That Trickster, Smeagol
The trickster has his own chapter in our book. Anyone who has ever experienced a trickster synchro knows why this Jungian archetype deserves his own chapter. He plays with us, this archetype, laughs at us, pokes fun at us. Think Smeagol in Lord of the Rings, the Magician in the tarot, Jim Carey in The Mask, the Joker in Batman…You get the idea.
One of our first posts on the trickster was called Tony and the Trickster, when we had maybe 3 readers. Tony was Trish’s dad. It’s such a classic trickster tale that we decided to post again, rewritten.
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Tony was a retired accountant, who absolutely loved numbers. Born in Quincy, Illinois in 1913, he left there some time after high school and accompanied his older brother to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where one of their sisters lived. He didn’t have the money to attend college. The irony here is that when he was in his late 70s, he applied for membership in MENSA, the high I.Q. society, and got in. I think he attended a technical school of some kind in Tulsa. Then the Great Depression hit and whipped away the American economy. He applied for a job as an accountant with Creole (Exxon) and in 1937 landed in some obscure town on the shores of Lake Maracaibo.
Now skip ahead more than 60 years. Tony is in his late 80s. His wife of 56 years died several years earlier. He has Parkinson’s and pretty much lives in a wheelchair, in an assisted living facility in Georgia where my sister is director of nursing. In assisted living facilities, your neighbors change frequently. As my dad remarked on more than one occasion, “We all know that assisted living is the end of the line, the equivalent of mile marker zero.” That’s Key West. “I never know who lives across the hall from me.”
So a couple months after he moved in, the man who had been living across the hall from him passed on and a woman moved in. A few days later, he met her. To his utter and total shock, the woman was a former high school classmate from Quincy,Illinois – from more than 65 or 70 years earlier. When I commented about the incredible synchronicity, my dad’s reply was: “The universe has a twisted sense of humor. I don’t like her any more now than I did back then.”
Looks like the trickster had brought his life full circle and taught me a thing or two about the nature of its lesson.
Hi Ray! Their interactions: there weren't any. Occasionally they ran into each other in the dining room, she flirted with him a few times, but that was it. He never changed his mind about her. She passed away three years or so before he did.
I love this blog. I would love to hear more about their interactions.
Ray
Your idea made me laugh out loud, Sansego. Trick the trickster.
Irony again. 🙂
Can we "trick" the trickster? As in…I didn't really like that lady I was crazy about in college. Run with it, trickster!
wv: essillip
Really good one! Ghaa to have a high school neighbor that you didn't like in high school. Definitely trickster.
Sometimes Destiny sends the trickster to bring us back to an opportunity we may have missed first time around! It's kinda nice when this happens…..if the return is a GOOD one! 🙂
cj WV: brudd hhhmmmmmm
what a terrific story on more than one level – wonder what the "rest of the story" really was??? 🙂
Love this story – there are some people in life we don't seem to be able to escape from … and yet others fade away when we want to cling to them. All part of our lessons I suppose.
Thanks for a wonderful…well needed morning laugh! The trickster seems to be on his side on this one…since it might be an issue he needed to resolve before the last exit?
Hope your daughter settles in nicely and you both won't be to lonely after she leaves.