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Regarding Retrogrades, Restrictions and Reunions
"Mercury retrograde... isn't 'bad', — it just takes some planning to cooperate with the energies. It's meant to be spent assimilating experiences, reviewing the past, and redoing, in general. Matter of fact, if you really want to get the most out of a Mercury retrograde, confine your activities as much as possible to those that have "re" attached to the beginning of the word. Re-schedule appointments, repair vehicles, return to the past, re-write documents and agreements, and so forth."
Kim Rogers-Gallagher, Astrologer
From "Astrology for the Light Side of the Brain"
I avoided my official tenth and twentieth high school reunions as determinedly as I would avoid any other kind of self-induced torment — like an optional root canal, for instance. This was not entirely, because the reunion committee provided a list of the names of people they couldn't locate — a list that included everyone with whom I would have wished to speak. Nor was it because I wasn't particularly successful, beautiful or possessed of any other superficial attributes I could utilize to lord over my former classmates. It wasn't even that I had ended my senior year badly, humiliated by a youthful scandal. Mostly, I didn't attend my high school reunion because my best friends did not graduate with my class from Canyon High in 1977.
Having graduated two years earlier than I, they were not going to be attending any shindig my class was throwing at an overpriced steak house in Granada Hills. No, if we were ever to reunite, it would have to be under our own steam. Perpetually uninterested in my peers, I had chosen older friends from the earliest days of my childhood. High school was no different in this regard. I entered as a 13-year-old freshman and promptly made friends with a group of girls who were of legal driving age. In those days, that meant they were at least 16. Why these groovy juniors befriended an uptight freshman remains unclear to this day. In retrospect, I believe that what I lacked in social skills and experience, I made up for with my ability to acquiesce and venerate. But regardless of what created the cosmic confluence that led me to my core group of older school friends, Leslie, Doreen and Denise, what matters is that they saved my life — from boredom as well as more serious emotional difficulties.
They were a creative group. Not only were they all involved with the school's drama department — where I met them — they were also writers, photographers and artists. They spent their days dreaming up attention-getting stunts. One favorite was when Leslie, who was co-starring in our high school production of "The Little Foxes," decided we should put live guppies in the colored water that was being used as a substitute for wine on stage. The idea was that whoever got the guppies would prove their mettle by being able to stay "in character" during a live performance, while ingesting those wriggling denizen of the deep. Perhaps Leslie had forgotten that her part, as the alcoholic Birdie, called for her to drink an entire bottle of wine during her big, dramatic scene. When the moment came, she took one look at that aquarium-in-a-decanter, swilled the brew and manfully emoted like there was no tomorrow.
Leslie was the centerpiece of our group — the glue that brought, and held us together. She was vivacious, generous, warm, funny, showy and something of an overachiever. From competing on the tennis and swim teams to startling unsuspecting diners by yodeling in local coffee shops, to posing, in drag, as a pimp on Hollywood Boulevard, there was nothing she was unwilling do for attention.
Her best friend was the inimitable Doreen. Doreen and Leslie were co-editors of the Canyon High yearbook during their senior year, as well as cohorts in a number of less acknowledged activities — like kidnapping their friends by force on Summer evenings while pretending to their parents to be at the Drive-In theater. Doreen, the quieter half of their duo, was a gifted photographer and a writer who was always possessed of a clever phrase and the ability to skewer friend and foe alike with her biting wit.
Denise was quieter still. She abstained from obvious attention seeking, to instead, author a brilliant Shakespearean parody, composed in perfect iambic pentameter. Denise was also a wonderful artist whose cartoons graced the yearbook as well as every bench at which she ever sat in the quad. Her parting gift to the school was a beautiful mural that graced the outdoor amphitheater for many years.
SATURN CONJUNCT SUN
I met these three girls, and a fourth, Michelle, who rounded out our quintet, at the point in my life when the first transit of Saturn across my sun was concluding. Saturn conjuncting the sun is "widely considered one of the toughest of all aspects," according to astrologer, Susan Miller. At the time I knew little of Astrology, except the smattering I'd gleaned from "Sun Signs," Linda Goodman's seminal Ô60s astro-tome. Being very young, I had little understanding that going from popular to anathema could be a reoccurring phenomenon. A circumstance that I shouldn't have taken so very, very seriously.
Robert Hand says in, "Planets in Transit," that Saturn conjunct the Sun is a big drag precisely because: "The energy of Saturn holds back the energy of the Sun, which is your basic life energy. Saturn confines and restricts it so that you can only do certain things. As a result you may feel cut off and lonely." In other words, as the two to three year cycle wears on, you go from wondering why all your friends and fun times have been replaced with duty and endless drudgery, to thinking, "who needs friends anyway? I can barely get out of bed as it is."
As I said, I didn't know it was a cycle, and that, like all cycles, it would end and be replaced with something better — or at least different — later in the decade. All I knew, when entering high school, was that jr. high had been an unrelenting nightmare of alienation and unhappiness from which I thought I would never recover. To be sure, I was hoping for better, but prepared, just in case, for a lifetime of the same. The only guide I had to adolescence was the one codified in the teen drug-and-suicide-tragedy, "Go Ask Alice." It was a book I read and reread during the summer preceding high school. So, when I claim Leslie, Doreen and Denise saved my life, I mean it.
Similarly, the past few years of my life had been much like my pre-adolescence. Saturn was again, transiting my sun in its 28-year cycle. This time I had been prepared with astrological foreknowledge. I knew this period of time would be restricting. I knew it would leave me feeling lonely. I knew it would be filled with travail and unwanted responsibility. However, to be forewarned, in this case, was not to be armed. There is little one can do to arm oneself to go through isolation and unending feelings of failure other than to be prepared to sit out the time and conserve one's energy — which is what I did.
RETROGRADING ALL THE WAY TO CANYON HIGH
In May 2003, my current Saturn transit was finally reaching its end. Coincidentally, I also had my first reunion with "the girls" in almost 30 years. Not only was Saturn at precisely the same degree it had been when I first met them, but Mercury was retrograde. Though many astrologers point to the three week Mercury retrograde as a difficult period of failed communications and plans gone awry, I have always seen it as a time of reflection. Yes, your computer will break down, or your car will need service, but that just gives you more time to plan what you'll say in that next brilliant e-mail, or where you'll go on your succeeding road trip.
Getting together, after all these years, was not consciously astrologically timed. Yet, in light of Kim-Rogers Gallagher's advice for Mercury retrograde periods Ñ to "confine your activities as much as possible to those that have "re" attached to the beginning of the word. Re-schedule appointments, repair vehicles, return to the past, re-write documents and agreements, and so forth" — we could not have chosen better if we'd tried.
As it was, we had chosen the date rather haphazardly. Beginning late last year, Leslie began to circulate e-mails to the rest of us broaching the subject of getting together. Through our round robin communicating, it took months to decide on a date, to discard the idea of camping and to agree on a location to meet. Despite some confusion in our missives to one another, we worked out the details and met on May 5th at a motel in the Santa Clarita Valley, home of our adolescence.
I had been feeling both excitement and trepidation about the meeting. Would it be awkward? Would we find we had nothing to say to each other after 30 years? Would we find ourselves judging each other? Would I recognize anyone? Leslie and Doreen both claimed they would be distinguishable only because they each weighed 400 lbs. I had not seen Denise, who I was picking up from the airport, for so many decades that I had no idea what she would look like. God knows, I've looked better in my life.
Yet from the first moment I spotted the smiling Denise, disembarking from the plane at the Hollywood-Burbank airport I knew things would be okay. Leslie had told me, years earlier, that Denise had joined the FBI. I was worried she was going to be some kind of right-wing cop. She almost immediately assuaged my trepidation when, within ten minutes, we began a conversation about the LSD and other drugs we'd taken in our lives. It turned out she wasn't in the FBI, after all. She was a law enforcement officer in another branch of the Homeland Security Department. It was the type of career choice I would never have expected from our group of friends, yet after talking to her it seemed perfectly logical Ð and oddly fascinating.
We arrived at the motel first, chatting amiably the whole way, and waited for Leslie and Doreen. From our room, we watched as they pulled up in their rented Dodge. We both held our breath as they got out. I supposed that anyone who would issue a disclaimer about their appearance, like the ones they had, was worried. From the reasonably-svelte looks of the two of them, I concluded that, all of us, who had come to maturity in the era of "very special" TV movies about anorexia, might still have some self-image issues we had not worked out. I knew I still dieted and thought of food alternately as enemy and comforter Ñ much like I thought of my family. Perhaps I was not alone in this.
REUNITED, AND IT FEELS SO GOOD
From the first, it felt like old times, as if three decades had not intervened since we were together as a group. Always the ringleader, Leslie suggested the first activity. We would go to the graveyard where Michelle, our absent fifth was buried. This seemed, to all of us, like the natural order of business. Indeed, there was nothing morbid about it. We spent 30 minutes at the grave taking zany photos with her headstone and stealing flowers from other graves to honor her. Michelle's death had been a terrible trauma for us in 1976. Now, it was just another part of our lives Ñ a part that we could acknowledge, without all the emotional baggage of the past.
Next, we took off to our Alma Mater. "All hail Canyon High School." We strolled through the buildings that had been constructed in 1969 in a style that was the paradigm for modern schools of the era. Modular, it was called then. The brick and glass buildings seemed smaller and dowdier than we remembered. Denise's mural was gone from the amphitheater. When we expressed dismay over the loss, she distanced herself from it by acting like "that other girl painted it." It seemed alarming that she spoke about her former self as if it was a separate person, but perhaps she was right. As the evening wore on I, too, would begin to feel a similar separation from the person I had once been.
We drove by old houses and haunts, saw parents, took more photos and finally settled in for dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant, which was still in the strip mall where we'd left it. The management had remodeled the place sometime within the past couple of decades. Gone was the dark coziness of the red vinyl booths, replaced by a bright, airy look that did not suit our mood. Nevertheless, we were cheered by our margaritas, and after dinner retired to the dark karaoke bar that had sprung up in our long absence.
It was later that night when we settled in to Leslie and Doreen's room to look at old photos, read old letters and listen to Leslie read her memoir of high school, that I began to see why Denise might want to distance herself from the past. Hearing my 13-year-old words — yellowing but still encased in their envelopes covered with Snoopy stickers — read back to me at this late date, made me realize that I was no longer the naive, angry teenager I'd been. Unfortunately, I realized, Iwas still angry, but I was now just a jaded, cynical adult.
We spent the next day at an old pot smoking, haunt, the Nike base. A former cold war era missile base, in the mountains separating the Santa Clarita and San Fernando Valleys, it was just as deserted and lovely as we remembered. We spent hours, taking ever more photos, reminiscing, and talking about the current state of our lives. We marveled over how much we still had in common and vowed to meet again in two years to raft down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I felt certain that our rekindled camaraderie would assure that we all honor that date.
My trip into the past left me feeling satisfied and grateful. Grateful for the friendship these girls gave me when I needed it most, and satisfied that they were still there, ready to become part of my life again. I wished they had been around the last few years when I had been living in my self-imposed friendless exile. I know Saturn would not have allowed that anyway. I had to wait it out. Just as I had needed to miss my official high school reunion to wait for this "real" one. Mercury retrograde had finally led me back into the fold — just in time.
Now all I have to worry about is that Uranus conjunction in a couple of weeks.
DR. ZODIAC ARCHIVE CURRENT -2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 |
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