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People often ask me how I
became a jeweler. And since the way it happened was really quite
amazing-- actually by a magic spell -- I thought I might tell
the whole story and reveal the spell to you and tell you how
to use it. Here follows the story of The Spell of the Lemures
and how it altered the course of my life and that of one of my
friends.
What
is a Lemure? (Also spelled Lemur)
(Note: The following story
was reconstructed from details in my personal diary that I have
kept since moving to New York from Shreveport, Louisana in 1960.)
New York City, Spring,
1973
My friend's name was Elizabeth D'Amico (we called her "Magic
Betty") , and though she is now gone from this earth in
body, her magic lingers on in the lives of the people she knew.
Had it not been for her and the series of events that began in
the early morning hours of May the 9th, 1973, I would still be
there in the concrete jungle of New York City, instead of here
on the tropical island of Key West doing something I had never
in my wildest dreams ever thought of doing, and didn't know anything
about doing, and had never shown any talent for doing by any
stretch of anyone's imagination -- least of all mine.
By day Elizabeth D'Amico and I worked together in a big New York
advertising agency, a rather mundane job as I look back on it.
She was a secretary to a high-ranking executive. I was copywriter.
She typed letters. I wrote ads. She re-typed letters. I re-wrote
ads. We had been doing it for fifteen years. We were bored to
death.
One night Elizabeth called
and said she had something special to show me, an intriguing
offer because I knew that, whatever it was, it would be something
from another sphere, another world beyond our existence. Magic
Betty was a devotee and believer of "white magic",
that is, of benevolent magic. And like her magic, everything
about her own self was good, and gentle, and kind. She was small
and sylph like; a ballet dancer and a classical pianist. When
she held your hand to read your palm, you felt the touch of the
hand of an angel.
The most remarkable thing about Elizabeth was her relationship
with animals, from lions to sea lions to horseshoe crabs, with
whom she carried on a mysterious communication and trust that
was mutual and completely understood. I had seen movie footage
of her in Africa, standing beside a road in the veldt as a huge
wild male lion walked up to her, licked her hand, and lay down,
washing its paw like a contented household cat. I had seen photographs
of her kneeling beside a sea lion which was giving birth with
some difficulty (and which is an especially formidable and dangerous
creature at this moment of its life); and saw her hand stroking
the creature and comforting her until the calf was born. A companion
of hers described an event as she reclined on the shoreline by
the ocean and sang. He said that he watched in amazement as an
audience of dozens of horseshoe crabs appeared mysteriously from
the water and completely blanketed the sand before her. And when
the song was over, they vanished as quietly and hauntingly as
they came.
I knew these stories were true, because I had seen her magic
myself. Once, while walking with her along the East River in
New York, a large dog broke loose from its owner and attacked
a monkey that belonged to a street musician. Betty whistled.
Not with a lady-like pursing of lips, but like a truck driver,
with thumb and index finger in her mouth. The dog not only stopped
its attack, but changed its demeanor completely. It began wagging
its tail and and let the monkey hang down from the acccordian
player's neck and tug at its ears.
And once, back in the bra-burning days, while we were attending
the first Women's Liberation Day parade on Fifth Avenue, the
horse on which a riot-control policeman was sitting a few feet
from us rared up at the sound of a firecracker and threw its
rider. The horse was looking frantically about, ready to charge
into the crowd, when Betty reached out and touched it on the
flank. The effect was instantaneous. The horse shuddered as if
throwing off a demon, then lowered its muzzle to the cheek of
the fallen officer and gave him an apologetic nuzzle. The horse
then put its nose in Betty's outstretched palm and closed its
eyes for a moment as if it were meditating. This incident affected
me greatly because, ever since I was in my early teens, I had
been nervous about horses after one had slipped and fallen on
me. I did not get back on the horse, as it is said that you should.
But after what I witnessed that day in New York, I knew who I
wanted with me if I ever did.
Magic Betty arrived about
11 o'clock the evening of May 8th, her hair as always pulled
up in a ballet-dancer's bun, carrying a large purple velvet bag
tied by a long drawstring. She placed it on a small round table
by an open window overlooking the skyline of Manhattan. A warm
wind was blowing in from the little terrace outside, and over
the tops of the distant skyscrapers one could see the moon rising,
almost full and dull yellow, with a greyish cast from the smog
of the city.
Elizabeth opened the bag and
shook out a strange array of objects: Two smooth white stones
about the size of fifty-cent pieces; a small crystal bowl; a
stick of rose incense; a purple candle about eight inches long
with a short burnt wick; a small scroll of parchment paper tied
with a lavender satin ribbon, and a flat square of wood, which
I recognized as the top from a little rosewood box I had given
her years before. As odd as this assortment was, there was one
thing that seemed out of place: a modern-day stopwatch, the very
one that I used at the office for timing television commercials.
As it was, that stopwatch would effectively put a stop to one
part of my life and start it off on another.
After arranging the contents
of the bag on the table, Elizabeth removed the ribbon from the
scroll and read aloud The Spell of the Lemures, as you
may do now by touching your magic cursor to the link below and
giving a little tap:
Click
to read The Spell of the Lemures
And so, as midnight approached,
we called the New York phone number that gave the time of day.
We dialed it over and over until the voice said "Twelve
Midnight", and then we clicked the stopwatch for a one minute
countdown. Elizabeth poured a small bottle of spring water into
the crystal bowl, and when the stopwatch ticked to zero, we dipped
our hands into the water three times, shook them, and patted
them dry; I on the front of my shirt, she on the lap of her dress.
She lit the rose incense and
set the watch for nine minutes. We sat in silence and watched
the thin curl of smoke float upwards and be caught by the breeze;
to be wafted away to summon the Lemures, wherever they might
be. In the distance a siren wailed, and 12 floors below us, the
beeping of taxi horns blended into the night like the sounds
of chattering frogs.
As the room filled with the smell of the burning incense, I briefly
wondered if it could be noticed in the hallway of the apartment
building. I thought of some old busybody calling the cops and
reporting a bunch of hippies smoking pot or something, and us
getting raided with all this suspicious looking stuff on the
table. My mind wandered on about this, almost hypnotized by the
muted sounds of the city below, when my trance was suddenly broken
by Elizabeth striking a match.
"This will light their
way," she said. She lit the purple candle and clicked the
stopwatch to three minutes.
"Are we supposed to talk?"
I asked.
"I don't know,"
she smiled. "But we're doing it. Que sera, sera"
I thought about her and what
she was thinking as the great lion approached her that day in
Africa. Que sera, sera.
"Knock on wood," she said, handing me one of the white
stones.
We began to tap them in unison
on the little rosewood boxtop. Some unseen force, maybe the Lemures
themselves, seemed to make us want to tap louder each time, like
a competition between two children; and by the thirteenth striking,
we were not only out of unison but as noisy as a galloping horse.
Somebody in the apartment above stomped on the floor and shouted
a muffled, "Shut up. It's after midnight."
"Its probably a lemur," said Elizabeth, half smiling
in a Mona Lisa kind of way. "They're said to be rather grouchy
when you wake them up."
And so it went.
Again, two days later at 12:01
A.M. on the Lemures Day of May 11th, the stopwatch that for fifteen
years had been timing Lever Brother's soap commercials and Swanson
Fried Chicken ads was performing a countdown on the course of
two people's lives.
Exactly what happened during
the second meeting is a bit dim in my memory now. Not that it
was routine, for I remember that we talked a great deal about
what we were doing and would it work. Actually, I had a slight
concern about whether or not we should be doing it at all, because
when I asked the desk clerk if the man above me had complained,
he said that the apartment was empty. He said that the old man
who lived there had died a week ago and that the apartment was
sealed pending disposition of the will. When I told Elizabeth,
we decided to tap a little more respectfully the second time
around.
On May 13th the ritual would be repeated for the last time, and
the stones, according to The Spell of the Lemures, would
become magic. I thought of the voice from the room upstairs and
had the strange feeling that maybe the magic would really there.
Seeing is believing, so the saying goes. And what we would see
on the terrace that night, after the burning of the incense,
and the lighting of the candle, and the tapping of the stones,
I will remember for the rest of my life. I still get a thrill
every time that I look at the face of the man in the moon.
Go to Part 2
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