In July 1989, with a couple of days off from a Second City tour, I guided my rental car along a mind-numbingly straight Manitoba highway; destination Harriet’s. I’d marked her directions on the crumpled paper map lying on the passenger seat, but didn’t need them once I got out of Winnipeg.
Selkirk, Manitoba resembled every other small Canadian prairie town I’d seen that summer - modest homes, vegetable gardens, above-ground pools tucked in the backyard for the kids to cool off after an afternoon of playing hard in the dusty heat. I pulled up to Harriet’s house, the smallest one on the street.
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Four crumbling cement stairs led to her front door, which stood open behind a wooden screen one. Before I could knock, Harriet sang out from inside the dark house. “Come in, come in” And then, there she was, in heavy grey wool pants and a rumpled floral shirt. Her gray curls were tousled, and she beamed at me, opening her arms wide to fold me in a generous hug. I bent down awkwardly to hug back; she was shorter than I remembered. Had she shrunk? I silently wondered. As we stepped into her cool dark hallway, she asked the usual – How did the drive go? Was I thirsty? She still gave her signature left-hand waggle mid-air while she chatted. It looked like her condition might have worsened over the past two years.
Her voice stopped mid-chatter when she saw me freeze in place, and stare upwards. Her living room ceiling was a canopy of disembodied inky images. They hung like crazy laundry, pinned on four long lines strung from wall to wall; a flock of one-dimensional blackbirds shimmering mid-air. I entered softly, careful not to disturb the room’s hush. Everywhere were handprints, each of them unique.
A large, meaty, working pair with broad fingers, and thick wrists. Slender delicate hands ending in tendril fingers. Further on, two hands but nine digits, no right pinkie. A breezy gust from the open door set some arthritis-gnarled fingers moving in an odd antic dance. One lone left hand had no mate. I looked to Harriet for the story. Farming accident, she told me, matter of factly. And the remaining hand contained more than the usual amount of information she’d expected. Did she think it took on the information of its missing partner? Her eyes lit up, “I am looking into this!”
Around many of the handprints, Harriet had scrawled tiny notes. They snaked around the images, interrupted by an occasional bracket - an afterthought or clarification. Arrows directed the reader’s eye from the notes to their corresponding hand area. Some notes were in playful colours – purple, red, green, orange – a mysterious code only Harriet knew.
My eye was drawn downward to other prints in the room. Some lay on a radiator. Others stuck out from between a stack of books on the floor beside Harriet’s overflowing dining table. Most of these she was still analyzing; a few in a more organized pile looked finished. She had cleared a small corner of the table for note-taking. Halfway down a page sat a string of words, interrupted mid-sentence. An expensive-looking fountain pen resting on top, its shiny black cap waiting close by.
It seemed Harriet’s whole house was her “lab”. I wondered about day-to-day tasks, how did she make meals or do laundry in all the chaos? Did she have any help? Unlikely, by the looks of things. A black cat soundlessly appeared, landing delicately on the table. It picked its way gingerly over the papers and carefully chose a print to stretch out on. In the shadows beyond the table, a large insolent tabby lounged on top of an overstuffed bookcase. He stared at me unblinking and sent dust motes whirling in an afternoon sunbeam with intermittent flicks of his tail.
Harriet shooed the cats and cleared a bigger spot on the table for tea. She brought me a harp back chair and placed a steamy bowl of homemade vegetable soup in front of me with spoon and paper napkin. I had turned down an earlier offer of lunch, but I think Harriet pretended she hadn’t heard. I found I was hungry. Her delicious soup was oddly comforting in the heat of summer, but just the thing that afternoon.
“I think your sexual frustration is linked to your professional life.” Harriet suddenly launched in with her report on my hands as she poured Earl Grey from a battered old Brown Betty teapot. It took a moment for me to realize she was now starting to report on her analysis of my handprints, taken two years previous. This was the reason I had driven all this way on my day off.
This sexual frustration wasn’t news to me. Relationships and sex baffled me just as much as I craved them. My doomed first marriage flamed out quickly. And just before the tour, I broke up with a figure skating waiter. I wanted to ask Harriet about this observation, but she hurried us along to more “interesting stuff” (Harriet’s phrase) and I forgot all about it.
Harriet’s written report filled several onionskin pages, each dense with her minute writing. The conclusions she drew from my prints captured my so far life and personality with impressive detail. She cautioned me against being too exacting about all of this: any chronological predictions she made should have “a give or take allowance of two years”. Proudly, she added, “I feel I am closer to your actual year for estimates than I usually am.” Many of her historical timelines for me lined up with the actual life events I’d had. She made some predictions – I would not have to worry about money after age fifty (true enough - I can pay my bills now) and I would marry well a second time (also, true after a bumpy start which is another story).
Then, she took a long pause. So far her findings weren’t shocking or upsetting, what was coming? “In your left hand is” - a longer pause as she picked up her pen- “The Wing”. She hovered her nib over a V shape on my left handprint. It resembled a bird mid-flight and appeared only in my left hand. The top open end of the V started under my third and fourth fingers and the bottom pointed down toward the centre of my palm. “‘Thought’s fly swiftly on the wings of intuitions’” This sounded like a famous quote I should know, but more likely it was a Harrietism.
“The presence of The Wing,” she said, “means you are a writer” “Am I?” My heart sped up. Ever since I was seven, I had scribbled thoughts and notes on anything I could find - paper towels, used envelopes, and countless notebooks. Right now, there are sixty-five journals in a box by my furnace, brimming with jumbled ideas and thoughts, snatches of poetry, a few potential novel plots, and a one-woman play I wrote that broke even at a Fringe Festival.
“This skill has not caught fire yet,” Harriet warned. “It is something to be cultivated, not merely inherited. Hence, you will have to work at it…”. OK, I thought. I’m ready to cultivate. I have a sign now. I made a mental note to get a fountain pen like Harriet’s for future book-signing events.
Harriet wasn’t finished: “Your INS (Inner Self Helper: she loved acronyms) is connected to The Wing. It controls the telepathy between us.” Now I paused - telepathy? I felt a strong connection with Harriet but, was it telepathic? She told me she and I had been having intuitive conversations over the previous two years, in addition to our letters and phone calls. I couldn’t tell her I hadn’t shared that experience. I nodded again and said “Hhmmm.”
We were wrapping up and Harriet asked permission to include my information in her final research report. Of course, I said yes. Her study was “really coming together”, she said. Soon she would take it to the printers and then submit it to the University of Manitoba. I know now that I didn’t appreciate the full weight of this for her. She needed to get her research out into the world soon. Now in her mid-eighties, Harriet was well aware that the chances of receiving academic validation for her work were dwindling. But, I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking about my future as a writer.
The light was fading into soft evening grey. I had to return the rental car and rejoin the touring company. Harriet beamed and waved to me as I pulled out. We had agreed to meet again soon.
In the tour van the next day, a few of us jostled for the window seats while the others in front argued about which tapes to play to get us to Stony Mountain – Madonna or the B52s. I plugged into my personal Walkman and cranked up the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited” to sit in the afterglow of my visit with Harriet. My dream of being an actual writer was reignited. I looked at my left palm. I had a sign. I had The Wing.
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