My week in retrograde

Saturday evening: huge branch falls from beech tree – the beech tree that used to look like this:

Our majestic beech tree, with a trunk you couldn’t get your arms around, a trunk that looked like an elephant foot, suddenly turned into this last spring:

Internet, TV, telephone wires all ripped from house, hanging in street.

Sunday: call the tree guy, since wires are now conveniently down. All outside timer lights stop working – they decided this on their own, unrelated to the non-electric downed wires.

Sunday night, 3 am: There’s a loose metal plate on the highway we call the Blue Route that runs near our house. It sounds like artillery fire when trucks run over it; until now the sound of the massive air exchange unit across the street has drowned it out, but it’s cool tonight so it’s not on. We listen to the battle till 6 am.

Monday: tree guys come; I park car across street. This is what across the street looks like:

We park huddled next to that log, as we’ve done for 30 years when our driveway is blocked.

The people renting a college house at the end of that long (and unblocked) driveway call campus police. “Boot/tow” notice and $20 ticket arrive on windshield.

College police are very nice when I stop into their office; tear up ticket, say it’s fine for me to park there till tree guys are done.

I park there, so-called neighbors call police again, college tells me to move car (via voicemail, which I can only access by cell phone, of course. People calling get a message we’re on the phone – they all must think we spend a lot of time talking, as well as not blocking driveways). I’ve never laid eyes on these people, and I guess I have to hope I never do.

Spend an hour on cell phone with Verizon. They can’t come to put wires back up till Thursday. If strike hadn’t ended, they say, it would have been several weeks.

Monday night, 3 am: In between the trucks, I hear repeated beeping. Ironic, since the friendly little beep that happens when you lock your car has suddenly stopped happening when we lock our car.

Tuesday: tree guys aren’t finished yet. I park car across the street with note to college. Neighbors call police again. Fortunately, tree guys finish so I move car. Verizon guys suddenly show up, but turns out they’re copper, not FIOS guys. They leave. FIOS guys will show up later, they say. At 3:30. They’ll call me first on cell phone; if I don’t answer they won’t come.

Tuesday afternoon: Earthquake. I’m in my Italian lesson. We learn the word for earthquake – terremoto – as my handy cell phone rattles on the table.

Everyone but us has evacuated buildings; people are all crowded on sidewalks using cell phones that don’t work.

I change cell phone message to tell Verizon guys I’ll be there at 3:30; that if they’re hearing this message it means all circuits are busy (it’s sort of fun to tell Verizon that).

Trains not running.

But my train finally comes, only 10 minutes late. I run home. No call, no Verizon guys, but at least the beeping mystery is solved: display panel on stove is displaying error message. Call stove repair guy; he comes to see what part he needs to order before he goes on vacation next week. Turns stove circuit breaker off.

No phone, no TV, no internet, no timer lights, no stove, no beeping car keys.

“Mercury must be in retrograde,” I say facetiously to my son.

“Mercury is in retrograde,” he says.

Retrograde is supposed to end this weekend, just in time for the hurricane. But things are already looking up – the FIOS guy showed up this morning!

And guess where he parked.

Finding Scorpio

Unlike all the other signs of the zodiac, Scorpio really looks like a creepy little scorpion. He’s even got a red heart at the center, the bright star Antares. I wish I could pick him out, but whenever I look up all I usually find are the big dipper and my favorite, Orion.

Scorpio is opposite Orion in the sky because of that heel-biting incident (some even say he killed Orion) – so he has to forever chase the great hunter. Scorpio had another problem with the Caesars: when a comet appeared between his claws after Julius Caesar got assassinated, Augustus Caesar cut them off to make Libra.

Some clear night this winter, when Orion comes back to us in the northern hemisphere, I’ll look up, look across, and try to find Antares. A supergiant star has to be good for something.

Leo time

It’s a little crazy, I know, to believe that personality has anything to do with astrology, but it is pretty striking that everyone seems to know what sign they were born in. And for every powerful person born in the sign of Leo the Lion, “king of the jungle” (even though lions don’t live in the jungle), ruled by the Sun, center of the solar system, I’m sure there are a bunch of weaklings.

But I still find it interesting that both Obama and Clinton are Leos, while shrubby little Bush is, like me, Cancer the Crab – the sign of home and family. No wonder he spent 490 days at his ranch.

Cancer time

Here’s what the lucky Duc de Berry got to look at from his Paris window – all the slaving peasants raking hay under the blazing chariot of Helios, the sun god; the Gemini twins; and Cancer the crab, who came in with the solstice.

Why on earth a crab, when you can barely see the constellation even with a telescope? Apparently it’s because, now that the sun has reached its highest point, it begins walking backwards, descending the zodiacal arc like, I guess, a crab. But it’s sure an inauspicious birth sign, even though cancer means “crab,” not a horrible disease, in Latin.

Gemini and NASA

I see I have two neglected categories I need to get busy on: “Astrology,” and the one called “Dreams, consciousness, and weird things like that.”

The problem is that I’m just not that interested in astrology or dreams anymore. I used to write stuff about how Carl Jung believed the progression of the signs of the zodiac represented stages of personal growth and spiritual development. Well, though I’m a lot less smart, not to mention less spiritually developed, than Carl Jung, all that seems just too new-agey to me now.

So here we are in the sign of Gemini, and the most interesting thing about that, to me, is that NASA named a whole space program after it. The program’s goal was to develop a two-man spacecraft, and so they used the Gemini glyph (which sort of looks like the Roman numeral II) and the two Castor and Pollux stars as its logo. I like that.

But I’m going to have to work on these categories more, I guess, so my growth doesn’t get too stunted.

Taurus time

One spring morning, Jupiter looked down from heaven and saw Europa, the beautiful Phoenician princess, gathering flowers. He changed himself into a bull and carried her off to Crete, where they were married (at least according to him). The bull became the constellation Taurus, who looks, unfortunately, as if he’s about to be eviscerated on Orion’s sword.

We can’t see Taurus now, of course, since we’re in his sun sign – he’s traveling across the sky with the sun.

Taurus time

I just love the way the ram and the bull up there in the cosmos plant their feet and look down at their respective elements – Aries at the fiery sun, Taurus at the earth below – but remain unmoved by the joyous scene, painted in spring pastels, that unfolds beneath them. The wheel of the seasons has moved again, from fiery beginnings to the greening of the earth; the ram and the bull go round and round, ever returning.

And the people below? Their path is linear.