AUTHOR’S NOTE: Saturday night in Savannah, GA I pulled the cards below for the final leg of our road trip to Daytona Beach, FL. We arrived without further incident around 1:30 PM Sunday, March 1^st.

Overview: The three adjacent face cards seemed to have the potential for lively interaction, but beyond the King of Clubs exchanging a few amiable words with the Jack of Spades (a total stranger) at a gas station, there was no excitement forthcoming. The two mild-mannered Hearts at the end had me paraphrasing T.S. Eliot: “That’s the way the trip ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” or rather a sigh of relief.

My first thought upon seeing the “erratic, unsettled” Jack of Spades was that we would encounter another wayward tractor-trailer driver and would have to take evasive action to avoid an accident. But nothing of the sort happened. While I was gassing up the car after breakfast, a younger man (anyone 50-ish looks young to me) who was similarly engaged on the far side of the pump began talking to me about “kids these days.” He was referring to a teenager behind a nearby McDonald’s who was clearly stoned out of his mind and making all kinds of bizarre gestures, as if he had a private movie playing inside his head. The yakker was a Midwesterner from Ohio who said cheerfully that he would talk to anyone, any time, and he was actively demonstrating the truth of that statement. He kept me almost ten minutes after we both had finished pumping, just chewing the fat and delaying my departure (not that I minded because he was interesting, but my wife was waiting).

As the King of Clubs (a “reliable married man”). I was the other party to this lop-sided conversation, while my wife, who was behind the wheel because she is at her best in the morning, was the energetic Queen of Diamonds tapping her foot. Beyond the three-way mis en scene involving the face cards, there was no additional drama to be found in their interaction, and we got underway.

The 7 of Hearts is perhaps the least “discordant” of the Sevens; according to Kapherus, it relates to peaceful surroundings, happy surprises, and “things that come in twos.” While driving an automobile in the middle of a pack of others going 75 mph hardly qualifies as “peaceful,” all but the impatient, lead-footed sports car drivers were on their best behavior, and – it being Sunday – there were few large commercial vehicles on the road to aggravate us. The only other “happy surprise” we experienced was that our condo was ready for us two hours ahead of schedule,

The 2 of Hearts could be considered something that “comes in twos,” which in this case could be emblematic of our mutual delight at successfully completing the long trek. At its best, Two is a number of cooperation, and that is exactly what it took to get us here safely and in good spirits.