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On Prognostication photo

I can’t see the future, though sometimes I see someone on the street and think it’s someone I know, but it’s not; a few minutes later, I see the person I’d thought the other person was. 

 

My friend can’t see the future, but she can see the past: when she loses something, she says a prayer and suddenly knows where to look. 

 

I read Tarot cards, but they tell me nothing, their meaning as convoluted and obscure as life itself. Once they indicated war in the Middle East would end in 250 years. But maybe everything will end in 250 years. 

 

The other night my daughter said she had a sick feeling she’d never see her dad again. I played it cool but worried until he came home. 

 

Some people believe we create reality with our thoughts alone. In the future I think about, I die, my husband dies, my children die. In the future I don’t think about, same thing. 

 

But none of that’s prognostication, a word that sits in my mind like procrastination. One means to see the inevitable; the other, to delay the inevitable. 

 

Then there’s my grandmother. She said she’d rather die than go to the nursing home. And that’s what she did.