critical seeing-the-future skills.  I read on.

i    can    help     you

In Love Business and Health

Let me first say to the psychic whose flyer was on my car, “I can help you with grammar and punctuation!”  Not only because you need help, but because I want to know, are you able to assist in only “love business” or did you mean love and business? Bring on the comma if you meant the latter—which might bring you a larger client base, as well.  Just trying to help.

One thing is for sure.  I don’t want any information from the psychic.  No future stuff.  But if she can tell me whether it’s okay to wear blue suede boots with a black dress, I’m going to call Bloomingdale’s to see if the Stuart Weitzman’s are on sale. Come to think of it,  she should be able to tell me that, as well.