Can I Come Back...Again?

In the 70s, when I lived in Northern Ireland, my mother was doing reincarnation readings as well as her usual counselings. When it comes to reincarnation, I mostly consider it something that would be a nice perk if it existed, for a whole bunch of reasons—but I don't accept it as a given. Just like an afterlife. Which begs the question, if reincarnation doesn't exist, where the hell does all that info come from? Why does a child in India remember her last life, including how to get to her village, the people she knew and loved, and how she died? How can a new Dali Lama be chosen, if he's the reincarnation of the last one, if that process doesn't exist? And how can anyone claim to tell you who you've been before?

I knew my mother wasn't making these stories up, at least not consciously. So where did she get her information from?

I do not know. But I admit it was sometimes fascinating.

When I asked Mother what she thought was going on behind the Irish troubles, she surprised me. She said people were being reborn, back and forth, from Catholic to Protestant, Irish to English, until each individual soul had learned its lesson, had enough, and dropped out of the cycle to go elsewhere. It certainly fit my perception that an endless loop was being perpetuated by blind prejudice and personal revenge: an eye for an eye, a daughter for a son, on and on. (Not that Northern Ireland ever had a corner on that type of cyclical violence; you can find it everywhere that perpetual, senseless war continues.)

Back then, I thought reincarnation explained a lot of things, like how I knew my way around a place I’d never seen before, why I had sudden attractions or repulsions toward people I’d just met, why I had affinities for certain environments. My mother had some very interesting cases: like the time she told her client that he'd been caught and convicted as a thief in an Eastern life, where the penalty was amputation of a hand or arm—only to have him hold up that same arm, withered and useless in this life. Or the woman who Mother said was thrown into a sacrificial well in an Aztec city, and who, in this life, was terrified of showers.

But I've also noticed that reincarnated lives always seem to include priestesses from Atlantis and shahs from India, but damn few truck drivers from Cleveland or dairy farmers or bank tellers. Someone once told my mother that she was Mary Queen of Scots. She was delighted, of course; her maternal ancestors came from Scotland, and Mary was a figure she could really identify with: proud, tragic, clever, with a jeweled ruff round her ill-fated neck. I read a couple books on Mary, and I found her erratic, stubborn, foolish, and a sucker for picking the wrong members of the opposite sex; so I have to say, you could make a case for my mother being her incarnation, if persistent character traits count for much.

Personally, I think Mary would have made a terrible ruler. And anyway, I bet the number of women told they were once Mary Queen of Scots (or convinced of it) would be staggering.

I knew a man whose mother was told by Edgar Cayce that he was the reincarnation of Thomas Jefferson; she named her baby after the prez and that man grew up impaired by the belief and knowledge—and a bit of a slacker, figuring his glory days gave him a ticket to goofing off this time around. I've been told I was from Atlantis, a soldier in the Roman army, a Chinese prisoner, an Egyptian ruler...I forget what all. My mother told me that my ex-husband and I were in the Roman army together, and one of us converted to Christianity and the other didn't, and that this event was the reason for our philosophical conflicts in this life. After my dad died, I had a dream where I talked to him and told him about a former life that he and I shared as family members in Virginia. I gave him the name and address of the farm we lived on in the 1800s.

When I was a youngster, one of Mother’s favorite love stories was a novella written in 1935 by Mildred Cram, called Forever, which starts: “Colin and Julie met before they were born.” I adored that book. This man and woman meet in heaven's waiting room, fall in love, and are called back to Earth to lead very separate lives. Then they end up in the same place, same time, and die in different ways and are reunited as souls again. This story has apparently been kicking around Hollywood in development hell ever since Tyrone Power took a shine to it. Yet it's never been made. People still talk about it.

Reincarnation as a method of exacting karma has enormous appeal. Everyone gets theirs, even if we don't see it happen in the Now. Evil will be punished. Good rewarded. The American version of reincarnation is a bit more appealing than the original Buddhist version and the whole coming back as a lower form of life, like a bug. I never bought into that, but isn't that typical of any ideological belief system? We change what we don't like and make it into what we want. It evolves. It splinters.

Just don't drink the koolaid and start thinking it's "the One answer." Belief doesn't make it correct. It just makes it real, as in our realities are shaped and manifested by our beliefs. That's certainly true.

Seance on a Hot Afternoon

When I was a teenager, Mom and I went to a lot of psychics. Partly because we were learning about this new and fascinating subculture, and partly because we were just like everyone else: we wanted to know what was going to happen in the future. (Hopefully, something good.)

We explored a whole arena of methodologies that "psychics" use: clairvoyance, trance, materialization, apportation, to name a few—and the accoutréments that went with them, like crystal balls, cards, trumpets, candles, crystals, tables, Ouija boards, etc.

There is a town in Florida called Cassadaga that was (at the time, I don't know about now) like the food court of psychics: palmists, card readers, astrologers, trance mediums—what are you hungry for? There was one woman who could supposedly apport things and who'd find strange objects—like a garter belt—wrapped around the insides of a lamp shade or discover her purse in a different room from the one she’d set it down in. (But this made me wonder just who was doing the apportation, her or someone else, because it seemed like she was "importing" rather than "apporting". Surely apporting is to send something somewhere else, away from you? So was it her talent taking things from somewhere else? Or was it someone else's talent, sending stuff her way?)

Mom visited Cassadaga more than I did; I had school and a social life completely detached from her journeys, and she had other friends willing to go with her.

But I was with her for this particular seance on a hot Florida afternoon. It took place in the same church where Mom and I met the Rev. Joe and his wife, Lil. Not in the church itself, but in a back room that we approached from the parking lot behind the church. We streamed in with a group of excited people, glad to pass from glare and humidity into a cool, dim room. Chairs were set up in a circle. The walls were draped with dark fabric. Bustling around was the minister, a stout young man with pale skin and blond hair. He was assisted by a slender, equally young man with dark hair. We were about to experience a materialization.

For those of you who don't know, a materialization is when spirits are supposed to gather and take form. They draw on the energies of the people in the room and manifest themselves. They may make objects move or speak through trumpets—long, simple metal horns, which our hosts had placed around the room in case they were needed.

Mom and I sat down, smiling or nodding at people sitting near us. I was excited but also nervous. Would I see ghosts? Who would they be? Would it be terrifying to hear them speak? When the Rev. Joe went into trance, his voice altered but it was still all contained within Joe. I could take that. But this...

We sang a hymn. We said a prayer. We closed our eyes and tried to breathe slowly. The room was very dark. The minister went into a trance.

"I feel the spirits around us..."

Typically, when you attended a service at this spiritualist church, the minister would stand up and call out messages or names to people in the audience. "Greta, is there a Greta here?" or "I have a message from Tommy, he wants to say he's sorry about the car accident. Does anyone recognize him?" Depending on who the minister of the day was, the message might be more or less specific. I often thought the messages were very broad—"He says to tell you he loves you and he's happy"—but sometimes they were clearly accurate, specific, and emotional. That's the thing about the world of psychics: I've experienced enough "real" information, stuff that someone couldn't possibly know, to keep believing in the possibilities. And I was living with proof of the paranormal: my own mother.

As our materialization session continued, I started to feel a drawing sensation in my nose, as if something was being gently pulled out of it. My fingertips and ears felt a lesser sensation.

"Ectoplasm..." whispered the minister. "The spirits are trying to manifest..."

Ectoplasm is supposedly a pale, ethereal substance that is drawn from trance mediums (and their guests) to help spirits materialize in the physical world, or to help them move objects around. It's been debunked by scientists and skeptics, and I have no comment about its authenticity; I only know what I felt, and it was weird!

A horn started to rise into the air. It moved around the circle and through it a voice spoke to someone. I couldn't hear what it said. I blinked my eyes, straining to make out what was happening in the darkness. Shapes roiled, like the wigglers left when you close your eyelids. The horn seemed faintly phosphorescent as it hung in the air. Now a lighter shape began to form in the middle of the circle. It stood in front of someone and the minister told us through his trance what the spirit was saying. People murmured. Another horn rose.

I'm looking back over many years, so some of the details are no longer clear in my memory. But I do remember being frustrated by the darkness. And I did get my turn! A spirit appeared in front of me. The minister said it was my grandfather (who had been dead some years at this point). He told me that my grandfather loved me and missed me and was happy and at peace. Then he asked me to hold out my hand, because he said my grandfather had a gift for me. Something small and light fell into my palm. I kept straining to see through the wavering darkness, to recognize something of my grandfather in the apparition before me. After all, if he was going to appear, wouldn't he take on the physical appearance I was familiar with? Was there not enough energy in the room to manifest completely? Did it need to be so very dark for him to appear?

Other people heard other messages and spirits wavered before them. My mother didn't get a message and I felt her unhappiness.

But when we at last emerged into the stifling afternoon sunshine, blinded and dazed, I looked down at the "gift" my grandfather's spirit had dropped into my hand; it was a small sapphire-blue gem. A variety of emotions washed over me as we climbed into our oven of a car and turned on the air: surprise, awe, confusion...then skepticism and disappointment.

"I didn't get a thing, not a thing! Not even a message," Mother said. "And sapphire is my birthstone. If someone was going to get a sapphire, it should have been me!"

For a moment we contemplated the possibility that grandfather had mistakenly given me something he meant for my mother. Then common sense got the better of me.

"You're better off getting nothing," I said flatly, "than getting a fake."

For nothing had really happened to convince me of my grandfather's appearance. I couldn't tell what he looked like, he hadn't said anything specific to our lives or our relationship, and there was absolutely no significance in giving me a small blue glass jewel.

"I don't know what happened in there, but it wasn't real. It wasn't right. I don't believe it," I said.

It was nothing like movie seances. And, after a little personal experience with "seeing" spirits, I can say it was nothing like them, either.

A few months later, there was an article in the newspaper; the minister and his companion were rousted from the church for being frauds. They found boxes full of those glass gems, the "gifts" of the spirit world; and black draping, some painted with a faint phosphorescent web, that the minister's assistant wore while pretending to be a spirit or holding up the horns.

Even though I had been skeptical, this deepened my disappointment. I took the sapphire from my dresser drawer and threw it in the trash.

Reliving Belfast

When I'd been married a year, my RN husband was transferred to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to test-fly repaired military aircraft. It was the 1970s. The Irish "Troubles" were in full swing. My expectation of a life amid the charm of English towns was instantly destroyed. I remember sitting on R's lap while he told me about the transfer, and crying. I was 21 years old and terrified.

We took the car up to Stranraer, Scotland, and an overnight ferry across the Irish Sea to Belfast. It was January, grey and rainy. My first view of the city was grim. Barricades and barbed wire were everywhere. Stacks of sandbags hid police stations from view. Youthful soldiers in camouflage stood on corners, collars turned up against the cold wind, smoking and shifting their weight under shouldered rifles. Equally youthful civilians lobbed rocks and hurled abuse. Tanks and armored trucks called “pigs” patrolled the streets. Military maps came with colored sections, to help troops understand where they were and what areas to avoid: green for Catholic neighborhoods, orange for Protestant.

I expect most people know, but Northern Ireland had been a part of Great Britain (like it or not) for centuries, and therefore its "loyalist" population was largely Protestant. The rest of Ireland is its own Republic and historically Catholic. The strife was between the factions that wanted free rule and those that wanted to remain loyal to the Crown. Religion entered into it as a symbol of that freedom/repression and lines were drawn along that schism—but a person's religious beliefs clearly had little to do with their actions. Retaliation, personal revenge for the deaths of relatives and loved ones, and a general terrorism fomented by the political underbelly and just plain mad buggers, kept fueling the fire.

Before we arrived, bombings were generally carried out against political or civic targets. This changed in the year we lived there (more on that in a minute) although cars, even with children or animals in them, were not allowed in the downtown Belfast shopping area because they’d been known to blow up, regardless of their occupants. All pedestrians entering downtown shops were frisked, their purses and carry bags searched.

Our assigned home was just a few blocks from Stormont, the seat of government, but well out of the city itself. Its architecture was a series of white geometric shapes that dribbled down a steep back garden, with large windows trimmed in bright orange and yellow, and cork floors. It was ultra-modern, with none of the warmth and charm of our English farmhouse in Somerset—or even of most suburban Irish homes in Belfast. It was a bizarre exception, and I hated it. The whole aura of the building was discordant, out of place; there was nothing in its cold angles that offered me solace or refuge, and I would need both of those things desperately in the coming months. Fortunately, it did have a nice garden, and beautiful roses in the warm months; that was some compensation. And it was a nice neighborhood in the burbs.

There was only a handful of RN personnel in Belfast, most of them men; so there were no squadron parties, no young wives to ask around for tea, no elegant Ladies’ Nights at the officers’ Wardroom. Instead, my husband grew his hair and beard and snuck into the station gate in civilian clothes. What little social life we had—such as lunch at the Captain’s house—was punctuated by the distant sound of bombs going off, and the growl of armored cars.

“My, that was a big one,” was the typical remark from our hostess. “More sherry, dear?”

Sherry, hell. I learned to drink neat malt whiskey in Belfast.

So, what does this have to do with being psychic?

Well, a crucial skill for intuitive people to learn is how to dampen down their paranormal perceptions. No one wants to sense the feelings of others 24 hours a day! My mother learned to deliberately shut herself down when she wasn’t working. Most people didn't understand this; they assumed they were in constant danger of her “reading” them, even in social situations. (Well, there was the time she blurted out information about a friend’s secret, illegitimate son at a party, but that was after a few drinks and very early in her career.) But my mom typically wasn't "tuning in" to people or events unless she was doing a counseling. She wasn't in your head and she didn't want to be. Like a doctor at a party, she was frequently asked to "diagnose" on the fly by some boorish guest, and they would be disappointed when she told them to make an appointment and pay for her time.

I was not as skilled at closing myself off. In fact, being an artist and a writer, I was accustomed to living life with my senses as open and extended as I could get them, to suck in every nuance. I loved getting in touch with nature that way, for example. Or understanding the emotional landscapes of others. So it was hard learning to retreat instead, to not allow impressions to seep in unsolicited. In Belfast, aside from my own fear, I always seemed to feel the torment of those around me, the unrest and fear and violence; and it shadowed my life, pressed down, chilled me. It also added a dimension to my new marriage that increased the struggle between us.

The bombing of the Abercorn restaurant, shortly after we arrived, marked an escalation in the violence. It wasn’t a military target or political retaliation. It was wholesale slaughter, without discrimination toward women and children. It shocked even the populace of Belfast. Some of the victims ended up small, unidentifiable shards in a plastic bag.

The evening of that explosion, I experienced an apparition. Two women, one younger, one older, came to me while I was in bed. They were in great grief; the younger one was pregnant. They seemed to beg me for help, as if they were trapped in an earthly limbo after so violent a death. I was overwhelmed with sorrow, and said a prayer, offering them what comfort and love I could, asking for their release. They gradually faded.

That event affected me so deeply that the next morning I wrote a song about it. I learned to play guitar when I was 13 and had been playing and writing music ever since—but only for myself or for the odd appearance here or there. I was in a folk trio back in high school, singing at protests and in hospitals to recovering vets from the Viet Nam war. Later, on the beach with friends, and at my one and only beauty competition (Rodeo Queen and I'm not talking about it!). :^) I was in a rock and roll band for about 5 minutes once—well, ok, for a summer. All very amateur.

Music proved to be my safety outlet in Belfast. All the horror, all the violence, and all the stress I was under was channeled through my guitar and piano, and came out as music. I wrote poetry and song lyrics furiously: a young British soldier placed in an untenable position, the scathing rebuke of a Catholic to her nun teacher, the endless cycle in a family of death and retribution. One song, “Mad Dog,” won the a national US lyric competition a few years later. It used the metaphor of a rabid dog wandering the streets of Belfast and randomly biting people, infecting them with rage.

I played in a few local clubs, daring potentially hostile audiences to share an American’s perception of their war. I even got an agent and we talked about cutting an album—but things fell apart when my husband was transferred back to England. Who knows what could have happened? It feels like an alternate life in a parallel universe. One I didn't live.

Needless to say, Mother was on the phone to me a lot during that time. Even from so far away, she could sense the terrible texture of Belfast and its impact on my emotions.

When R and I managed to get away to England for a few days, we discovered the enormous stress we were under in Belfast simply by its absence. It was like a weight being lifted off, and a joy just to cross a street in London without fear. (Something you can't always say these days in London.) But when we returned, we found our house had been burglarized, belongings scattered, drawers overturned, jewelry stolen. Our records were tossed out of their sleeves and thrown around the room in senseless vandalism. Books were flung to the floor. Furniture was upside down. A small hole in one window looked like a bullet hole, but turned out to be from a rock. The police said the intruders were most likely looking for weapons, but the meanness of their actions said something more about their characters.

Here was the big irony of living in Northern Ireland, even in those days: if you went beyond the borders of Belfast, you discovered a different world. A land of deep green fields, stone cottages, streams and forests. A place where the nature of the Irish people was as gentle and garrulous as ever; faces were unpinched, tongues were loosened. Wonderful restaurants, welcoming hotels, stunning landscapes. A stop at a pub for lunch and a beer always included a generous dollop of curiosity, humor, and friendliness from the publican and his customers. Many decried the violence as stupid and senseless, and this, I believe, is always the way; most people want to be left in peace to live their lives, love and raise their families, appreciate the beauty of being alive. To use a LOTR metaphor, it was Hobbiton; and the city of Belfast was Mordor. And I have never seen anything to surpass the natural beauty of County Antrim’s northern coast, with its narrow roads winding around Torr’s Head, Dunluce Castle and the Giant’s Causeway.

After nearly a year, something happened to bring our Belfast adventure to a sudden close.

One afternoon, I received a call from a strange man. He said R was lying on his living room floor after having parachuted off the man’s roof. Apparently, R and his pilot had experienced technical problems in a repaired aircraft, back-up systems had failed, their fuel had been jettisoned, and they'd been force to eject over Belfast. They'd had to make the grim choice of finding the best spot for the jet to crash—a school yard or an office building's parking lot—and steering toward it before banging out. They picked the office building and, fortunately, no one was killed. It crashed into the side of the building, which had been reinforced with a steel beam. (See photo.) We heard that the steel beam was not part of the original building plan, which would be pretty ironic.

One memorable story from the event is of the man in that office building, who was talking on the phone and looking out the window just as this megaton monster dropped from the sky and headed his direction. He told his caller, with complete aplomb, that he “had to ring off” and dove under his desk. Another was the man who found the pilot lying on the sidewalk (with a broken elbow) and asked if he was alright. "I think so," said the disoriented pilot. "Right you are!" said the man, and kept walking!

There were rumors of an IRA—or British troop—invasion from people sighting the plane and parachutes. One man died of a heart attack. But all in all, it could have been so much worse.

However, my husband was seriously injured. He was taken to the Royal Victoria hospital downtown, where he was diagnosed with two compressed vertebrae and a damaged knee. He'd probably compressed the vertebrae when ejecting, and he'd injured himself further when he pushed off a roof while parachuting down; the parachute had folded and he'd dropped instead of floated from two stories up.

He had to remain absolutely flat on his back, then in a brace, for a very long time; it was the end of his flying career, because they couldn't risk him ejecting again and doing further damage to his spine. This led to his eventual decision to leave the service. Fly boys are young, courageous, and keen on their jobs. Clipping those metal wings was the end of what R loved.

My trips to and from the hospital were harrowing: one evening, a small bomb went off in front of a Catholic school across the street. It killed a prominent public figure who was collecting his children after class.

My mother was on the next plane when she heard of Richard’s mishap. It was a difficult trip—she had to clear customs in Dublin, and no one would help her with her bags, because they might contain a bomb. Considering that luggage was NOT on wheels in those days and that my mother's suitcases were heavy leather and numerous, this was almost impossible to manage. In addition, she had thoughtfully packed a supply of Mexican food for her displaced daughter, in the form of canned tortillas, chiles and sauces. When she finally made Belfast, she swore her arms were two feet longer from the extra weight. Her usual buoyancy was daunted even further as we headed for the house, for the RN Captain’s staff driver decided to give her a full tour of the city on the way, including the Crumlin Road area—a nexus for violence between factions.

I'm going to be a bit mean about my mother right now. I tried to dissuade her from coming to Belfast, but she'd hear none of it. When she arrived, her interest in my recovering husband quickly waned. After all, it was a risky trip to drive to the hospital, and it was boring for her to stay there and keep him company.

"I've come all this way, I want to see some of the country while I'm here," was her attitude. So while ostensibly she was there to support me in R's recovery, in reality she was on holiday and wanted to be entertained. It was not the best of visits. My husband got the short end of the stick, as they say—but then, there was no love lost between him and my mother, ever. I know now that he recognized an opponent when he saw one and had every right to be wary or even hostile. But it also wasn't very strategic of him, given my attachment to her. The two of them wore me out sometimes!

So I took my mother on a series of jaunts away from the area. One moment in particular still stands out in my memory: the two of us standing on coastal cliffs, watching a flock of white Tundra swans skimming above the autumn sea as they arrived from far-off Siberia. It was like something out of a ballet or a fairy tale, so many of the beautiful birds, so white and aloft.

Mother and I dined out quite a bit as well, while poor R was laid up. One of her favorites was the Culloden Hotel (now called an "Estate & Spa") a former bishop’s palace, decorated in dark woods, plush carpets and stained glass. After enjoying its elegant service and excellent food, Mother struck up a conversation with our waitress, who confided that she’d visited New York.

“Well,” said my mother, “That must have been a nice change for you. How did you like it?”

“Och, sure, you know,” replied the girl, “I hardly went out of my room the whole time, I was that scared about being mugged or raped on the street. New York’s a very dangerous place!”

This was said completely without irony, while serving tables to the distant echo of heavy artillery. Because you can learn to accept almost anything as familiar, even war.

I survived my mother's visit, and my husband was discharged by the doctors, and we moved to Helston, Cornwall, a town at the tip of England where the wind blew continually, where we acquired the border collie that would save my life, and where my son was born. Belfast came to feel like a dream, but like most dreams, it was not all bad or good but a mix of light and shadow. Once away from it, all we had were the media reports on television—and we knew from personal experience that Northern Ireland was so much more than that. We were on the outside looking in again.

When the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, I could hardly believe that such a thing was accomplished. It took some years, but from all appearances, a peace has been struck between the peoples of Northern and the Republic of Ireland, and I would love to go back. I have been to the Republic several times to visit family and enjoy it tremendously. I just haven't made it north.

Didn't See It Coming

In this sloppy, complex, crowded world, people get away with murder all the time.  Perfect (and less than perfect) crimes go unpunished every day. The police do the best they can, and so did my mother. She tried her hardest when assisting a police investigation because there was always the chance that something would shake loose as a result of her impressions. Sometimes it did, which led to her being a sort of subculture celebrity. She appeared on Merv Griffin's show back in the day, on Arsenio Hall, on Psychic Detectives, on Japanese television, and in various newspapers and local news shows.

She never stuck her nose into a police case unless she was asked. She often did them for free. The one time she was accused of publicity-seeking (more in another blog), she was deeply hurt and offended and for good reason. She might share her psychic feelings with me while watching the news, but she never called up and volunteered. She didn't need to. The families of victims were quick to find her and she had a network of police detectives that believed in her, though sometimes their bosses were harder to convince. Ironically, despite the many personal and professional confirmations of her ability, and our close connection, she didn't see a really bad thing coming in my life; something that still can make me shudder and see darkness. October 1984 was a time of celebration for me. I had been a contributing writer/editor on an elaborate dessert cookbook, and this night the author was giving an elegant launch party in her beautiful Palo Alto home. The food was (of course) delicious, the evening was mild, the people were congratulatory and I hummed with a sense of accomplishment. I needed that feeling just then. I had recently separated from my second husband and moved into a cheap apartment on the border of East Palo Alto. The dwelling itself wasn’t too bad, although I couldn’t get over seeing cockroaches lined up around the cat’s dish like kids waiting around a swimming hole. The last tenant had not been fastidious, and the building was old. I had done my best to decorate it, and its interior was cozy and pleasant. The problem was the neighborhood.

In that particular part of the San Francisco Bay area, upper-class mansions (like the one I was partying in) stood only a stone’s throw across a dry creek bed from a pocket of low-income dwellings. The worst 'hoods were on the east side of Hwy 101; I was (barely) on the west side. Although most of the people in my building were students or young professionals, many of the complexes surrounding us were inhabited by individuals whose idea of a good time was screaming and breaking bottles over each other’s heads at 3:00 in the morning. In the three months since I’d moved there, I had called the police several times in an effort to prevent what sounded just like a murder. (Also known as "a domestic disturbance", a term that didn't do these hair-raising howls justice!

After the book launch party, I went back to the apartment with my friends Kristee and Richard. (Kristee had done the illustrations for the cookbook.) Mother was there, visiting from Maryland, where she’d recently moved after marrying her fourth husband.  We talked for a while, then I took my border collie, Dulcie, for a short walk and left Mom to visit with my friends.

Rounding a corner after Dulcie had completed her duties, I had a clear feeling to turn around and go back. The feeling was like running into an invisible membrane that resisted my forward progress. But full of wine and compliments as I was after the party, I ignored that resistance and decided to go a little further. I wasn’t afraid, I told myself.  It was a pleasant evening, and only 8:00. People laughed in the distance; someone jogged by; a bicyclist passed.

The worst moment of any life is when it suddenly flips from good to bad and you realize you're in trouble. A minute ago, everything was fine. Now, you are going to be terribly hurt or die. In my case, I went from innocent dog-walker to a victim of violence. For a second, I felt stupid and vulnerable — how could I let this happen?  After that, it was just a struggle for survival.

The slender young black man who approached and threatened me was well-dressed and neatly groomed.  He told me that he had a knife, though I never saw it. He asked me to be quiet, and given my ignorance of his weapon’s location, I agreed. I put my hands up, palms forward, in what I hoped was a placating motion and told him it was cool. His eyes never stopped moving in his head; his left hand never let go of a small brown paper bag. From these indications, I figured he was on drugs.  Right across the street was a row of small houses; right behind me was a street light. Right next to me was a silent but curious dog, but he was undaunted by any of these. He turned me to face the steep banks of the dry creek bed, and demanded that I follow him down.

And that's where he made his mistake.

I do not do "down" well. I'm afraid of steep slopes, I can’t do gymnastics, I would never attempt skiing, and I hesitate at down escalators. I can climb upwards like a mountain goat, but once the angle of the land beneath me reaches a certain acuteness, I break into a sweat and become immobile. I need the hand of someone I trust to help me traverse the terrain.

So at that moment, I was willing to die rather than descend that creek bed. (Looking at it in the daylight later, it was obvious that I would have died either way, it was that steep.)

My body became a lead weight; I fell to my knees. Impatient, the man pulled on the bulky fisherman’s sweater I'd changed into after the party.  I shrugged my shoulders, lowered my neck, and let the sweater slide over my head. In a fraction of a second, we were far enough apart that I was out of range from his knife.

“Fetch him off, Dulcie,” I said.

My border collie was 10 years old at the time, and only 35 lbs., but she was the quickest, smartest dog I have ever known. I'd bought her in Cornwall when my first husband and I lived there, and both her parents were working dogs on neighboring farms.

Her bewildered brain had just been waiting for my orders to clarify this confusing situation. When I gave her the command, she launched herself at my attacker; he startled and moved away; I filled my lungs (and I’ve got real good ones) and screamed loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. Then I scrambled to my feet and headed in the opposite direction, calling Dulcie as I ran; she was down the street, still leaping and snarling at the guy and I was afraid he’d turn his knife on her, but he never stopped running. Dulcie turned and joined me and we fled home.

The whole incident, from beginning to end, probably took about five minutes. It seemed like hours. People talk about time stretching in certain instances, and this was one of them. Perhaps because you are so present, moment to moment.

I didn’t feel any pain but as I ran I noticed that the last two fingers on my left hand wouldn’t bend when I told them to. There was a slash across the top part of my palm. When I'd held up my hands to placate my attacker, he'd sliced me.

Later, Mother told me she'd felt uneasy all day. She’d called Maryland, but everything there was okay. I seemed to be fine, what with the book party and everything. My brothers were fine. Since she couldn’t place the problem, she let it go. Our day had been filled with shopping, visiting friends, and spending time in my new apartment before the book launch. She wasn’t crazy about the neighborhood and said so, but (and she’s regretted this since) she never sat and tracked down just what was bugging her. If she had, I might not have gone out on that walk by myself.

As it was, even I had felt uneasy about wearing my jewelry that night, and had taken it all off when I changed my clothes. But I didn’t put it together. And neither did she.

Naturally, it was a great shock when I threw open the front door and stood there, blood splattered all over my white sweater and tennis shoes from the cut in my hand. Fifteen minutes later I was in the emergency room of Stanford Hospital.

I won’t go into the details of hospital procedure, the delay, the pain, the lack of medication until a doctor and a policeman could get through with me. Stanford was wonderful, and—over the next eighteen months—I endured three hand surgeries trying to restore functionality to the tendons that drugged-up son of a bitch severed that night. They were 85% successful. I can’t play piano well with my left hand, and the fingers will never be completely straight, but they do just about everything else well enough. Even now, small pills tend to drop out of my fisted left hand, but oh well. Thank god for the miracle of microsurgery! I was also incredibly fortunate to qualify for a fund created for victims of violent crime, a fund that was later dropped from the state budget. Without it, I would have been poor for a very long time.

After I was admitted that night, Mother went into action immediately. She tore a new one on the cynical interviewing detective who tried to insinuate that I'd provoked the attack (possibly by dressing in that alluring fisherman’s sweater and blue jeans?). She called up her contacts in local law enforcement and rang a police artist she'd worked with on many cases. She started pouring out her intuitions about my attacker before I was asleep in my hospital room. Her information, as it always is in these cases, was detailed and specific. She told them what this guy was like, what part of the neighborhood he lived in, what sort of life he led.

“There’s a garage where he lives. It has an engine taken apart in it, with oil standing in containers and oily rags on the floor. The building is three-story, it’s cinder block, it’s on the left side of road beginning with an “L.” He has a girlfriend who he fights with a lot of the time. She doesn’t like what he’s into. He’s done this sort of thing before. If you don’t catch him, he will again.”

After my surgery the next day, I went to stay with Kristee and Richard at their house. The police artist came over and made a sketch; unlike most police composite drawings, his portrait was frighteningly lifelike. Despite this, when I looked at albums of mug shots later on, I couldn’t pick out my attacker; as a result, the police didn’t do a line-up. Maybe if they had, I would have been more certain, because I struggled to connect the living person I had experienced with a set of frozen, inexpressive polaroids. On the other hand, maybe he wasn't in them!

Mother had to return to Maryland eventually, but she continued to work on the case. But they never caught the man.

The reality is, the police have more than they can ever handle. They are busy picking up the guys they know are guilty, the ones who are identified or caught red-handed. Even if my mother’s information matched a known bad guy, unless they could find proof of the man’s crime—even if I could identify him—it would be a hard, long, legal haul. And more often than you'd like to think, the result was they had to let the guy go.

One of Mom's detective friends told me that, from a certain standpoint, it was probably better for my peace of mind to go on with my life and try to heal and be spared the ordeal. Luckily, he said, I wasn’t raped or murdered. I had a bad hand, but it was being fixed. I’d lived in a bad neighborhood, but I’d since moved. Better not to face the guy in a criminal court, relive the details ad nauseum, and end up knowing that he knew who I was and vice versa. If that happened, I might live in fear the rest of my life.

This pragmatism enraged my mother, because she wanted revenge for her injured child. I would feel the same if it was my child. I felt like a failure when I couldn't identify him, but the detective's advice consoled me.

I also told him I felt stupid for being caught out, and so inadequate...to be so passive and quiet in the face of potential death instead of fighting hard. It's not how I expected myself to react. He pushed my opinion aside and said, "You did exactly the right things. How do I know? Because you're here. You survived. So don't second-guess yourself anymore." That was immensely comforting. I'll always be grateful to him for his perspective.

As it was, I had enough to deal with in the years to come: like flinching when any man walked toward me, being afraid on nature trails, reliving the incident at unexpected moments, finding raised voices unendurable, being nervous that I would experience that horrible "turning on a dime" situation again, where life went from good to bad. Sometimes, even a sunny day went black for me.

I never blamed my mother for anything connected to my event, of course—but I did ponder how bizarre it was to have a psychic as a mom who didn't foresee the worst thing I ever experienced. Perhaps it's a natural blind spot re: the ones we love. Who wants to see trouble for them? Or maybe we have no choice about certain nexus events in our time stream, to be real sci-fi about it. Maybe there was a cosmic reason, though I'm not a big believer in those. What I do know is what I felt: that membrane of resistance. Something was trying to warn me; from that moment on, I've tried to sense that warning and pay attention to it. Fortunately, it has been very rare.

I moved to Washington, DC a couple of years after the attack. I couldn't bear driving past the neighborhood where it happened, even on the freeway. In one sense, this may not have been the wisest decision because the African-American population in DC is vastly more than it is in California. Every day I was confronted with dark-skinned men on my way to work, some of them with chips on their shoulders. I was pushed on a sidewalk by a man who uttered "bitch" under his breath. Groped on the Metro by a well-dressed professional while I was dozing in my seat. For someone already jumpy about men—and yes, let's be honest, especially black men—this was not conducive to my recovery. But in all other aspects, the move was a very good thing and I look back on those years with happiness.

My own trauma was relatively minor and mercifully brief, compared to the horrific attacks that other women endured. I spoke with some of them. Their endurance and struggle to find peace in the aftermath deeply inspired me. If they could savor life again, what excuse did I have not to?

If there was one moment of recovery I can point to, it happened back in California as I walked a trail on Stanford land. I'd climbed a hill and was among gnarled old live oak trees. I've always loved trees, they are as essential to my happiness as air. So I wrapped my arms around this massive old oak and leaned my cheek against its rough bark. I felt the sap of life running beneath its surface, feeding all the branches and leaves, digging deep into the soil with its roots. It seemed to flow onto me as well, filling me with a calm energy, a shared life force. The message I received was one of permanence, of endurance, of life before and after this one incident in my history. Of oneness between living entities on this earth. And it lifted my spirits. I saw light instead of darkness.

I held onto that moment whenever the shadows started creeping in, and it really helped.

Connections

I loved England as a new bride, but it was a big adjustment. Although I had moved many times in my life, I'd always had my family core around me. This time I was alone in a new culture, in a new marriage with someone I didn’t know a lot about. Ours had been a long distance courtship, with lots of letters but not a lot of actual time together. There were a million little things to learn about each other.

Then there were the contrasts in culture — my American background of big stores, big appliances, big central heating bills, against England’s tradition of small shops, miniature washing machines, no dryers and “a wee fire in the sitting room.” In addition, my husband was from New Zealand, not England, making him a sort of cultural double whammy.

We lived in the country, and I had no car, so my weekdays were spent rattling around the house or going for long walks along narrow lanes and open fields. There were many times in that first year when I felt very alone—except for my mother.

I found, to my surprise, that the miles didn’t diminish our psychic connection. (Which was lucky, because she was always a terrible correspondent.) If I needed her, if things looked grey and depressing, the phone would ring. If she needed me, if there were troubles brewing on the home front, I would call her. Of course, sometimes I cheated. I would want to have a chat, but not pay for it; so I’d concentrate hard on her calling me—and she always did.

“What’s going on?” she’d ask. ”You’ve been on my mind all morning, so what is it?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to use your dime.”

“You little witch.” (I think it was “witch.”)

Sometimes the messages were hard to decipher. I’d feel unhappy for no apparent reason, dragging around in the dumps — or worse, biting R’s head off, with no biological cycle to justify my behavior. It might take a day or two for me to realize that these weren’t my own emotions. When I did, and called or wrote Mother (I was a good correspondent!), I’d find out what was going on during that time period. Usually, it was coming from her or one of my brothers.

Just before my first wedding anniversary, Mother developed severe physical symptoms, and ended up being scheduled for exploratory surgery. Fares to the States were cheap through the RAF, so I flew home in time to be with her in the hospital. (It later turned out that she was "picking up" her husband’s physical condition, according to her; she herself was fine and the surgery—which found nothing—was considered unnecessary. Or at least, that's the family mythology. Frankly, I am a bit skeptical of superimposing such severe symptoms on herself, but I'm also at a loss as to how to explain it. My mom was a hyperchondriac in some ways, but surgery seems extreme. Was it a deeply neurotic, unconscious, need to gather her family around her, even from across the sea? To remind them that all attention needed to be on her? Or a way to punish her husband for their tempestuous, vindictive, relationship? Or was she really so sensitive she would manifest the illness of another as her own?)

What's undeniable is that we're all connected to our loved ones. The closer the relationship, the easier it is for us to sense that connection. "I knew that was you calling!" is a pretty common occurrence. "You've been on my mind." "I had a feeling there was trouble." "I had to call you, are you ok?" Most of us have had some or all of these experiences.

As I sat in the hospital waiting room, a friend taught me how to use the Tarot cards. My affinity for the cards has remained with me through the years, even though I rarely use them anymore; I find them a wonderful trigger for meditation, self-reflection, sensing patterns. Back then, I read only for myself or close family and friends, for I never overcame the fear of being wrong or my resistance to being a psychic problem-solver. The cards gave me certain material points to steer by; I enlarged and expanded on these via my own intuition. I have always been more adept at psychological insight, ruminating on how and why people behave as they do. As a result, I've frequently been called upon by friends for non-psychic advice (though, of course, I can never divorce my intuition from what I tell people). But I have no formal training. It's just a part of how I'm wired and, given that Mother was also a counselor, in her way, perhaps it's an inherited trait.

*       *       *

In England, I experienced an apparition.

My husband had gone to Poole for a two-day training course, leaving in the early morning darkness of winter. I was sound asleep, still snuggled in the covers of our farmhouse bed. All at once, I knew there was someone in the room. I felt my consciousness being pulled to the surface, like a diver coming out of deep waters. My heart pounded. My hands sweated. There, in the far corner of the dark room, was an old man. I had a distinct impression of an aged, crooked body, a white beard, a woolen tam on his head, a Scottish feel to his clothes. He wasn’t solid, like a real person. He also wasn’t ethereal, like a cinematic ghost. He was that combination of spirit and psychic impression that gives you remarkable details about a person without really seeing them.

I didn’t know what he wanted, but the implication of trouble was clear. I looked over at the clock: it was 7:15 a.m. Half an hour later, R. rang. He had been in a car accident. The treacherous fog of southern England had tricked his eyes into thinking he was following a car, when the car was actually parked with its tail lights on. He had swerved to avoid hitting it, gone through a hedgrow, and flipped over. Fortunately, he wasn’t seriously hurt; the worst injury was to his head, when he tried to get the hood of the car to stay open and it banged him one. A farmer pulled the car out of the field and he was going to a garage to get it repaired. 

When I asked him what time the accident happened, he told me 7:15—the exact time that I had looked at the clock after being "warned" by my apparition. Who the Scottish gentlemen was, I’ll never know. But my ancestors on my mother’s side were Campbells. Could one of them been looking out for us? Or did he come from my husband's family tree? I only know I didn't make him up, he was there.

I have my theories, and they're unprovable, and they've evolved over the years. We're connected. All of us. We are an ecosystem in an ecosystem. Everything is energy, molecules rubbing up and overlapping. We live in a planet that has a massive and diverse ecosystem. We can grasp that, mostly. We're part of that system, so why is it hard to suppose that we're all connected as well? To animals, to insects, to trees, to every organic thing on our world. We feel these connections strongest with our loved ones, our friends. But I believe they exist with every being. And so, when we corrupt and destroy those Others by violence, pollution, indifference, war...we are ravaging our own larger Being.

Someday, I hope we'll all understand this. But it appears to still be one helluva long ways off.

Mortality and TMI

Sometimes, you should just keep things to yourself. I think this is an enormous responsibility for people who are psychics and deal with clients. Death, failure, sickness, loss...life holds these for every one of us. Just because you see it doesn't mean you have to tell it, unless there is a really valid reason, a helpful reason, for giving your client that information.

I think my mom was, in general, very perceptive about these areas. She was sensitive in how she approached them, thoughtful in when she applied them. But not always.

Her marriage to my stepfather went sour early on. Our relationship to him as teenagers went from cordial to combative, more because we were used as pawns and forced to take our mother's side in everything than from us confronting him. They fought a lot and bickered constantly. Maybe he did start it by being jealous and suspicious (well, he married someone that he couldn't control—a factor that strongly attracted him before marriage, but infuriated him afterwards); maybe he was the first to break the sanctity and have an affair (more on that in a minute). But instead of being adults and seeking help and trying to work things out, they just went nuclear and—boom!—it was like living in a Nevada atom bomb test facility.

One of my mother's very first psychic experiences happened when my stepfather was at sea. They'd been married about 2 1/2 years, and she was missing him. But as she looked at his photo, she heard the word, "Maria." Loud and clear. It intrigued her, but it also enraged her. She was sure her husband was cheating on her. So the next time she wrote, she added, "Give my regards to Maria." Just that. Wow.

I can't recall what, if anything, he said in his letter back to her. But when he returned, he denied everything. Told mom she was crazy and all this psychic stuff was bullshit and corrupting. She almost bought it...until she found a photograph of him standing next to a lovely young woman, a priest, and some older people. Until he took her aside in the base chapel and confessed to her that he'd caught an STD. Then he had to own up that Maria was real, her brother a priest, and the photo her family members—who'd all enjoyed his company while he was in port.

Nothing was the same after that, of course. Lots of opportunities for Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff drinking and backbiting.

Okay, but here's where the TMI stuff starts to come in. A psychic told my mom that her husband was going to die in a car crash. He was sporting a lovely little Austin Healey in those days, and drove like an Earhardt. The atmosphere at home was corrosive, and all of us walked around on eggshells a lot of the time. When we heard that sports car's engine purring as it entered the garage, our butts clenched shut. We kids scattered like rabbits. Mom sharpened her nails for the evening bout.

After this prediction, mom (and I'm ashamed to say, myself) started hoping we wouldn't hear that engine anymore. Every evening for a while, we waited for him NOT to come home. For him to crash and burn somewhere. For him to die. And every time we DID hear the Healey in the drive, our hearts sank. This went on for some time.

And it was so ghoulish, so morally wrong. To hope for someone's death. Even though it's understandable that people in abusive situations might do so. We didn't hope for our mom's death, just his. Because then it would all stop. But what a stupid way to stop it.

I understand why we took that stance, mother and me. We were both passive-aggressive, feeling helpless and somewhat hopeless in the face of a volatile situation; we couldn't see any way out. My mother's method was always to look for another man to bail her from one situation to the next. She was incredibly capable of some things—she'd had her own local news column, radio show, modeling and charm school (yeah, it was the South, they still had charm schools in the 60s); she organized fashion shows, charity balls, her own kids, her own home. But when it came to men and marriage, she absolutely wanted to be Rescued, princess-like, and sheltered and pampered. For ever after. She never thought of stepping out on her own two feet.

And guess what? At that point in my life, neither did I. I was deep into the Sleeping Beauty/Rapunzel psychology, and I felt—in the face of my mother, her marriage, and my ability to earn a living—weak, helpless, unskilled, miserable, and deeply desperate. For someone with half a college education and no trained skills, there was only one goal: get married and have kids. Artistic talent wasn't going to cut it. It's what my mother expected, it's what I expected. The sooner, the better.

But still...that psychic, whoever she/he was, had a lot of nerve to make that prediction and share it with my mother. It just innervated her further.

###

Ironically, my mother did something similar to me years later. My first marriage had ended and I was in love with—well, let's call him Mark. I'd met him through my mother and we'd started dating hot on the heels of my crumbling marriage. Still on the SB/R track, I was leaping into another relationship so I didn't have to be out in the cold world of the un-Rescued for more than 5 minutes. After Mark and I had been together for a year, we decided to get married. I was crazy about him, he had some lovely qualities: charm, intelligence, and the ability to listen and converse about feelings and emotions that was rare in a guy. We could talk for hours. We could sort out why I felt the way I did and what to do about it. We read books together, loved art cinema, sci-fi and fantasy, animals...He was 10 years older than me, fiercely independent, and a real mentor. He also fancied himself a bit of a bad boy, a hint of danger, and I was stuck on him big time. 

My mother, always quick to smell a threat, went off him pretty quickly. Maybe being a bit of a flim-flam charmer herself, she knew one when she saw one. In addition, she saw someone who was teaching me to be OK with telling her "no" when she made selfish, unreasonable, demands. Or tried to drag me into her dramatic chaos. So, by the time we announced our wedding plans, maybe she just couldn't keep it to herself.

I went to her for a career reading. I was doing temp secretarial work all over Silicon Valley, and I wanted to know if I was going to settle into something more permanent. Money was tight in my new relationship, and I was hoping for better. Instead, my mother told me, in no uncertain terms, that my new marriage was going to be a bust. She said Mark (who, when I met him, was in a lucrative job but soon quit it to become an entrepreneur) would never succeed. That I would never have the kind of home I dreamed of, surrounded by plush furnishings and antique pieces, or a comfortable lifestyle. Not with him. That I would be scrabbling for money, that he would prove not to be my Prince, and that the marriage would not last.

Stupidly, I went home and told Mark what she said. I demanded that he help prove her wrong. And it changed our relationship. Over the next four years, I watched every move he made. I was often his critic instead of his supporter. When I saw him waver and lose interest in a project, I harangued him about commitment. When he moved on to something else, I bullied him about not taking a power position. When the bills piled up, I nagged him about responsibility.

I was afraid, so afraid of losing the dream I had about our life together. And I wanted Mom to be wrong.

But underneath the yummy romantic aspects of our relationship, and the warm, comforting mentorship, Mark and I wanted two really different things out of life. He wanted to be free, a high-flyer, someone who struck it lucky, made it big, and then parlayed that into something else. He wanted to start it, get it running, then sell it and retire with tons of cash. He was, at heart, a gambler. But like all addicts, it was always the "next one" that would help him strike it rich. It wasn't about buckling down and working hard to make "this one" succeed and endure.

And emotionally, he was no Rescuing Prince; he was Peter Pan—immature, irresponsible, careless, in the moment. And I was, at my core, desperate for security, stability, shelter. Like Wendy, I was sometimes shocked at how he could forget about me or anything that he'd promised. After five years, I realized I was already standing on my own two feet, doing everything that needed doing, without his help. He had mentored me well, I had drawn strength from it, and I believed I could do it myself. With a lot less stress! I hated the nagging bitch I had become, pushing him. We went to counseling, but the conclusion was inevitable. We were done.

So, in the end, my mother's prediction came true. But it was still terribly wrong of her to tell me. It influenced me, it hampered me; maybe the outcome would have been the same, but would the journey?

I've only had one other example of this kind of TMI predicting: while I was married to Mark, his brother dragged a self-professed psychic to our house one evening. She had the brass to tell me that I would die in my 50's of drowning in a sailing accident. Just like that! I was floored and more than a little shocked at this information. I admit that I looked at sailing—which I've done maybe a handful of times in my whole life—with less appetite than before. And the thought of drowning, for someone who grew up around the beach, makes me shudder even now. 

As it turns out, she was full of shit. But just like my mom, she had no damn business telling me such a thing. Why? Because we all have to walk our paths in this world. Death, failure, sickness, loss...they are with us, they are certain to be a part of our lives. Whether we know about them in advance or not, we have to make the journey, with enough burdens on our backs. We can't live each day steeped in our mortality and we can't make a marriage knowing it's doomed. We have to push those fears away and find the joy in our days. We need hopes and dreams right down to the last second.

Some people might say that only God knows the moment of our death. Well, the good news about God is that he keeps his mouth shut. Psychics should take a lesson from that.

Dark Visions

I never wanted my mother’s profession, never. What would it be like to relive the last moment’s of a person’s life? I know, for she has told me; recounted moments, hours—of murder, rape, violation, and violence. Poured these channeled memories into my ear like poison into Hamlet’s father until I wanted to wretch and run from the room. Finally, I convinced her not to share her work with me. It took years! Perhaps she was compelled to repeat it as part of a personal exorcism of the day’s experiences. Maybe it was more a mindless, babbling release than true sharing. But I couldn’t get her to restrain herself.

I couldn’t bear to wade through those dark, fetid waters. That she chose to amazes me even now. She prided herself on her clarity, her clinical detachment. She was no empathetic, possessed medium, suffering and screaming as the victim struggled and bled, like some movies portray. She was a hovering presence, a moviegoer, watching, taking notes, gathering both facts and sensory perceptions—but removed. East. Spring. By that tree. Near that cliff. Within the sound of an old waterwheel. The crunch of gravel. The smell of fresh tar. Marks on the neck. The murder weapon.

It took its toll on her. Plunging into those cruel shadows of life and afterlife colored her own existence. She was wary, even blind, to the world’s beauty and kindness. She needed a watch dog. She kept her windows closed. She feared for me, her family, her friends, her cats. She couldn’t believe I slept with my windows cracked in summer. She slept with a gun beneath her pillow and another in her bedside table—a couple, actually, and various sprays. She began to watch the news channels obsessively, almost all day. She also read murder mysteries and watched cop shows—including the animal cops, which were even more distressing to me than the human shows. Always a heavy social drinker, she began routinely numbing her mind with booze and Advil at the end of every day.

It took years for her to see more darkness than light, but it happened. She fell into depression.

I choose not to live there. I prefer optimism and faith in the belief that most people attempt productive, loving lives: raise kids, feed their pets, go to work, garden, watch sunsets. Evil is real and I have personal knowledge of it, with scars to prove it. But I won’t let it color my days, shut my windows, darken the sunlight. I avoid horror and grim violence in movies. I will leave if a film gets too dark and stresses me out. Science fiction or action flicks are a bit more tolerable, because they're fantasy at their core.

My son’s tolerances have changed as well. He says it’s because he’s old enough to know that the world harbors such dark sicknesses for real, and he chooses not to experience it vicariously. There is a certain triumph in enduring horrific movies, I know, and the young—who imagine themselves invulnerable and immortal—can relish that accomplishment, perhaps. But I comprehend my own mortality too well and I don’t care for it.

In that aspect, mother’s more like them than me.

Ironically, for all her paranoia and fear, her sifting of the dark side, she never saw my own personal danger coming—and thus never warned me.

Dream

I've always been a vivid dreamer, and I've journaled many dreams, especially if they felt "significant." I think dream interpretation books are only partially helpful because we all possess a personal vocabulary inside ourselves. So the symbols used and the emotions we experience come from who were are and the meanings we connect to objects/events/people.

I found this dream in a larger document from 2007 and I include it here because I believe that many premonitions come in dreams. I also think we connect with others in ways we can't imagine, even while asleep.

I dreamt that all these beautiful antique pieces of furniture and objects, things that had been handed down through the family—even pieces I remembered from my childhood—were being removed from their long-term storage and put all over the yard and street in front of my house. It was gray and starting to rain. I was upset because they were going to be ruined and there was no place to store them in my house, which was already full.

I wandered through them, touching and remembering. A woman from across the street was picking up lovely throw pillows from a beautiful mahogany king size bed. I told her she could have them. I was sorry there was no room in my guest room, for it was such a beautiful bed. The storage man said some part of the contract had been violated and so the things were being thrown out.

People wandered through them, as if it were a garage sale, but no one violated anything or took anything. They just looked. Then, on a turn, the storage man said that now that all the pieces had been trotted out and put in my yard, he could take them all back again under a new contract. I could negotiate new terms. And my terms were to put them all in the moving van and arrange for them to be sold on consignment. I had no room for them. But at least they would be sheltered from the bad weather until they were sold.

Two years after I had this dream, I was laid off from my job at American Girl. I had to sell my house, store all my furniture—which includes antique pieces and hand-me-downs from family and friends—and move in with family in California. I lived there for a year, looking for work. In the end, I landed a long-term freelance job which allowed me to move back to Wisconsin and take my things back out of storage "under a new contract." They'd been sheltered from the bad weather of being laid off and homeless (eternal gratitude to my family) until I was able to "negotiate new terms" in my life.

Emotionally, I feel the loss of my king size bed, which I haven't been able to sleep in since I sold my house. The new place I rent only has room for the king bed in the basement guest room—which I don't use, myself. I sleep on the former guest bed upstairs.

Tough Love

Being a psychic—or as my mother preferred to be called, a parapsychologist—involves developing a visual and sensual "vocabulary" to assist you with clients. It isn't easy, because all of us have our own reference points, drawn from our own lives and experiences. Red may represent anger to one person and romance to another; fat may mean 150 lbs. to you and 250 lbs. to me! You can use your own experiences to convey what you're seeing: "It reminds me of the time I lost my grandmother's bracelet—does that make sense?" or "Your relationship with this guy is kind of like eating Chinese food; you feel great for a little while, then you're starving again!"

Try describing a person to someone, and nine times out of ten, you won’t both see the same face; it’s even harder when describing emotions or circumstances, and most difficult of all when you’re trying to envision things for those whom you love best.

Mother would give me detailed information on a boyfriend I was going to meet—mainly because I badgered her constantly on the subject—but when I met him, he didn’t look the way I expected. He’d fit her description, but he wouldn’t appear the way I’d imagined. He’d end up having hazel eyes, blondish hair and a great build—but I’d have envisioned someone Patrick Swayze-ish and she’d have seen someone Robert Redford-ish. (Not that I can recall ever dating someone who looked like either of them!)

It's hard to push aside your personal desires and ambitions for a loved one—especially hard for the type-A control freak my mom was—and reach some kind of Master Shifu "inner peace" clarity that is willing to give you the bad news as well as the good. You want your children and your friends to be happy. So you end up being close but just off a bit. Or getting splinters of info that are correct but not the bigger picture (which nullifies the splinters).

She once described my wedding to me, down to the shape and size of the diamond ring, the pearl necklace I’d receive, and the family heirloom my mother-in-law would give me. She saw all the colors and flowers and people. She told me the time of year. And it came true, every single bit of it. But not for me. It was my best friend Kathy’s wedding, down to the peach-colored roses. She got married just three months before I did, and I was her maid of honor. (She was also mine.)

Of course, sometimes there’s no room for equivocation. . .

One summer, when I was eighteen, a fraternity came into town for the weekend. They ran an ad in the local paper asking for girls to act as blind dates for a formal dinner dance at a swank hotel. Since I was uninvolved at the time, I responded. In those days, I was an incurable movie-soaked romantic and life seemed one long search for the man of my dreams. I was approaching marriageable age, and I was all for it. My friends and I didn’t waffle over careers and professional fulfillment back then. Besides, I had seen my mother raise four kids, move a dozen times, throw hundreds of dinner parties, and run fashion shows for the officers’ wives clubs; I was under no illusion that being married was anything but a full-time job. (She did a lot of other things, too, but she always had more energy than I could ever muster!)

Anyway....The fraternity coordinator paired me up with a guy named Dave for the dinner dance, to take place on the following Saturday. Great. On Wednesday, Dave’s roommate Bob called and asked to go out with me Friday night. Even better! Things were looking up, romance was in the air, I had a new red cocktail dress. . .

I rushed eagerly into my mother’s room and asked her if Bob wasn’t going to be the most handsome, intelligent, sensitive, romantic, wealthy man I would ever go out on a blind date with and eventually marry?

“Uh, well. . .” was her reply.

This was not good.

“He’s sort of stocky, and built like a football player," she said.

Oh. I lusted after tall, willowy, poetic types back then. Musicians. Artists.

"His face is kind of round..."

I imagined Charlie Brown.

"And I don’t think he has a lot of hair on the top of his head. . .”

Well, shit. So no mop of thick dark hair falling over his collar. "You are looking at the right guy, aren't you?" I asked, breathless. "I mean, Mom—a bald college student? Really?"

Seeing my crestfallen face, she added, “He’s very nice, though, honey. And he’ll think you’re wonderful!”

"Okay. Thanks." All of a sudden, I did NOT want to know what Dave was going to be like!

I awaited Friday with all the enthusiasm of a hanging. Although, incurable as I was, I held out hope that Dave would be better than Bob, and that if all else failed, my perfect mate would be among the crowd somewhere, just waiting to meet my eyes across the dance floor—like in West Side Story.

I was upstairs putting on my makeup when the doorbell rang Friday night. Seconds later, my brother Chris (who has always possessed the tongue of an adder) gleefully stuck his head into the bathroom door.

“Your date’s here.”

I stopped brushing on mascara. “Well?”

Chris put two fingers up his nose and lifted, displaying large, round nostrils.

“Mom was right — he looks just like a pig!”

I groaned.

“Anything else?”

“He’s bald on top.”

“Please, stop. Go away.” Cackling, my brother did just that.

As it turned out, Bob was an awfully nice guy. Boring, but nice. I slapped on my best southern belle manner and told myself it was only for a night. Things improved when I met his roommate, Dave—a lean, green-eyed Georgia boy with a chiseled chin. Saturday would be worth the wait, then, I told myself.

Bob and I danced, sort of, and talked, kind of, and time passed as it always does. On the ride home I debated over whether or not to kiss him goodnight on the lips. Generosity was winning over rudeness when he turned to me and said, “I had such a good time with you tonight, I asked Dave if he’d mind swapping for the dinner dance. So we’ll get to go out again tomorrow night, isn’t that great?”

Generosity took a quick trip north and disappeared right out the top of my head, which was lifting off in outrage. (I was raised by a redhead, remember?)

“You did WHAT?”

My face must have changed radically, because he stared at it as if he’d never seen me before. My southern belle facade was replaced by the slit-eyed, hard-lipped expression of a sod-busting Oklahoma farmer’s wife with a bead on the first squirrel she’d seen in months.

“What gave you the right to do that without asking ME first?”

Bob did not get a kiss goodnight. Not then, not even later, when he called from the hospital to say he’d driven his car down the wrong side of a four-lane boulevard and crashed into a pole, as a result of his agitation at my anger. My date for the dinner dance was dressed in a white silk Nehru jacket, a gold chain and medallion, and a black eye. He had stitches on his head (fortunately, they hadn’t had to shave his hair) where he’d hit the windshield. He limped, so we couldn't dance. We spent the evening sitting down, with him looking as sad as a blond, balding pit bull who'd gotten the worst of a dog fight.

I hope—though I don't really remember—that I was at least courteous to that unfortunate young man. It wasn't his fault that he wasn't tall, dark, and poetic. Or that I was a romantic idiot.

As for Dave, if he'd been that keen about our date, he wouldn't have swapped me in the first place.

At least, in this case, Mom had been accurate about my future romantic prospects. It wasn't always so. She  once described my wedding to me, down to the shape and size of the diamond ring, the pearl necklace I’d receive, and the family heirloom my mother-in-law would give me. She saw all the colors and flowers and people. She told me the time of year. And it came true, every single bit of it. But not for me. It was my best friend Kathy’s wedding, down to the peach-colored roses. She got married just three months before I did, and I was her maid of honor. (She was also mine.)

When my husband did eventually come along, Mom and I both wanted that romance to work out SO much that, even if she had misgivings (I did, and it didn’t stop me), they were undoubtedly overthrown by the happiness of the present moment and her wish to see me fulfilling my dreams.

Years later, when she had developed her intuition more fully and had tools to work with, Mom would use a chakra chart to illustrate to clients where they and their potential mates did and didn’t match up. Maybe if she'd had that tool when I met my mate, I could have avoided a tumultuous marriage and horribly painful divorce.

On the other hand, maybe not. Mom and I both adhered to the philosophy that life is full of lessons and choices, and we all make ours for a reason; even the relationships that don’t work out give us many vital things. I was given my son and he has been the light in my life. I wouldn't go back and change that marriage for the world, because we brought him into this world. And he, in turn, brought to us a lovely wife and wonderful grandchildren.

So even if my mother had told me the marriage was not going to succeed, I probably would have gone ahead, because it was what I WANTED at the time. We all have to pay the price for our desires. We all have to act out our parts and live a life. So I married R. and moved to England, just as psychic Bartie said I would. And if I remembered the rest of her prophecy—that I would remarry—I refused to let that daunt me. I still think maybe that’s the best way, the only way, to endure such knowledge.

Bedside Manner

By the time I was eighteen, my mother was charging people fifteen dollars to come and see her. The Navy had moved us to Virginia Beach, and Mom worked out of her upstairs bedroom. After a very brief attempt at trance mediumship—mother was always one for being in control, and she didn’t like snoozing off while others spoke through her—she developed her own ritual of holding people’s jewelry or looking at photographs of their family and friends, while illuminated by a single candle. The phone rang at all hours of the day and night with needy people looking for answers. I became a sort of quasi-secretary and started protecting Mom from her desperate clients; no one had answering machines in those days.

Virginia Beach was a fortunate place to live because it had an established subculture of believers in the occult. The Edgar Cayce Foundation had made a metaphysical mecca out of the area, as popular in its own way as San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. People burned incense and smoked marijuana, ate health food and searched for past lives, gave up the material for the spiritual. The smell of patchouli still reminds me of the second-hand clothes my friends wore. My particular concession to the trend was to wear Mom’s twenty-year-old fringed suede jacket and moccasins. I alternated this with very short skirts and a vinyl raincoat.

The advantage of the Beach was that we could share our psychic experiences without being considered insane. You still couldn’t tell everyone—this was the South, not Southern California—but there were plenty who understood. Mom, with her bloodline of Texas cowboys and tenacious Celts, and her background of Navy pilots, public relations, and modeling schools, brought a unique earthiness to the task. This would evolve into a clinical detachment later on, one that served her well when working murder and missing persons cases with the police.

Like Tonto, I was her faithful companion on this part of the paranormal journey. I attended lectures at the Cayce foundation, discussed reincarnation over seafood dinners and sat in on Mom’s sessions with friends and clients. I believed in her ability because I knew the person it stemmed from, and I had watched it grow over the years. But I also knew that I never wanted to be inundated with all these people coming to me for help. I was not going to follow in her footsteps, even though she often urged me to try. The responsibility of steering someone else's life through my own intuition felt like a heavy stone crushing my chest. What if I was wrong? What if they made bad choices—or worse, wasted their lives in futile dreaming—because of what I predicted?

One of the many who wandered into our path was Nick, a lantern-jawed young navy lieutenant who favored cowboy boots with almost any attire and drove a Volkswagen bug named Lambchop (after the Shari Lewis hand puppet of the time). I liked Nick, he was cheerful, funny, and a gentleman. We went out a few times, and while my heart wasn’t deeply committed, I enjoyed his company, especially on the weekends. So I was rather wistful when I told Mom that Nick wouldn’t be around one weekend because he was spending it in Washington, D.C.

Mother looked up from washing dishes in the sink (water is a great conductor of intuitive insights) and said, “Yeah, and I know who he’s spending it with! She likes to sleep on the left side of the bed.” I goggled at this intimate information (sex was always a subject of frankness and humor in our house) but it didn't cause me any significant pain. I was amused—and apprehensive; my mother was way too delighted with her insight and that probably meant she was going to needle Nick with it the next time we saw him.

Sure enough, when Nick came around for dinner two weeks later, she plopped that little clairvoyant tidbit right on the table. He went white to the eyebrows and choked on his spoonbread; when he finally cleared his windpipe,  he admitted she was right. We went out a couple times after that, but Nick was never the same. One evening, we were sitting on the living room couch, snogging just below a portrait of my mother done by a local artist. It was an ephemeral rather than realistic representation, but the thoughtful expression in her green eyes followed you wherever you went. Between kisses, Nick would glance up at the portrait—and every time he did, he became more distracted. Finally he just stopped.

“I can’t,” he said, “I’m sorry, I’ve really tried, but I just can’t do this anymore. When I sit here, I feel like your mom knows what we’re doing. And her room is right above above us. For all I know, she’s watching us right now.”

I tried to explain that it didn’t work that way—although, in all honesty, it nearly did; I can’t tell you the number of times I tried to creep into the house after curfew, only to have Mom shoot out of her room and confront me from the top of the stairs. Her eyes were so piercing and angry, it felt like a rifle trained on my forehead. I could never argue any sort of innocence with her, either, because she always had a sense of what I’d really been up to. My brothers and I were probably saved from a lot of dangerous experimentation that way. Why bother, we’d say, when you know she’s going to catch you?

As for Nick, he pulled on his boots, saddled up Lambchop and putt-putted off into the sunset. He came by once or twice after that, before he was transferred, but he never kissed me like anything but a brother.

Premonition of Snow

Being a psychic's daughter means I have to contend with my own abilities, too. It's like hanging out with an artist or someone who knits. You explore your own talent for the activity because it's in your environment, your relationship. Mother always said everyone is psychic, just like everyone can play something on a piano. But not everyone is Mozart. Certainly not me.

I wrote this a couple years before I moved to North Carolina (for 18 months) and then Wisconsin (for many years). In both places, I had a full change of seasons and cold winters with snow (because I drove up to friends in the Blue Ridge many times while in NC). I knew this change was coming, I saw and felt it before it happened.

Changes are coming, in more ways than one. Moving is in the air—this time alone—as I feel a drive for new beginnings, on my own.

I have long given up on thinking there is someone for me; but I know if I stay here with Mom, there never will be. There is no energy left for anything besides my work and her. I am frightened of where I will land. I need my pets around me, an understanding place that will let me have them all. I need some room, a little garden, some greenery, close to work, with safety and peace. I need light and harmony.

Give it to me! I so richly deserve it.

But beyond this need...I feel a hint of snow in the air, that cold smell beneath grey skies. There are bare trees and snowflakes. Most of all, there are achingly beautiful Falls, with crispness in the air, and the vivid colors; the sharp pain of change, death in its cycle, the stirrings of flight and migration.  Although the year is dying then, I always feel myself reborn. It is my birth time, and my time of poetry and song. It is the time of contrasting cold outside with snug warm houses and yellow lights. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Football. The joy of wine-rich air in your lungs.

This is not California, no no....this feeling has followed me for years now, urging me to go to Boston, to Vermont, to New Hampshire, to insane places where I would surely tire of the cold and slush and grey. But where and how and when?

Mother talks about moving to the mountains of Virginia. (Note: She never did.) But I will not move with her. I need distance, the more the better. I need my life back. She is careless, playing with and breaking us like toys in the hands of a willful child. I want my Christmas to be what it should me. I want to hear my own carols in my own heart, and feel the peace and beauty of that moment on my own, in my own way. My Tarot cards leave me trailing in a wilderness of mystery: currents and eddies, false breezes, uneasy dreams. I try to see but I cannot always see clearly. My scale is off; what I perceive as big changes are small ones, seen through a veil of intuition. There are shapes and skylines, money and men and friends...but I cannot gauge the horizon, guess their size. Is it a city in miniature, a small pile of dollars, a few good friends? Or is it wealth enough to make choices, the love of my heart, a tidal wave of major change? Where does the crisp golden sap of Autumn and the cold smell of snow come into my life? Where are the wool-coated arms with the outdoors and cologne and man smell on them, crushing me to his chest in playful passion?

Do we always realize our dreams or can we be snuffed out in the midst of them? Do those who stand on the brink of death still dream their dreams and have their hopes? Or do they waver, sensing some severance from their linear lives? I try to believe it all has pattern and purpose, but I do not know if that is simply the comfort one gives oneself or a universal truth.

Power Praying

I wrote this in 1993, when I was living with my mother in Northern California. My perspective is one of cynical bemusement...

My mother sits beneath the hairdryer in her bedroom and reads the bible. Sometimes when I pass the doorway, I see her beating mea culpa on her breast. It's an old signal, evoking early memories of Catholic ritual. It makes me uncomfortable because it dredges up my past, and because watching my mother do it seems faintly blasphemous.

I've thought about this a lot. My mother is not a devout woman. She doesn't go to church. In fact, her cynical attitude—coupled with some very unpleasant experiences of my own in Catholic school—stopped me from attending Mass years ago. So why is she doing this?

She's doing it because the house won't sell. She's in a real pickle, falling behind on her bills and the mortgage, and she will try anything. (This includes burying a statue of St. Joseph in the front garden, based on nebulous reports that several other people did it and “their houses sold right away.”) She's hoping God will have pity on her and save the day. If that means reading the bible, saying prayers and beating your breast, then so be it. It's a system, one that millions of Catholics have used for hundreds of years. When I realized that, my view of the woman under the hairdryer came back into focus.

My mother is a master at manipulation. She uses guilt like other people use power tools. I took me years to see her games coming down the road. Even when I was married for the second time, with a 9 year-old son, she could still push and twist and rotate my emotions into an explosion of rage and helpless self-condemnation.

She barters treatment, advice and prescriptions from a network of doctor friends. She gets first-class service at discount prices from the appliance repair man. She borrows money from a variety of well-heeled associates. This is more than guilt; most of these people are men, and there isn't any doubt that a chemistry's at work. Never mind that she's 65 or so, her beauty fading, her figure succumbing to gravity, alcohol and too much Hagen Daas. It isn't a physical thing. She exudes pheromones like a queen bee, and the drones buzz to the rescue.

This isn't her first return to the flock, either. Her last marriage was to a Catholic, but in order to get it sanctified and marry within the church, she had to confess that all her other marriages were bogus, because the Catholic church still doesn't recognize divorce. It meant denying a couple of husbands and most of her adult life. If I hadn't been so amused by the charade, I would have worried about my father's status. After all, he was her second husband, and if she was denying them all, then my brothers and I were illegitimate in the eyes of the church! But Mom has a deep-seated reluctance to acknowledge her first marriage—she was eighteen, it only lasted a couple of years—so she made the confession retroactive only as far back as her divorce from my father. The lie never bothered her, and she hung the hand-lettered certificate of absolution from the Pope on her bedroom wall.

All for nothing because the Catholic marriage failed, too.

Mother has a quick mind, and she's always worked the angle. If the ride resembled a roller coaster more than a limo, it was because she was impatient. She wanted things to happen right away, and screw the details. You grabbed some fame, you hit it big and you spent it all. Savings accounts were for wimps and tightwads.

As she's gotten older, this impatience with detail has transformed into a stubborn passivity. She's in dire straits, but won't call Social Security and start drawing on the money she deserves. She hobbles on a hurt foot, but won't take up her orthopedist friend's free offer of surgery. There's a complicated pattern of martyrdom going on here. I don't understand it, but it's another thing she's a master at. It serves her sense of perspective.

That brings me back to the hairdryer. Martyrdom is a subject Catholics are very big on. That, and giving over all your troubles to the arms of a large, bearded paternal figure. After four marriages, that's a concept she can understand.

Mom isn't really turning religious. She's just manipulating God. And if man was created in God's image, I'd say she's got a better than even chance of having him come through for her.

Going Under

That afternoon, the living room of our Florida ranch house was draped and shadowed. The lights were dim. A candle burned on the coffee table. People spoke in whispers. Expectation snapped in the air. We were about to have a séance.

The group included Spiritualist minister Joe Dickenson, and his wife, Lil; my mother, cool in white linen pants; our hairdresser, Carl, smoking nervously on the couch; and my sixteen-year-old self. We were waiting for Gail Greenberg—a psychic "coach" from New York—to arrive.

We didn't wait long. A moment later, a stocky, short-haired woman dressed in a skirt, blouse, and silk neck scarf bustled into the room and greeted us with breezy aplomb. She dropped a worn leather briefcase on the floor, lit a cigarette, and gave me her order for a Tom Collins. I grabbed a tray from our slate-topped bar and hurried to the kitchen.

Beyond the swinging door, our housekeeper Ann was mixing cocktails; as I paused, she tippled from a pint of gin on the kitchen table.

“Ann. . .”

A guilty look crossed her face and she set the bottle down hurriedly. I gave her a sly smile and she chuckled with relief.

“This day’s got my nerves so janglin’ I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Seems like I just got to have a little drink or I’m not gonna make it.” She gave me her sweet smile again and poured just a little gin into a glass, sipping delicately.

“Mother won’t let me drink or I’d join you,” I said.

“What’s that lady from New York going to do?”

I tried to shrug nonchalantly. “She’s going to make a trance psychic out of Carl. I guess she’s trained a lot of them up North, and when Joe found out she was in town to speak at the Spiritualist Church, he asked her to come and meet Carl.”

“What’s Mr. Carl been doing trance for?” asked Ann.

“He didn’t mean to; it just happened, while we were at Bartie Butcher’s house for a séance last month."

Bartie was a frail, white-haired ex-schoolteacher who could read palms, cards, and the crystal ball. I found her to be amazingly accurate; she foretold the disastrous end to one of my romances; she saw me marrying three times (it’s been two so far); and she said that I would live in England, because she saw a trip and an English crown (I did, and gave birth to my son there).

Her down-to-earth approach and steady ability impressed Mother, leading her to try and acquire similar skills—although my mother's methods were predictably unorthodox. She practiced on the dog races. (Note here: when I was a teen, no one thought twice about greyhound racing or knew of its underbelly of neglect and mistreatment. Fortunately, we're more enlightened now; I've adopted more than one retired racer myself.)

In those early days of her paranormal journey, racing forms flowed over the my mother's bed and lapped against our crossed legs like a sea of paper. Mom liked names like Go Get ‘Em, or Fast Red; I preferred romantic names like Queen’s Ivory or True Love. We'd clutch our forms, with all their scribbled notes, and spend an evening at the track testing our ability to pick dogs via intuition. Sometimes Bartie would go, too, reading winners in the foam of her trackside beer. We did okay, but even after a dog, a color, and a number were chosen at home, Mom would become distracted at the track itself. She'd ask people around her what they thought. She'd look at the bookie's odds. She'd peruse the hounds as they headed for the track and change her mind. So even though it was an intriguing way to develop intuitive accuracy, the theoretical parameters were not always followed. As any kind of clinical trial, it was a bust. This could explain why being a psychic doesn't guarantee success in gambling.

Anyway, as I told Ann on the night of the séance, it was at Bartie’s house that Carl first went into trance.

“Everyone was sitting in a circle in the dark, holding hands, when Carl sat straight up like he was poked and started speaking with someone else’s voice, calling Lucy and telling her he was Douglas, her first husband who’d been dead for ten years.”

Ann gave a little gasp.

“Mother and I were on either side of him, and I didn’t know what to do, but Bartie said not to pull my hand away, so I just had to sit and wait till he was through talking. We told Joe about it and he told Gail. Now she’s down here, that’s all. Let me take those drinks through.”

“I seed a trance once,” said Ann. “A lady in our church did it. Her head throwed back and her eyes rolled up, and there was stuff on her lips. She went into convulsions...and then she started calling out words we couldn’t even understand. The preacher said it was the tongue of God...”

Ann's eyes were like saucers as she placed the drinks on the tray. “Is that what’s going to happen out there tonight?”

“I sure hope not!” I said, and pushed my way through the door.

Ann had good reason to be nervous, I thought. Whenever Joe and Lil visited our house, strange things happened. Like the night they used my bedroom, and I had to sleep with my mother (my stepfather was at sea). In the deep, wee hours, I heard a nearby door swing shut, quite distinctly.

“What was that?” asked Mother, turning over.

“Door shut,” I mumbled, sliding deeper beneath the covers.

“Which door? Turn on the light and see,” she said.

“It was the closet door at the foot of the bed," I replied, "and I’m not getting up and turning the light on, no way.”

“Don’t be silly,” said my mother, nudging me, but I was adamant. With a sigh, she slipped out of the sheets and over to the light switch on the wall.

We both blinked and looked: the closet door was standing open, just as it had been when we went to bed. The house was silent, except for Joe’s snores coming from my room down the hall.

“Well, it must have been the bedroom door, then,” said Mother.

“Nope. It was already closed. I did it myself,” I told her.

"Then what was it?"

I snorted. "You ask? It was Joe. Spooky stuff always happens when he's around."

The next day, Ann answered the front door and let in a lady who said nothing, but walked down the hallway and disappeared. When I got home from school she was in the laundry room, clutching our cross-eyed male Siamese to her broad breast in an effort to feel protected. I told this tale to Mother, who tried to soothe Ann's fears.

“Now Ann," she said, "what are you afraid of? These are just people who have passed over to the Other Side.”

Ann rolled her dark eyes and shook her head. “One night, when I was getting ready for bed, the spirit of my aunt appeared and when I asked her what did she want, she grabbed me by the neck. I liked to choke to death.”

Mother made a sound of disbelief.

“I think you just imagined that part. Spirits can’t hurt you.”

Ann stuck out her chin. “Maybe not, but even if they can't, they’re sure going to make me hurt myself! You tell the Reverend to take his haunts with him next time he goes.”

Personally, I think it was a wonder that Ann continued to work for us—much less agree to be in the house during a séance! Now, perspiring with the tension and eeriness of the occasion, she took another sip of gin and patted her forehead with a handkerchief. I grabbed the drinks tray and hustled back to our guests...

Everyone had fallen silent. Gail’s dark eyes were sweeping the room.

“Now who,” she said, swishing back her hair with a plump hand, “is the new psychic in this house? Who is going to go into trance tonight?”

I was a bit surprised, because I thought she was there for Carl. So was this just a bit of showmanship to relax him into thinking he had a choice? Did I imagine it, or did her glance snag on me as I stood there, tray in hand?

Not me, I whispered. I’m not the one. But a sudden compulsion washed over me, like standing on the edge of a building and feeling the urge to fall off, even as your hands grip the railing with sweaty intensity.

Since Mother and I had begun exploring paranormal phenomena, I'd discovered my own innate sense of intuition. Several experiences—such as catching glimpses of people who weren’t there, or hearing doors shut that hadn’t shut, or feeling my neck hairs rise to an unknown breath—had dimmed my enthusiasm. But I knew the potential lurked right beneath the surface, like a shark circling in dark waters. I could be a psychic if I wanted to, I thought. It was that, combined with a compulsive honesty from my parochial schooldays, which prompted my sudden desire to step forward and be called upon to perform.

Gail’s gaze lingered on me a moment longer. Don’t try to hide from me! her frown seemed to say. Just then, Joe Dickenson’s bulky outline moved between Gail and I like a solar eclipse, breaking the spell and freeing me to move forward and hand out the drinks. She took her Tom Collins from the tray with an impatient swipe.

“There he is, there’s the young man you want, Gail,” Joe wheezed. He gestured at Carl on the couch. Pale, slender, with a wispy pompadour hair-do, Carl blinked nervously at Gail as she walked over and sat down on the cushion next to him.

“I’ve trained a lot of psychics in my time, young man. Just relax and stop acting as if I were going to bite,” she cooed.

I was reminded of a thin, skittish sheep being driven by an oversized sheepdog. Carl’s face had that white-rimmed, sheep-like kind of stare, too, as if he were trying to assess his chances for bolting. After everyone finished their drinks, Gail clapped her hands and called for attention. She turned off all the living room lights, leaving only the candle and a bulb in the hallway to throw slanted highlights on her heavy face. The candle flickered as the air conditioning kicked on. I saw Ann creep quietly into the room and take a chair. She had a drink in her hand.

After a pause, Gail’s strong New York voice rose in the first bars of the hymn, I Come To the Garden. The hair rose on the back of my neck. Joe’s rumbling bass joined in, and the quavering tones of his wife, Lil. My mother’s clear soprano sounded from the other side of the room. Not knowing the words, I tried to hum along.

Gail was trying to get Carl to relax and enter what she called a "preliminary light trance stage". I thought anyone who could get Carl to stop shaking and flicking ashes would be ahead of the game, but gradually—with her help—his breathing slowed and the silence in the room deepened. He leaned back into the sofa and closed his eyes. Then, something strange started to happen. First there was a thickness in the air, as if it was soft and spongy. I had the perception of increasing energy, as if everyone there was a drop of water that, together, was forming a pool. I also felt a sensation of something being pulled from my nostrils and fingertips.

“Ectoplasm,” murmured Joe from the darkness, and my heart beat fast. Ectoplasm was the substance frequently seen around trance mediums, especially during a materialization. Theoretically, it was drawn from the medium and others participating in the event. It had been photographed on occasion, showing up as a wispy, whitish halo encircling the medium’s face and body, sometimes transforming their features.

Gail was talking in a low, even, voice. “Carl, you are going deeper and deeper into a trance state,” she said. “You are completely and deeply relaxed. Your limbs are heavy. You cannot move your feet. . .”

Watching someone go into a trance always reminded me uncomfortably of watching someone drown; they stopped struggling, went slack, and opened their mouths. Another person’s voice came out of them, someone who claimed to be the medium’s “guide.” They were usually native American or Hindu or even Atlantean; I always wondered why there weren’t any car mechanics from Akron, or dry cleaners from Boston.

The guide would act as sort of a metaphysical bellboy, someone who went back and forth, fetching information, advice, or other people to speak during the trance. As if the afterlife were a big hotel lobby. Joe Dickenson had a small Pawnee girl named Lucy as his guide; it was weird to hear a high, female voice coming out of his oversized frame. Even weirder were the buzzing noises, like gnats, that hung around his ears. They sounded like a radio left on low in another room, but Joe could always translate what they said.

At this point, Carl had laid his head back on the sofa and was appropriately loose in the jaw. Gail was still intoning instructions. “Your body is heavy and sleepy, but your mind is light, weightless. . . It moves up and away from your body and takes you wherever you want to go. Go with your mind, Carl. Let it take you. . . What do you see? Where are you, Carl?”

 “I’m above a city,” Carl replied. “I’m above mountains, and a city. There are white buildings below. It’s early morning, the sun is just coming up. I can see its glow on the buildings. The earth on the mountains is green. It’s not here. Not now. Far away…” His voice dwindled and the heavy breathing returned.

“Good, Carl, very good,” soothed Gail. “Is there someone in that city who wants to be your guide, Carl? Is there someone who wants to speak to us?” She turned to the crowded silent room. “He should find one main guide, a spirit who will always start his trance off.” She turned back to Carl and waited, but he remained mute, supine, breathing in and out. 

“Is there someone who wishes to speak to us?” Gail’s voice became imperious. “Does someone wish to speak?”

“Yes!” came the answer, sudden and loud as a thunderclap. “I will speak!”

Ann put a hand to her mouth. I could see the whites of her eyes in the darkness, and my own clutching fear made me feel as if I were suffocating. Sweat ran from my hairline and I could hear the sharp intake of my own breath.

Gail Greenberg whirled to face the opposite end of the couch. There in the shadows, eyes closed and head back, was my mother. The voice was coming from her.