Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter 12: Tarzan and Jane
When I was a girl in Des Moines, I used to babysit for 50 cents an hour. That was at an age before I could go out into the world and work at Burger King and other places and be on the payroll for minimum wage. But I worked hard for that 50 cents an hour. Sometimes I was navigating three kids at a time while doing dishes, cleaning up the house for their mother, bathing all three, and putting them to bed. At the end of the night, I would sometimes have only about two bucks. How funny, as I look back now.
After the children went to bed, I always enjoyed having popcorn and watching late-night movies like Dracula and Frankenstein and all of the other scary movies of our times in the 60s. That was particularly unwise since I then heard every boogeyman sound outside of the house and had to restrain myself from calling my parents to come over. A safe bet was my favorite television series, Tarzan and Jane. I was secretly in love with Johnny Weismuller, and I was so impressed by the story that all the time I was growing up, I actually wanted a chimpanzee. I longed for a chimpanzee like Cheetah, having no idea what one would actually do to sanctify the inside of the house. Well, I thought my parents to be quite unreasonable that they wouldn't let me have one. It was like when they denied me a drum set to learn to be a rock drummer. In the end, they were pretty wise.
When my parents both died within a year and a half of each other in 1986 and 1988, we girls cleaned out the house. Above the refrigerator, I found an old cigar box. It was obviously Dad's, as it contained old college graduation dinner table name cards and some other things of his from college days at Wartburg College in northern Iowa. It was mostly full of old postcards he had collected from his travels when he was young, and by this time they were pretty much antique postcards as well. Some I was so attracted to that I put them in frames and hung them in various places around the house and thought of my dad enjoying those places every time I would pass by them. I am nothing if not extremely sentimental.
One of my favorite postcards was of Tarzan and Jane doing underwater maneuvers for the Tarzan series. It was taken in Silver Springs, Florida. My dad never really knew my love for the Tarzan movies, which makes this even more wonderful. It was a great gift.
By the time I was grown and working at my retreat in the woods outside of Franklin, Tennessee, I still had the postcards on my wall. One year, as I was getting my massage therapy business put together, I decided to advertise for new clients. I had never done that before, and the yellow page ads were quite unsuccessful, with my phone ringing at three in the morning by drunken prospects calling for a massage in the middle of the night. No, I would say I'm not that kind of massage therapist. So the phone book was out.
I embarked on some advertising that was new, and at the time, advertising on the back of grocery store receipts seemed like a good idea. The company had many statistics on how it worked for many new businesses starting out. I went for it. It was a large sum for me at the time, and it was a large sum to contract to, but I gave it a whirl. On top of that, the owner discounted the price of my massage work to attract people, and at the end, for some reason, I did not get one call.
A couple of months went by, and it was clear that this was not the method of attracting clients for me, but the indebtedness to the company for the advertising was still hanging in the balance. I stopped the ads and decided I would see if he would swap out for bodywork for some of the indebtedness. He said no, he didn't have time, but he would ask his sales lady, Eileen. And she was delighted. She started coming to the retreat every week, and I was taking good care of her, but it seemed like it would be a very, very long time before I could satisfy this thousands of dollars that I that they invoiced me for.
Months went by; we chipped away at it as time went by. I enjoyed seeing her so much and talking with her about her life and her journey that it didn't really matter to me anymore about the financial situation. One day we were talking about her deteriorating health and her difficulty in moving and flexing in her now early 70s, and somehow we started talking about what she used to do when she was young. She shared she had been a great swimmer. She had come by it naturally, as her mom and dad taught her from way back when she was a girl. She was very proud. Suddenly, as she talked about her parents being the body doubles for Tarzan and Jane in Silver Springs, Florida, I took her to the hallway and showed her the postcard on the wall. And that was her mom and dad.
I'll repeat that in case you missed it: It was her mom and dad. How does this happen? Only God knows. Truly, only God knows. The level of synchronicity has been the story of my life and is present in all of our lives, I'm sure. We just have to pay close attention so we don't miss it.
Finding the old cigar box, which had been hidden away for 50 years; deciding to keep the postcards inside; later framing some of them; decades later, doing random massage on the woman who came to me by default, and she had to drive an hour round trip on my woods in the middle of nowhere, almost against her physical ability to do it; to accidentally find out about her parents from the 1930s who worked in the film industry; and then showing her that their parents were framed on my wall—I could not even make this one up. Again, I ask all interested parties, how does this happen? Only God knows. Truly, only God knows. You.