Fortune Teller, but not a Gypsy?

Wanugee
3 min readMar 14, 2021

I’m not a Fortune Teller. At least not the classic image of one.

You know, the Gypsy born outside of town, in a tent, camper or shack, down by the river. I wasn’t born one, a Fortune Teller, or a Gypsy. And I am not a Gypsy Fortune Teller! Or am I? As I reflect on my childhood, perhaps I was a Gypsy? I had lived in 3 different countries, separated by 17,000 miles of oceans, by the age of 8.

If you define Gypsy as a wanderer, roaming about from town to town, a little different, and hard to define and pin down, I might fit.

That’s because I also have “international looks”. I could pass for a lot of ethnicities. Many people want to guess, but they are rarely right. Everybody uses their own filter anyway. We are the sum of our life experiences, so we recognize/relate to what we have experienced/learned. I have been asked so many times, in so many ways, I started to ask the stranger where they were from. After they told me, I would say “So Am I!” It’s an easy way to relate (and get accepted) by a stranger, and learn a bit of their culture, too. If they ask more questions, I would just throw it back to them, they would tell me, and I would reiterate, “So am I!”. Eventually it would get down to “Do you know so and so….?”, and I would just say no, but nice talking to you! And wander off.

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