I thanked the women in the Old Oraibi shop, left them speaking Hopi, and got into my Sunfire. As I started it up, another woman came to my window as though she'd been lying in wait for me to emerge. I rolled the window down. She opened a shoebox to show me three of her own handmade kachina dolls, very primitive and of scant artistic merit. She briefly described the symbolic significance of each one, and told me that she carved them from cottonwood roots and painted them with natural pigment dyes -- thus satisfying my presumed need that the kachinas be "authentic" and made by "real" Hopis out of "indigenous" material. Given their rudimentary and hasty composition, I thought they were exorbitantly overpriced (especially compared to the souvenirs I bought in Southeast Asia). But I talked the woman down and bought two of them anyway.

How desperately was I searching for spiritual counsel, for amulets and sacred objects that weren't dollars? I had bracelets of Akha beads from Laos on my wrists, Hopi kachinas in my bag, a sarong from Sumatra, Sierra coffee from a mountain man. Tomorrow I would buy Hopi twig tea in a parking lot, a Zuni knife the next day. About a month later, two nights before Christmas, I told my friend Kelly that I needed a new neck chain, because an overzealous hairdresser in Jakarta broke the hasp of my old one while shampooing me. Kelly unhooked one of the two chains she was wearing and put it around my neck. It was handmade by a friend of hers who was sitting there with us, and whose business is making and selling them with her brother in New York City. From what she told me about the pieces and where they have been displayed (in Soho boutiques, on the cover of Elle, like that), I gathered that the pieces are probably quite expensive. She politely said nothing, though, while Kelly gave me what must have been a gift intended exclusively, and expensively, for Kelly. But there's no way I'm giving it back. It's got a horseshoe pendant on it (of especial significance back in Texas, where I was about to resettle), and it feels somehow as if, because a friend laid it upon me, even if only in wine-dizzy spontaneity -- feels as if it will ward off evil, or remind me of love when I am lonely. Perhaps the horseshoe will bring me luck even though it hangs upside down. Perhaps it binds me to Kelly in some occult way neither of us will ever know; or to the woman who sat silently by and watched Kelly wrap me in it.

I never used to care much about things. I bought my clothes in thrift stores and inherited discarded cars and furniture from my family and friends, donated stuff to the Salvation Army when it fell into disuse. But my eyes have changed, and my sense of the value of objects with them. If you give me something these days, I will hold it as precious; I will not forget. For years I have been generous, I have thrown lavish dinner parties and given gifts I could not afford; I have been profligate with my wines and my charity, have wasted my love and tolerance on people who never repaid it. (I am a waiter: my very job title connotes patience.) When this abundance redounds to me in these comparatively lean times, I meet it with profound gratitude, loyalty and devotion. So I beg you do not tell me lies, do not give me reproductions or alibis or castoffs. I have in these faith-seeking days no mechanism to spot fakes; I go where I am led, and my assent may imperil me. I am an easy mark, American, aware of my own gullibility but powerless to combat it. Come to my window with kachina dolls and I will buy them. Invite me to Laos and I will accept. Drag me bodily off the street, if you will, and make me the tenth for your minyan. (That actually happened the other day here in Los Angeles.) I have become a follower, a new role for me, and I play the part with the total transformative method, subsumed into the character, appropriately guileless and blind. You can, if you wish, lead me to slaughter.

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Unless there has been a remarkable design coincidence, or rapacious copying, I think I saw Sheryl Crow wearing my very chain during a VH-1 interview. But I constantly see things that aren't there when it comes to my connection to Sheryl Crow.