Running Fox: I Believe in Omens

One of my favorite pieces of filmmaking/literature/performance is Jonathan Demme’s “Swimming to Cambodia.” Spalding Gray is beyond neurotic, giving voice to a number of my own manias throughout the tour-de-force monologue.

In that performance, there’s a segment in which Spalding talks about what he calls “Magical Thinking.” It’s his obsessive compulsive need to perform certain rituals, including not being able to leave his home until he hears a positive word on the radio.

It’s hilarious to me because it’s so recognizable. Like Gray, I believe in “magical thinking.” I take things as omens all the time, and this morning I had a doozy.

Driving south on Gregg Manor Road towards 290, after dropping off my kids at Manor Elementary School, I saw, about five cars ahead of me, a fox make a run for it across both lanes of heavy school-time traffic, from east to west across Gregg Manor. He was so fast (I say “he” not knowing the gender, obviously) that I don’t think the cars he managed to bisect even realized he’d gone across.

But I saw him, clear as day – a Running Fox – right there in front of me. Of course by the time I reached the point where he’d made his crossing, he was nowhere to be seen, snuggled safely amid the tall pasture grass that borders the Shadowglen golf course.

Significance: My name: Fuchs, German for fox. My tattoo on my left bicep, a running fox. And my film company, whose name is tagged on the documentary I’m about to present at a national conference in South Carolina? You guessed it: Running Fox Productions.

I felt as if God sent that fox in my path as if to say, “Don’t sweat it, Dan. The people who come see your film are going to love it. It’s good work. Be proud of it.”

The thing about me and my belief in omens, is that I tend to believe the ones I perceive to be “positive” ones. If it had been a black cat darting across Manor Road I would have pshawed it, having a private giggle for those poor suckers who believe in that sort of thing.

But if it’s going to help me have a better experience at the At Risk Youth Forum next week, then I say thank you, to God, and to that little gray fox, for giving me the courage to go forth and excel.