Summer Magic Box of Goodies

Jessica Glareheart did a weird thing one Saturday afternoon in June.

Jessica Glareheart did weird things all the time. She didn’t tell anyone about them. Nobody needed to know, except for the people she decided would need to know.

That Saturday, it rained, and Jessica Glareheart was bored. She knew she needed to clean, sort, organize files and paperwork, scrub the kitchen floor. And yet there were so few things she wanted to do other than create. She wanted to make magic. So she decided to make magic new.

Jessica Glareheart is what Elders would call a Magic Creator.

So as Jessica sorted through papers on her desk—poetry, postcards, little essays kids had written—she began to make piles.

Four piles.

She stacked her variety of papers and a few other small, odd trinkets of different shapes on the dining room table. She placed each pile on its own turquoise placemat.

One pile, she decided, was for the Family Man.

Another pile was for the Entrepreneur. This entrepreneur, in Jessica Glareheart’s mind, was sexless and ageless.

The third pile was for the Creative Type. A special and witty vixen.

The fourth? A Financial Expert, of course. Every woman needed a financial expert in her life. This was Jessica’s time to find hers.

Jessica Glareheart then put a few records on, to make the sorting process more enjoyable. First, she played songs from Tori Amos’s album Boys for Pele, notably “Muhammad, My Friend.” After that, a little Zeppelin. Then some Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar.”

When she was done sorting, and the record player stopped, Ms. Jessica Glareheart found a skein of yarn, and she cut it into strips. She put each of the four piles into its own padded envelope, and wrapped the envelopes like small packages with yarn, and sealed each package with tape.

Jessica Glareheart set the mini-packages aside in a brown paper box in her dining room, waiting for just the right opportunity to seal the box with duct tape and deliver it to a wholesome, thoughtful, intelligent group of people.

What group? She wasn’t yet sure.

She was envisioning a company, an organization. A venture capitalist firm interested in investing for the common good. Some group focused on the big picture, not just helping rich, privileged people make more and more money with no impactful systemic change. Adventurers, she thought. Rebels. Innovators set on tackling the impossible. She wanted to find the superheroes of all venture capitalist firms to make headway in The New World.

When she decided who that was, she would ship the cardboard box out.

The box would embody mystery, magic, intrigue. Truth. A novel way forward.

For the time being, though, she wasn’t going to tell anyone her ideas or her plans.

It would only be for her and the future innovators to know.

**

Now Jessica Glareheart moves from her dining room into her kitchen, and she is cleaning off the breakfast dishes. She is lathering up the soap on the sponge, and she is making the water warm as it runs over her hands.

As she lathers and washes, we are going to step into present tense and tell you a few things about Jessica.

People like Jessica Glareheart are faithful and disciplined. At times, they speak to angels. The Jessica Glarehearts of the world are like Mary Poppinses, except they wear cute, 21st century clothing with colorful sashes and chic hats. They are not meant to nanny children, but to save the world in a variety of other ways. Jessica Glarehearts initially appear in your third eye, as a vision or a mirage, a presence you have always longed for. Later, Jessica Glarehearts manifest into the physical world, in front of you, in the flesh.

Jessica Glarehearts are dreams come true.

You may have hung out with a Jessica Glareheart and not even known it, by the way. You often don’t recognize these kinds of people until after they’re gone. They either die before you find out about them, or they disappear from Facebook just as you become intrigued. Or, more likely, they move to Sedona, Arizona.

Jessica Glarehearts are impossible to grasp or to own. They do what they want in this life. They conquer every room, only their concept of conquering the room is filling it with their hearts, their minds, their clarity, and not through obtaining property. If a Jessica Glareheart brought her own drum to march to at your party, it would probably be a drum a carpenter made in Zimbabwe, which she found in a dumpster in New Jersey, and then covered with glitter from her kid’s Easter egg-dying kit. That is a Jessica-Glareheart-kind-of-drum.

So here is what we, the narrator, want to know about you, the reader of this tale.

If a Jessica Glareheart came into your life, with her magical box of goodies, would you show up and open the box?

Would you notice it was there?

Even deeper, we must ask you this:

Do you see?

**

We also want to assure you that Jessica Glareheart has a back-up plan, in case she cannot find the innovators she seeks. We don’t have to tell you what the back-up plan is. We just want you to know that the back-up plan exists.

Jessica Glarehearts have back-up plans, because they were probably born in September, or April, under very practical zodiac signs.

Jessica Glareheart is ready for anything, prepared for nothing, and yet sort-of, kind-of, prepared for almost every single possibility in some dimension of time.

Jessica Glareheart realized the importance of having a back-up plan when she got divorced several years ago. That year, she told every woman she knew, “ALWAYS HAVE A BACK-UP PLAN! Sometimes guys screw you, and it is not in a pleasurable way or in a place your body wants to be touched!” She is not sure if the women listened.

Jessica now, and forevermore, will call her ex-husband The Patriarchy, so please note that.

He was not always The Patriarchy, however.

(This is all an aside.)

Early on, when Jessica and The Patriarchy met, as DJs in a college radio station, Jessica Glareheart thought The Patriarchy was nice, smart, and a little sarcastic. She also noticed he wore terribly ugly shoes which she could not abide. (Those shoes are called loafers, and if you wear them without socks, you should stop reading now.)

One day, when Jessica noticed The Patriarchy had gotten a new pair of somewhat decent shoes, she recognized he may be eligible for her to date. He asked her to dinner not long after that. She went. He paid. (Thumbs up, Patriarchy.)

Once, a black kid in a poor neighborhood on a hot summer day walked up to The Patriarchy and said to him, “Why you so pink?”

The Patriarchy laughed. Back then, The Patriarchy had a heart and wanted to help people. He could laugh at himself and admit his flaws. Yet after they were married, he stopped wanting to help. He just wanted to watch porn.

“The Patriarchy lost himself,” Jessica said.

Now, back to those dishes.

**

When Jessica Glareheart finished the dishes that Saturday night, and returned to the brown paper box of items in her dining room, she wondered if she should include a list of instructions for the future innovators. One list, or four separate lists? Let's go over those characters again: the Family Man, the Entrepreneur, the Creative Type, the Financial Expert.

If she were to write something up, she would tell these people that the purpose of the Magic Box was to help them tap into their playfulness and intuition, to sense, to feel, and to open up to the presence of mystery. The Magic Box of Goodies would require weighing, considering, pondering, and joy.

It was to be an experience. A reminder of life, in all its vastness, richness, its exploration.

(We are telling you all of this, by special consent of Jessica Glareheart, who has agreed to let you in on her secret.)

(We are only the narrator. You shouldn’t pay much attention to us.)

(We are just sitting next to a half-empty ramekin of ketchup and a plate of French fries making this entire thing up. We also have a glass of red wine with a grape varietal we do not yet know, but we are not sure if we will drink all of it.)

(This restaurant is in Frenchtown, New Jersey. It is hot, and dusk, and the weather feels a little like New Orleans today.)

(Is everything supposed to be “new” in places like New Jersey and New Orleans, or is the meaning behind the name “new” simply to ensure that the spirit never gets old?)

(If Jessica Glareheart was still married to The Patriarchy, she would have asked him this question while they ate fries.)

(She might also ask him, “Is marriage a worthy and relevant thing to do?”)

(The Patriarchy might have said, “I don’t know. But we’re stuck now.”)

(Then Jessica would have continued the discussion, listing several pragmatic reasons for marriage’s use in popular culture.)

**

Let’s go back to The Now, the dining room, where Jessica Glareheart’s Magic Box of Goodies sits, only we're going to tell this last part in past tense.

Jessica Glareheart thought she would keep the box in the corner, out of the way. She would wait for exactly the right person or people to send the box to, at exactly the right time. She would select people who could receive her Summer Magic Box of Goodies with joy. Those who were open to fresh opportunities. Those whose hope and inspiration for life outweighed their suspicion and cynicism.

Jessica took out a black marker from her kitchen drawer, and wrote on the side of the box, “New Magic, Not Yet Seen.”

About one thing Jessica was sure: The recipients of this box were people she did not yet know. She did not yet trust them, either.

Still, she was going to try.