“Magical Appropriation in La Jolla” by Dan Grossman

Magical Appropriation in La Jolla

My sister Ali and I were eating shrimp empanadas at the La Jolla Farmers Market when a young woman with a gold nose ring and a young man in a baseball cap sat down at the opposite end of the oblong table where we were sitting. 

 “Did you learn much Spanish when you were in Mexico City?” the young man asked her.

“No, most of the time I was holed up in my apartment,” she said. “I was studying psychology virtually.”  

Meanwhile Ali was deciding what to munch on next. “I think I’ll get a samosa,” she said.

I was waxing poetic about my empanadas. “I love the shrimp and the green onions,” I said, swallowing the first bite. “That combo really does it for me. ” 

But the flow of the words of the young woman across from us — as she talked about her journey from Freudian psychology, through Jung, and on into astral projection — didn’t let up. 

“I felt myself being brought back to life rather than just kind of seeing the mind as a separate entity,” she told her companion.

In the past month, she said, she had imbibed peyote in Death Valley with Juan Carlos.

“He’s a soothsayer steeped in Yaqui traditions and magic, and I’ve been initiated into his tribe,” she said. “He helped me see the hidden light behind the solar orb.”

“Really?” the young man interjected. “But aren’t the Yaqui Indians from Oaxaca? You’re saying you saw them in Death Valley?” 

The woman shook her head. “International borders are nothing to magicians,” she said. “Neither, for that matter, are the borders between space and time, between life and death.” 

At that moment the woman vanished into the humid, salty air. Ali and the woman’s companion exchanged WTF glances. 

But I was more captivated by the magical empanada melting in my mouth.