For Iris’s 14th birthday, I made her an absolutely lovely cheesecake and gave her a copy of the Tarot of the Absurd, #1/600. She was particularly interested in the cheesecake, tho she was not particularly interested in the deck of cards. She asked if it bothered me. It doesn’t. She has the rest of her life (or until they are destroyed) to look at the cards; the cheesecake was gone rather quickly.
A deck of cards is the opposite of a majors-only deck: it has no dedicated trump suit. The four of spades corresponds to the four of swords in the occult tarot deck. It says I’m going to feel isolated for a while. I should use this time of isolation wisely.
My mom gave me this double-deck of cards about 30 years ago. She said to take good care of it, so I did. I played with it a lot when I was a kid. I played war, go-fish, crazy-eights, a dozen rummy games, casino, canasta, anything else my friends wanted to teach me. When I went off to college, the deck stayed at home. This past year I put the deck with my tarot card collection. I think my grandmother purchased it in Greece in the 1950s. One image is the Carvatides Erechiteum, the other is the Parthenon. I don’t want to play with the deck anymore. I want to look at it sometimes and remember all the times I begged my mom to play cards with me and she obliged. May I be patient and give my time so generously to my own child.
