Faye Tully, my new massage therapist and also my "regular" therapist, makes house calls. And she practices alternative healing.
Yesterday afternoon she popped by for tea and stayed until just after midnight; tells me these non-professional social visits are "part of the process." I'm all for it, now that my lower lumbar is worrying me again.
Faye made herself at home with a book of ghost stories and some vintage pulp magazines I keep on hand for October evenings on my back porch. After a long silence (roughly an hour) I mentioned that, re: alternative healing, at the hospital where I work there's an emphasis on evidence-based medicine. Empirical science and whatnot.
"Do the experts at your medical center understand that appointments with specialists always being four to six months out is essentially 'no' medicine, evidence or not?" she fired back.
Yep, Faye is one tough cookie.
And she's not whistling Dixie when she uses the term "alternative."
Has a little bag of carved jade runes in her briefcase. Tarot. Planchette. Keeps miniature black candles in an old Altoids tin.
Her notes are written in hieroglyphics with a quill.
Among other keepsakes in that briefcase was a crumpled photo of a man "somewhere in Yugoslavia, 1945" whom she swears is her grandfather and fought the fascists; he's got a beat-up Enfield slung over his shoulder and wears a partisan scarf, so maybe so.
That photo and her Eastern Bloc accent make Faye's claim to be born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, seem slightly off bubble.
But I do love that she carries in a tiny wicker basket her treasured pet hedgehog, Mr. Brush. He's a well behaved and endlessly curious little gnome, so I let him have the run of my porch during the visit.
Faye lit one of those candles, which, after three hours, was still not a quarter-inch shorter than when match met wick. I told Faye that her perpetual candle was one of the most amazing devices I'd ever seen.
"Infinity is a constant illusion," she sighed. "But we can always dream about forever."
"I see what you did with that sentence construction," I replied." "Constant with infinity. Always with forever. Is your incantation redundant, tautological, or just magical?"
"Look at you catching the subtle clues, inspector," she said. "But I'm not the local witch, even in October."
"Well you kind of are," I said, then scooped up Mr. Brush and rubbed his belly. "You have the cutest little familiar in town."
The greenhouse clock stuck midnight. Mr. Brush made a happy clucking sound. Faye pinched out the candle.
"You should give that a rest, Dave. Especially in October."
She calls me Dave. Did I mention that she's gorgeous?