Ezra Azra--The Future Is Predictable

While Christina was waiting at home, one day a Gypsy woman appeared at her door to tell fortunes. The Gypsy woman prophesied “There will be a big accident when your husband’s ship lands, but he will not be hurt.” On May 05, 1907, the ship put into port in Galveston, Texas, U.S.A. Throngs of people crowded on the wood dock to welcome the ship. The dock collapsed; many people perished in the water. All those on the ship were uninjured. It happened just as that Gypsy woman had predicted.’ (By Rhonda Leanne Stock, from her 2002 story, “The Immigrant Experience” at www.storyhouse.org.

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I have never had a cat as a pet. For the first twenty-nine years of my life I had never seen a domestic cat. And so when I was six years old a peripatetic part-time fortune-teller predicted that sometime in my future a cat would save my life, all my family members at that table having a tea-break were skeptically and dismissively amused.

For two reasons, that fortune-teller did not mind the skepticism. First, because my Grampa poured him a second cup of tea, nonetheless.

The second reason was that his main reason for visiting us was not as a fortune-teller.

A family member observed that the best news of that prediction was that it guaranteed I would live safely as long as I had nothing to do with cats; and since there had never been a cat in our lives for generations this side of the horizon, I was guaranteed a long safe life.

Another family member cautioned us that the fairy tale of “Sleeping Beauty”, first told in Italy in the year 1550, was proof that defeating a prophecy by avoiding one of its stipulations just does not work.

Since I had never seen a cat by then, the prediction meant less than nothing to me.

I had so forgotten the prediction that when it happened to me seventy-five years later in another country, memory of the prediction took years after that to kick in. It was only a few years later when I was reading the story by Rhonda Leanne Stock, that it all came back to me with tsunami-like impact!

Seeing futures in tea leaves was not that fortune-teller’s main occupation. He was paid for re-furbishing coir mattresses. He traveled by bicycle to the homes of his regular customers. His tools were two sturdy long wood canes, a sewing kit in a wood box, and mattress cloth.

Coir-filled mattresses were not sold in stores, and not made in factories. Those bicycle itinerant coir mattress makers were common sights all over our village-town.

Coir is the coarse fiber from the outer husk of a coconut. It is known for its durability, breatheability, and resistance to mold and mildew. It took about three hours to make a coir mattress, or to refurbish an existing mattress.

The process was hard work but straightforward, and required no special skills. One person could finish making or refurbishing a coir mattress within three hours. A coir mattress was the first choice of poor people because each mattress made in the backyard cost less than a tenth of any other kind of mattress sold in stores. Coir was inexpensive and was sold stuffed in canvas bags in General Stores, and markets. I remember carrying bags of coir on my back in my teens working for a pittance as a delivery worker.

I emigrated in my thirtieth year. In my new country, domestic cats as pets is as normal as having dogs as pets. It is not unusual for a home to have cats and dogs as pets. Most pet dog owners keep their dogs within their yards. Most pet cat owners allow their cats to roam freely far away from home, and to stay away from home for days.

One of my homes overseas was an apartment on the third floor of a three-storey building. Each of the apartment homes had a balcony with a glass sliding door.

It was a noisy building, day and night. A fair amount of the noise was made by cats fighting cats, day and night. Many tenants all around me owned cats, which had free run of the building by day and by night.

I had no animal pets. However, the repair person of the building would bring their cats when they went about repairing. For that reason, I did not report minor malfunctions; I repaired them myself at my cost.

The balconies were cat highways, by day and night. When I had to keep balcony windows and door open for fresh air, I kept the openings to only a finger width.

Petty crimes were so frequent on the premises that Police cars were a normal sight in the parking lot and on the adjacent streets. Especially at night, law-breakers continually exploited the ubiquitous noises to mask their illegal shenanigans.

One windy rainy thunder lightnings night just after midnight, I heard sounds of a violent conflict on my balcony. As usual, I tensed and armed myself, and made sure there were items of furniture against all doors. The noises sounded like there was a skirmish happening between a cat or cats, and persons.

That there were cats and strange persons on my balcony was not new information. That there were strange persons on my balcony so near after midnight made it certain I would still be awake when it was time for me to prepare to leave for work in the morning.

The weather was still stormy when I was ready to leave for work at about eight o’clock that morning. Before I left, I worked up courage to go out on the balcony.

I found a screwdriver on the floor by the balcony door, and smears of blood on the balcony floor. I guessed that if most of the blood smear on the balcony floor was not because of the rain and wind, the wound source must have been fatal.

I left the screwdriver where it lay, and hoped the wind would eventually blow it off the balcony. To aid and abet the wind, I used my booted feet to move the screwdriver to the edge of the balcony.

When I arrived from work late that afternoon, I was most happy to notice that the rain had washed away all the blood smears, and the wind had cleared the balcony of the screwdriver.

By the time that incident occurred, there was nobody still alive who had been there at my home in the country of my birth drinking tea when that mattress-maker fortune teller had made the prophecy.

Sometimes I think that had that fortune-teller added the stipulation that my future would have a violent cat in it only if I was in another country, I might have chosen to never emigrate.