Meditation for the Erzulie Clan

In 2002, while living in Baton Rouge, I dated a guy who lived in New Orleans for a bit.  He was good-looking; that was nice.  He was interesting.  Took me on some good dates -- smart movies, cool restaurants, walks through the Bywater where he lived (on Montague Street, in fact, of "Tangled Up In Blue" fame).  The second weekend or so that I went to see him, I came out and my car had had some kind of grey substance painted across the drivers' side window, and over a "Safe Travel" sticker I had in the back window with an iconically spell-like circle on it, weird little characters and a few curving lines going in and out of it.  Well, spell-like; it was sold as a spell.

At first, I was kind of excited; I felt like I'd been hazed, like getting voodoo-cursed -- because what else could it be -- meant I really lived there.  I didn't know what it had done, and was definitely superstitious enough to think it had to have done something.  I was also superstitious enough to be fully leery of trying to undo it myself; voodoo, so I had been told, latches on to people just for thinking about it, and fighting it was definitely a bridge farther than thinking about it.  That winter, I'd wreck my car driving home, the last time I went home for a holiday and the last time I'd go home at all until just a couple years ago.  Totaled it out.  My poor little Honda looked like it had been punched in the jaw, and my cats and I had to wait, first by the side of a road and then in a police station lobby, for hours while my father drove down to get us.  Or, I would have totaled it out if I'd had insurance; when I called the next morning, I found out I didn't, that my mother hadn't paid my bill, something she'd voluntarily offered to do when I started graduate school, and my insurance had been dropped quite some time earlier.  As it ended up, my parents paid for the repairs and my brother came up to help fix it, but I lost three weeks I hadn't planned on spending there and as a result lost my extra job -- which was a miserable job, but I did need the money at the time.  I remember watching a lot of Beavis and Butthead on one of their giant screen TV's, off my brother's laptop, and I remember the smells of paint and bondo.  A windshield repairman came out to the house on a Saturday to put in a new one.  I remember the crash, too, but that's a different knot in this cord.

I worked out a plan to exorcise the curse I was then certain I had.  I had an old glass prism from a chandelier or lamp to put it in, a ribbon to wind around and bind it there that came from somewhere significant though I can't remember where anymore, a lemon to blast it out and a knife -- and so, nearly a decade ago, I was already living in some of Spicer's terms.  The lemon and the unwelcome ghost and the problem of control.  I never had the bravery to do it, though; driving again, across I-70, I did it in my head, wrapped the glass gem in its ribbon and threw it out the window somewhere in the middle of the state, but the lemon had started to mold and I knew I wasn't doing what needed to be done; I wasn't sure what needed to be done was possible, but I did know I wasn't accomplishing it.

I never know, anymore, how I believe in any of these things.  But I wonder if I need to get rid of my car for things to start going well for me again.  That fall was probably the last time they did and I'm still driving it.  Not that I have any way to afford one right now, but if it could be made to happen, it couldn't hurt.