Like Toilets that Flush Backwards

My grandmother Helen is pretty well-known among a certain circle of New York and Cleveland Jews and members of our family for sending people random junk in the mail. Often it is a newspaper clipping, her perception of your interest in which is not always clear. If you are lucky, she has scribbled an explanation on the back of the envelope -- a New York Times review of a play, for example, might be accompanied with a note like this: "Tony Kushner was your Uncle Hugh's roommate at Columbia, but Tony was mean to Hughie because he wasn't a homosexual." But more often than not, there is no such note, and you are left to guess why she has sent you a page full of real estate listings in Crown Heights or an advertisement for the sociology department at the New School (the latter, you suspect, may have been instigated by that one time you mentioned sociolinguistics in passing).

When visiting her in East Hampton, my brother showed her a drawing of an anime character he had copied from a graphic novel, and a week later she sent him an invitation to the opening of an exhibition on American painting that had taken place six months earlier in California (my brother lives in Virginia). One time she sent me a used bra that was at least 4 sizes too big for me. And I'm pretty sure my cousin Rebecca once got a pair of pantyhose with a hole in them.

Sometimes she does send something useful, but often with strange ideas as to how you should use it. Not too long ago, she sent me a small rubber cosmetics bag with an assortment of sample-sized eyeshadows, lipsticks, and mascaras inside -- the kind you get sometimes as a free gift when you buy other makeup -- along with a note suggesting I use the bag as a clutch when I go out dancing at night.

Once in a while, though, a real gem arrives. Shortly before returning to Buenos Aires, I received a package from her that, along with a bunch of crap I didn't want, contained an old necklace of hers that I actually thought looked pretty cool. Now, I was a bit conflicted at first about wearing the necklace, as it just so happens that this necklace is made out of ivory, which, at least in theory, I am against. But, like, a vegan friend of mine who once reasoned that it was OK for him to wear leather as long as it was vintage (invoking a logic that was based more on fashion, I believe, than ethics), I decided that it was OK for me to wear the necklace because the poachers responsible for the necklace were probably long gone by now and, therefore, posed no threat to the lives of any current or future elephants.

Plus, this necklace has actual magical powers.

At first, I thought it was just a good luck necklace. I was, after all, wearing this necklace when I took my laptop to the Apple store in order to purchase a new battery and, instead of charging me 150 dollars, the guy working at the genius bar gave me the battery for free, presumably just to be nice (my warranty on the previous battery had run out a long time ago).

As an isolated incident, of course, this does not prove that my necklace has any magical powers. Perhaps a stranger had recently given the genius bar guy a free car and he was simply paying it forward. Maybe he was just in a good mood. Maybe it was actually my cleavage that had magical powers.

But I was also wearing this necklace when I boarded my plane back to Buenos Aires and no one was seated next to me, giving me extra room to stretch out and sleep comfortably on the overnight flight.

Clearly, this necklace of mine had magical powers. And up to this point, it seemed that these powers were exclusively good.

Unfortunately, like toilets that flush backwards, my necklace's powers appear to reverse on the other side of the equator. I was wearing the necklace when I got off the plane and Manuel's brother's car wouldn't start. I was still wearing the necklace when, after getting the car running, Martin slammed on the brakes on the way out of the airport parking lot. We didn't hit the car in front of us, but the bag with my laptop in it slid off the seat next to me and hit the floor pretty hard.

At this point, it should have become clear to me that this necklace had ceased to be the good luck charm like it had been in the northern hemisphere, but was rather proving to be somewhat of a curse. But I left the necklace on and was still wearing it when we got home and I tried to turn on my computer and it wouldn't start.

Then I wore it to the MacStation, where the tech support guy informed me that, unlike at genius bars, at MacStatons, you have to pay 150 pesos just to have them look at your computer.

And I even wore it when I went back to get the diagnosis and was informed that not only did I need a new hard drive and would probably lose most of my data (only some of which is backed up, of course -- thanks, necklace), it would also take over a month for the new hard drive to arrive.

To make matters worse, soon after I got back to Buenos Aires, the city suffered some of the coldest temperatures it has seen in years.

I took off the necklace.