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The Gift

An Eye on the Future

By Coranne CreswellPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
2
The Gift
Photo by Peggy Paulson on Unsplash

Honking the horn three times was the official indication I was open for business. I cranked the door wide, stepped down, and set up the sign with the picture of an owl with a monocle lens and a book under its wing. It was a wise and studious symbol for the bookmobile bus that dropped by this wheat kernel of a prairie farm town not yet grown up enough to have its own library. Someone once said I bore a resemblance and in fact was sometimes referred to as The Owl Lady.

All summer I would circulate through the farm-belt towns that were outside of an hour from the nearest city. Long before websites, emails, or texts, the only way for town people to know of the service was by reading an announcement in the local paper or a thumb-tacked post on the community board beside the notices for church bake sales and the sign-up date for softball. There was a notice that went home with kid’s report cards telling them the dates they could expect the bookmobile.

The girl pulled at her mom who was poised with her feet tucked under the park bench, checking her lipstick in a compact mirror before tucking it into her purse and snapping it shut. She was put together in her crisp short sleeve blouse, a neck scarf, banana-yellow capris and flip up at the bottom Mary Tyler Moore hair-do. The young one had skinned knees, cut off shorts, and a sleeveless shirt with snap buttons. Her cowboy boots were scuffed and dusty as if she had been interrupted from milking cows. She was already giving me the clues I needed to send her home with suitable reading.

Mom and I exchanged hellos while she made her way towards the home décor magazines.

“I bet you are six,” I said by way of a greeting to the girl who was scanning the lower shelf children’s books. Missing a tooth was a giveaway but she looked at me from her freckle flecked face like I had some kind of magical powers.

I do in fact have what could be called a magical power but it had nothing to do with guessing ages.

“Do you also know that my name is Casey?”

She made it SO easy for me. “Yes, I was just going to guess that.”

The Gift; passed down from my grandmother and as the story goes, every 2nd generation oldest daughter. It is the strange, even incredible anomaly of glimpsing a person’s future, revealed in the flash of a moment in the lens of their eye, as if I have a fortune telling ocular telescope.

As Casey chatted, I could see in the glassy window of her light brown eyes. It revealed the perspective of being aboard a horse with a view between the ears on a head that was lunging towards a finish line at breakneck speed. The arms extended were covered in rippling white and gold silk and thick leather reins were woven between fingers whose motion was a relaxed and rhythmic give and take. She had a matching helmet and was flying through airborne clumps of dirt, past horses carrying other goggled riders. The vision included the sound of wind and hoofbeats, the smell of animal sweat, the feeling of joy, and a pounding heart.

Whoa. It wasn’t always this exciting.

The walls of the bus were stocked with a variety of subjects I called self-help, not the new-age section from guru health and mindfulness books that were still twenty years away, but books that between their covers hold stories that could light a fire of curiosity and change the course of a person’s life. It was a perfect support resource for someone with The Gift. There were how-to books, cookbooks, popular novels, racy Hollywood memoirs, books about space and nature, art, music and world history that provided some access to what was beyond a sleepy town that had given up on or not realized its imagination.

“I think what you are looking for is right here.” I directed her to the section that had picture books and early readers, specifically to the horse section; Misty of Chincoteague, Roy Rogers and Trigger, and My First Pony.

The preview comes far in advance of what they will later find themselves doing, that is if they follow the signs. Astronomers follow the stars, climatologists the weather. The Gift reveals where a person will thrive with their own unique calling imprinted on them from the moment they are conceived. A book might sow the first seed or at least feed that appetite and thus make the dream harder to ignore and abandon.

I see the haziness in adult’s eyes that I understand as having drifted or been sidetracked by acquiescing to cultural expectations, especially the women. Exceptional athletes in high school, leaders, thinkers, problem solvers who instead of pursuing whatever would take them to the next level, opted to stop at getting married. A lack of role models doing otherwise were few and far between. Humans applaud genius but most paths lead to a life of security, not the exceptional. It made people nervous for women to even be thinking it, so they were slowly whittled down to a smaller version of themselves. It was 1961 and that’s how it was.

But men also; that used car salesman who still carried a pilot of a jet plane reflection that was fading like a vintage photograph. His wife, whose veiled disappearing eye image was of holding an artist’s brush in front of a canvas on an easel. She asked if there was a book on women artists while three kids under five pulled any book off the shelf they could reach. In the middle of the chaos and while her handsome husband smoked a cigarette outside, the smallest child filled his diapers. The woman, so very disappointed had gathered them up to leave without finding her book. Next time I would have a guide to painting and Tour the New York Met ready to go for her.

Casey bounced out of the bus. I wrote down a note to myself, as was my custom, to look for a book on racing at the main branch, maybe one that at least had photos of female exercise riders because to my knowledge women had not yet won their right to ride against men at the racecourses. The argument was that they are weak when they have their periods and would be a danger to others. I was excited to know it was going to change.

It isn’t just gender rules that set limitations. It’s the geography of where you are born. Casey’s mom signed the book cards and looked up to thank me for the help, I saw in her sea green eyes something she would be unfamiliar with if she had spent her life on the prairie.

“Have you ever been on the ocean?”

“Well, no, never been east of the Rockies, but I sometimes hear seagulls in my dreams.” She appeared mildly embarrassed at the odd confession.

I looked again. It was hazy but I waited. The fog cleared. There was a sail full of wind, whitecaps and the very same hands that were filling out the book card were at 10 and 2 on a ships wheel. The sun lit everything and a faraway white ship, maybe a cruise liner like you would see on a brochure for the Bahamas, floated on the horizon.

“Hang on a minute.” I walked awkward with my bum knee limp, my larger owl-like oval frame taking up most of the space between the sides of the narrow bus. It was a new release; A Curve in Time: The Classic Memoir of a Woman and Her Children Who Explored the Coastal Waters of the Pacific Northwest.

“Oh my.” She added it to her stack.

I heard sea-gulls and the sound of a big wave crashing and the land-bound bus of possibilities swayed for a moment as if on water.

fact or fiction
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About the Creator

Coranne Creswell

Coranne is in a polyamorous relationship with genres of poetry, lit fiction, CNF, and fools around with fine arts on the side. She is a graduate of SFU Writer's Studio. Favorite thing is a good road trip to loosen up the creative muscles.

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