If You Have to Get Off the Plane to Buenos Aires, Do it in Good Company
En Route to Buenos Aires, Batya Reads International Palms
If you have to get off the plane to Buenos Aires, make sure you do it with at least a couple of Argentineans and a guy from Montreal named Max. We were about to board the 11:30 p.m. out to BA when the guy behind the desk asked first in Spanish and then English for volunteers to take $800 good for flights on American Airlines and associates for a year. The plane had been oversold. We were all part of the group waiting to hear if we had been selected. And we were bored.
We kept asking about our status. The guy in the uniform just kept answering, wait. Wait we did. We were pushy, impatient, and bored. And pretty soon, in a mix of English, French, and Spanish, we had gotten to know each other pretty well.
Almost instantly, the whole gang discovered that I was a palmist on my way to interview Argentinean palmists for a column leading to the next installment of my palmistry book, Opening Palms (available on Amazon). In the last edition, I had interviewed Hindu palmists in Varanasi and New Delhi. But this time, I had a series of interviews booked with women in the international palmistry network.
For some reason, there were only two palmists in the registry in Mexico, but 15 in Argentina. I read somewhere once, when I first got into this research, I told my airport gang, that the diviners had all had to leave Spain during the Spanish Inquisition, and the farthest they could go was Argentina. Thus, I intuited, such a high concentration.
“Is that true?” Max asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “That is what I am going to find out.”
Within 24 hours we were all back on the plane. In the interim I had read the hands of two of the Argentineans, beginning at the complimentary breakfast and running right on for two hours in the lobby of the four-star airport hotel where I also showed them my jewelry. Then, when they went off to see South Beach, I went upstairs to my king size bed and six pillows to catch an episode of Law and Order and record the events of the day.
