Word: talisman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Because it is the only meaningful talisman remaining to him after his father's death, every detail of its history becomes sacred. He constantly tries to recreate the letter's origins, to determine whether his mother knew about its existence before he found her with it, and to trace its journey from the safe where it was first kept to the desk drawer where it was after his father's death. He says, "I did not see my mother actually find the letter. Come across it; locate it. I'm building backwards again." Toward the end of the novel...
...Strange Weather she has put together a self-portrait from random sketches by such diverse artists as Jerome Kern and Bob Dylan. She makes the Otto Harbach/Jerome Kern Yesterdays into a devastating diary of faded hope and turns Dylan's superb I'll Keep It with Mine into a talisman of redemption...
...receives a lucky Mexican talisman to stop his nightmares of plane crashes. But, ominously, the talisman breaks in a fight with Bob just before the real crash. In fact, to add to the melodrama. Valens ends up on the Buddy Holly-chartered plane which eventually crashes over Iowa only because he wins a coin toss--the first he has ever won in his life...
Lost in thought, he fiddles with his fingers, rubbing his left hand with his right as though it were a kind of talisman. It is a nervous habit, something he does before nearly every public appearance. At 7:15 a.m., Gary Hart, his black cowboy boots burnished, his blue pinstripe suit neatly pressed, stands in the corner of the windowless waiting room at ABC before going on Good Morning America. He is there to promote The Strategies of Zeus, his recently published spy novel about arms talks in Geneva. Watching the monitor, he hears the announcer telling viewers what...
...rite and techno-trend vocabulary meet in "programming," or getting the most out of your talisman. One West Coast formula for doing so goes this way: first, "clear" the stone by washing it in ocean water (in a pinch, salt water will do). Then leave it outside for at least 24 hours so that rays of the sun and moon may penetrate it. A quicker, high-tech method is to pass an audiocassette eraser over each side of the crystal for half a minute. To program, after the crystal has been cleared, hold it in both hands and blow...