28 | October | 2021 | Spo-Reflections

Longtime Spo-fans know at Hallowe’en I pull out the tarot deck and have a look-see on the upcoming year (November 2021-October 2022). Each year I invite Spo-fans for a reading. If you would like one, please say so in the comments. If you have a specific inquiry, so say, otherwise I will do a general twelve-month reading. I do them this weekend, and email the results to you early next week. Spo

There are anxious grumblings at work this week. Apparently established patients are not able to get timely appointments but must wait eight weeks for an opening. I emailed The Boss to consider canceling the new ones scheduled to make some openings (fat chance of that). When the pendulum swings this way viz. being ‘full up’, the telephone calls from anxious patients puts pressure the staff to pressure me in turn to make space which means working longer hours than usual and/or during my lunch hour or administrative times. As I’ve aged I am less willing to bail out a systems problem with me working (but not paid) more. The pendulum will swing the other way (it always does) and then The Powers That Be will be worried my dance card has holes in it (I am on salary) and they fill up spaces with new patients and this all repeats. Oh the pain.

Speaking of work, I completed the seasonal sorting of the business cards. The pile in the office desk drawer is high enough to fall over whenever I open the drawer. This is a signal to sort’em and toss’em, at least the rubbish types. This is always a curious endeavor. The majority of cards evoke the emotion of ‘no recall’ as to who this is. Most of them are from pharmaceutical representatives whom I don’t make an effort to remember, as they are transient as Bedouins. There are cards from counselors and when I call them to see if they are taking new clients I often get messages they have closed down.

I throw out the majority of the cards and by next season I will have accumulated a new set.

There is a pile of business cards at home as well. They are mostly souvenirs of people I used to work with or now deceased. For examples I still have the card of my late friend Robert, who played the bagpipes. The card says “Robert. A piper” with his telephone number on it, to call him if you wanted that sort of thing. There is a card from a now-closed Palm Springs resort; it has a brightly colored border around the words “For the fun stuff”. I remember the resort but I don’t recall what was the fun stuff. I have a set of cards with my previous addresses and telephone numbers on them, which I would give to folks in encountered in social situations – “trick cards” Someone calls them. Then there are the oh-so-practical cards of the electrician or someone like him.

I suppose business cards are passé, a quaint reminder of those tech-less times when we weren’t all walking around with cellphones programmed with everybody’s telephone numbers. I could toss the cards out, the current ones at least, and there would be no loss really. I hang onto them like the CDs, in case the phone goes and I need a number. I will keep the ‘souvenir’ cards as they serve as portraits of people and photos from the past. I thought of putting them in a scrapbook, but I like shuffling them and seeing which cards come up. In a way they make a lovely Tarot deck, allowing me to peer into the past and reflect on memories.