Mid December. One night, I found a clear plastic “pyramid shape” sitting on the usual cluttered dining table at Mom’s house. As I started to pick it up, mom came up the steps from the den, and I turned around to face her with it in my hand. I was expecting her to say something like: “Put that down and leave it alone”, which was her usual style. Instead, she walked over to me and said, “Do you want that?”
I asked, “Where did you get it?”
“Oh, it’s something I saved. It had candy in it, and I ate of all of it”, she said with a smirk.
I looked at her, trying not to laugh. “Why do you think I want something like this?” She shrugged and wrinkled up her nose at me, then grinned. I thought to myself, “All of that is in the past and behind me anyway. I don’t concern myself with such anymore. Pyramids, metaphysics, and science junk. Been there, done that. I know it all, why go back?” But, because it was a clear and perfect shape, interesting to the eyes, I thought I’d take it.
Christmas Eve. I was at my brother and sister-in-law’s house in Andalusia getting ready for midnight service. I was going to Church only because I wanted to be with my nieces. The phone rang. I started to answer, but suddenly somehow felt heavier and like I couldn’t get to it quick enough. Sarah came in and answered. “Oh, hi Paul! How’s it going?...... Oh, yeah, Dan’s here and the girls and.......”she turned half way around and I couldn’t hear her. “Paul?” I thought. “PSSST.” I said to Sarah and motioned in one of those soundless talks, shaking the curls out of my hair, “I’m not here!” She turned to me and covered the transmitter, “Oh too late, he already knows you’re here. I just told him.”
She talked with him a while then said he asked for me. I really, seriously didn’t want to talk to Paul. I still was not sure at that point if I wanted to trade my grudge that guarded my current peaceful easiness I’d rediscovered for a flow of bad feelings from my past association with him. I wished him well, but I wished him never to come around me again. I was, by then, mentally and emotionally recuperated, and I was my old comfy self. “Tell him I’m busy getting the girls ready and I don’t have time”, I whispered. Actually, it was the truth. I don’t know what he might have said on the other end in response, but the subject changed to something else rather quickly.
Around the middle of the 2000 Christmas holidays, oddly, something came up between my self and Mom on the subject of music and mother had asked if I’d seen the movie about Beethoven she owned. I said, “Well, yes, um….I discovered it while you were gone one day.” It was okay, I guess.” She went to get it out again and put it in the player. She asked me where was the letter that came with it. “A letter?” I asked. “There was a copy of a letter in the movie that came with it in the video sleeve I ordered from the Musical Heritage Society”. “Oh, sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about, mom. I’ve never seen it. It wasn’t in there the other day. Maybe you misplaced it somewhere.”
“No I didn’t. How about finding it”. There was no sense in arguing with a stump, I reminded myself.
We watched it together since I’d not sat and watched a program with her for a long time; afterward I said something about his early death, and we started out own speculating. She then referred to a manual that I had seen all of my life in her possession. This is STILL her “reliable source of information”, after it’s publication over forty years ago. She then said, “He may have contracted syphilis from that woman he stayed with in that movie, because mercury treatments were used at that time for treatment of such”. I told her this movie, like any other product of Hollywood’s efforts, was based on a minimum degree of historical information-after that, we owe our entertainment to the power of pure imagination. The next day, I began a search for her so called letter around her house to prove that she lost it, but I never found it. But the search for it simply increased my curiosity all the more about him, and so I was determined to locate it. Why did carry on and enunciate the importance of it so much?
During this time, I went to the public library here in Montgomery, AL. I couldn’t find anything in the library, Books-a-Million nor at Barnes & Nobles on Beethoven, so I drove out to Huntingdon College, where I had earlier visited to seek out voice instruction teachers-who always seemed to be too “booked up” to fit me into to their schedules. I visited old bookstores, turning them upside down and leaving a mess in my wake. Finally! I found this one book in the antique store, “Listening to Music”, by Alan Schindler, that looked interesting, with a brief section referencing Beethoven on harmony.
Ah...Allan Schindler.... Oh wait a startle-ful minute--A. SCHINDLER! Oh well, such coincidences are inneresting, but so what...
So, this was all well and good, but not sufficient for the level of my curiosity. I kept looking and still my efforts yielded next to nothing save only background info on his music.
Know this: I didn’t give a flip about his music.
I wanted something about the man’s background in living, moving and having his being here-something I could disarm Mom and defend myself next time she told me (for at least the thousandth time in my life) I didn’t know what I was talking about. Therefore I required something of a more deeply personal nature for the prime purpose of demonstrating to mother how old reference manuals such as hers were that collected dust after a certain time and why they weren’t always reliable just because they were “older than you” and had “been around a lot longer than you”.
I couldn’t wait to get back to work the following Monday. I wound up on the web again; searching, determined, it seemed, to find out something really useful. Not that the web should be considered that reliable for really useful stuff but was generally a quick reference when practical. I do remember that this is the point where I had dived off into deep water. I was out in the middle of the “ocean” now, groping for info but catching ‘bits and pieces’ of stuff floating in cyber-space that had no seeming depth or meaning in its content. I was getting frustrated. I tried again, thinking this would be the LAST time before I aborted the idea of this subject. Again, I had several choices to choose from and doing it my way, as usual, I closed my eyes and just clicked on one-I had no way of knowing anyway what was behind door number one until I looked anyway. This site produced portraits of Beethoven. Since I couldn’t find anything significant in writing, I conceded to what I’d learned earlier in an art class in high school. Portraits say much about a person. Well, a lot of these looked pretty wild, anyway. There was this one that stood out to me because it was the only one in color. The eyes were the most noticeable feature in that they seemed to have a disturbing effect on my consciousness. I found myself looking at it, trying to “read” something about the image.
January 2001, midmonth. Guess what? I’m back in civilian employment and out of uniform! I had applied for the position of Secretary for this program, not expecting at all anything fruitful, least of all an interview. Within a couple of weeks my full time employment was confirmed. I decide to abandon all and throw myself wholly into this job and make the best of it. I hit the ground running every day. The day is over before I know it. This is good! I don’t have time to think about getting into trouble anymore-just work, pay bills go home go to bed-get up and do it again. Finally! Consistency in my life-running smoothly and routinely for a change! Busy, busy, BUSY!!!
I am constantly running and I am actually enjoying it! My brain is getting FULL! In the midst of this new excitement for me, I learn that my new supervisor doesn’t know if he is coming or going. So many TDYs, at one time and hot taskings in between. Does he ever slow down? Oh yeah! He does now. The General tells him he needs to cut down on his field trips and stay at Maxwell some of the time. This directive is a thorn in my boss’s side because his heart is fully into the Cadet program, and he sees so much that is not getting done in the field that should be, but so much that is that should not be, which is causing the program to slump. “By the time I leave in a couple of years, I want this to be a well oiled, fully functional machine”, he said.
Colonel King began explaining to me the organizational structure he has in mind for this program, “Within a couple of months, you’ll be thinking pretty much like me, and you and I will be like this”-he held up two fingers together-that made me comfortable with future plans but uncomfortable with that gesture he’d made. “You will be at a point where you will actually be advising me-telling me where to go and what to do”. I was thinking, “Ha! Me, a GS-5 nobody, tell you, a full bird Colonel, what to do and where to go? Buddy, you don’t know what you’re asking for”. And I especially wasn’t comfortable with that “just like this” deal. I liked to do my job, but at a certain distance without “mind-melding” with anyone else. As well, I wasn’t sure that I could tell my boss “where to go”, “what to do”; I’d never done that before. But, I said, smiling, “Okay, sounds good to me”. If he was confident, then I should be, too.
Jan 01 Mid-month: I am at Mom’s house again for the weekend, wearing out my welcome, as usual. Evening, Saturday, my oldest brother and I are standing around in the den, and during our conversation about something, he says, “I want to show you something you may have not seen before.” He picks up a book which my next to the oldest brother bought, flips through it to find a specific page, turns it around for me to look at, and says, “Take a good look at this picture and tell me if you see anything unusual about it.” I looked at a drawing of a human eye, and said, “Hmm”. He asked, “You don’t see anything?” I looked hard at it because apparently there was something here that he was referring to specifically. Then, I thought I saw it. “Well I see something in the eye-looks like a skull in its pupil.” He said, “That’s it. Do you know what it is?” I shook my head. “It’s called, “The Grim Reaper-the one who watches us all.”
“Reaper,” I thought. Of course I felt that sort of feeling that goes up one’s back when a thought hits them just right. Then I thought of that song I had heard many times before, and how I could never quite understand the reason of the rhyme by the one who penned it into existence for us. Music flowed from memory sounding as if far in the distance and from within a tin can. While my brother was talking to me-my attention faded from him and tuned into the past as I heard the words......“don’t fear the reaper.” I always did like the metal music of that one song, even though I never paid much heed to the lyrics.
I guess I shouldn’t mentally ingest things that I don’t understand-but then again, I understood earlier in life that “understanding will come, eventually”, and to simply press on in the meantime. That the reaper has his job to do is nothing that one can do anything about except to try and live as fully and productively as possible until he raps on your door. “Now I have been informed. Fair enough”, I considered. “Where did he get this book?” I wanted to know. “I think he said he got it at Barnes and Nobles when he was up there in Montgomery last time”, he replied. “Oh, that figures-I should have known,” I thought. The next week I went on an internet search for the words to the song from years before. As I read them instead of listening to someone sing them, I then understood the message. It’s a love song it does appear, now to me. Before that point in time, the words always seemed dark and forbidding to my unenlightened mind.
February 2001. Where did the month go? It was like a blur! Traveling on Hwy 231 for home, I suddenly execute an illegal U-turn in middle of the highway. Cold rain came down the day I bought the keyboard for no sane reason. I walked into the Radio Shack, directly up the keyboards. “May I help you?” asked the polite young man. “I want that keyboard”, I said, as if a direct command to him, pointing at the one at my eye level, my finger almost touching it. “This one?” he asked, smiling, touching the one I pointed at. “Yes, stupid!” I thought indignantly. “How much is it?” I didn't really care how much it was-and I didn’t know the difference between it and the others-I just had walked in the door right up to this particular one and pointed at it mindlessly.
“Well,” he started patiently, “That one is $148.00 plus tax, and then we have...” Good, I’ll take it!” I interrupted. “No.” I thought to myself, “Not good, really-that I am out of my mind at the moment!” I didn’t have money to just throw out! “Oh, does this have a sustain pedal with it, by the way? I don't like keyboards unless I can sustain sounds at will.” Did he care about that? Most likely not-but he sure did like me being there, buying on spontaneity and giving him zero resistance on a sale. He didn’t even have to work for that commission-as long as he gave me what I wanted that seemed to defy my own reasoning, there would be no heartburn between us. “For 19.95, this universal pedal goes with the keyboard….” “Good, I'll take it!” I said, without hesitation. I say to myself, “What the f--- are you doing????” “A stiff but silent “SHUT-UP!” instantly came right back at me.
“Would you care to......” he was asking. I wasn't really listening to the sales guy anymore. I was trying to sort my thought processes. “NO!-” I interrupted him abruptly and he looked startled so I said, “I mean-I said-‘no thank you, sir’”, I corrected myself, with a pasted-on tight expressionless grin. What the heck was going on with me, conducting myself that way in a public place? I knew better. He was looking at me with amusement like I was the “weirdo customer of the day”. He then smiled, looking around the room without comment as he tallied the additional amount. $180.00 total. I still felt uncomfortable about my actions, but somehow just could not say no. I knew better than to pull a stunt like this, so why was I actually following through with this? Certainly not for my health! “Tank yew!” I told him as I started out. “Need help taking it out?” He inquired politely. “Nah, thanks though!” I took the boxed instrument under my arm and marched out with it under my arm in the drizzling rain. When I got home I put batteries in it and fired it up. “Let’s see. What can I do with this thing? No, no! Correction: what am I doing with this thing?” I thought of the $180.00, that I somehow didn’t regret this deal but knew too, that I should. “I will later, no doubt”, I forewarned myself.
Well, I guess I should try playing something. Like what? ‘Mary had a little lamb?’”. I gritted my teeth, mocking myself. I plunked on it, thinking, and then tried to pick out sounds, but nothing came forth. I used to be able to sit and music would flow-if I’d known anything about reading music, then I could have produced something from my own mind. I had not touched a keyboard since leaving Alabama in 1991. Ten years, approximately-certainly that would constitute the cobwebs and dust balls; in spite of the fact that I had a roommate for several years who was a concert pianist that I could have taken music lessons from instead of boxing lessons. I gave up trying to play anything and started playing with the synthesizers on it instead.
March 2001. I’m settling in well at work and getting into a mindset. But, a strange thing is going on right in the middle of my contentment. I feel I am becoming “unsettled” in another way that I never felt like before in my life. I can’t put my finger on it. I sit at my new desk, lost in thought, frowning, wondering why my face hurts, in the midst of my recent successes. I should not be feeling like this. A few days later, I go back to Barnes and Nobles in search of “something”, just looking around-dawdling my time, twiddling thumbs, sauntering down the isle, humming to myself, looking left and right, ready to jump on anything that jumped out at me. I thought, “Well, this must be the place to be for someone like me with nothing else to do.” I was here two years ago doing the same thing when all of that information started coming at me-or pouring out of me-I don't know which. Why was I like that so many times that I wound up here, as if I “lacked” something to fill me up, but couldn’t define what it was? The saying, “You don’t what you’re missing”, pretty much fits me to a “T”. “God knows what it is even if I don’t. So why can’t God just send me an angel who could just HAND IT TO ME?” I think to myself. I passed by the music section then stepped back two paces. “Perhaps, while I am here, I’ll see if there is anything that can justify my reason for being so”. I came across a book called, “Finding Your Voice”.
Seeing the book reminded me that I still wanted to pursue voice lessons. I thought about Jerri at Huntington College last year. We had planned that I would take voice last year. The day I met her, she had me sing to her scales to determine where my vocal range peaked out. When I was a senior in high school, the voice teacher I had then, had classified me as a mezzo alto-now almost 30 years later, this lady had determined that I was mezzo soprano. I guess with all the screaming fits I’d been through and my emotions being stretched seemingly beyond my endurance, I’d busted through a previous range to a higher pitch. Oh well, did I not hear a popular opera star not too long ago in an interview “best describe” opera singing as controlled screaming? Go figure.
Before I left, she picked out a piece of sheet music to practice with until the next appointment, asking if I could read music. I said “No. But I can use the keyboard I just bought to pick out the notes for tone relation and determine how to sing it; if I really try”. “Okay, then, she said.” It was a very simple folk song titled, “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair.” I never learned it because before I could see her again, she had to leave the state to go to Mississippi because her Aunt there had died, and a month later when I finally was able to get back with her, she apologized to me and said that she was “expecting”, and would have to alter her schedule to make it lighter, and offered to put me in contact with someone else. The other person was “booked up” for the season and so I dropped the issue. I lost the sheet music she gave me and never found it again.
Thinking about that, I put the book back, uninterested. I glanced further down the shelf. A book about Beethoven. I’d forgotten about him too, being busy and all. “Substance! At last!” I thought, picking it out and looking at the cover. “There’s that picture again”. I was getting the idea that he was the kind of person that ate nails for breakfast, brushed his teeth with a wire brush, and wiped his rear with sandpaper. “Beethoven-The Composer as Hero”-said the cover. Why wasn’t it here before when I visited earlier? I bought the book for background info. A couple of weeks passed and one Saturday morning I was having my coffee, sitting in the den. I picked the book up, finally, flipped through the pages slowly, and got to a section that read, “documents” and took a good look at the actual content for the first time since having the book in my possession. I came across something called the Heglinstadt Letter.
Actually this was good, because if anyone knew anything about Beethoven, well, it was Beethoven. As I read it, I got a different “picture” of this person other than what I thought he was. Then I found another document, The letter to the Immortal Beloved. “This is what mom was fussing over earlier?” I read it. As I did, words from a song of today flowed into my thoughts-“My Heart will go on”, the Titanic song. One script mirrored the other, in my mind, at least. Thus, a song I didn’t regard too much, now a thing of beauty and deep meaning I realized it to be, as I looked at it with a fresh perspective as it took on a timeless spiritual meaning. Wow.
I found out that the portrait that my eyes had locked on so powerfully earlier, was a depiction of Beethoven composing the Missa Solemnis. Afterward, I had gone to the “Disc Jockey Store” at the Eastdale Mall looking for “Missa Solemnis”, since it seemed significant enough to constitute a research over, I might as well go all the way with it and have a listen to it-what could it hurt? This would be my first attempt at buying some of Beethoven’s music. Hey! Whaddya know? It turns out that the situation warrants listening to some music, after all”, I realized I was getting reeled in hookline and sinker wanting to know what was so great about Missus Solemni. The recording I was after not in that store. Instead, right out in front of the selection sat, “Beethoven: Mass In C”, Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Choral Orchestra. God forbid! I was not interested in “Mass” anything-just the title of it turned me away.
“Probably B-O-R-I-N-G and depressing!” I thought. I felt so tempted to get it, defying reason not to. So I resisted because the “masses” I had heard mother playing all of my life sounded depressing and sent me hurrying out of the room at the sound and mention of “Mass”. Still, I couldn’t keep my fingers off of it.
“Let’s not get carried away now, Lisa.” I thought. I just wasn’t too sure about wasting my money on anything else as I did earlier, so I bought a couple of CDs of Beethoven music to justify avoiding “Mass in C". As I was checking out, Rap music blared from the ceiling speakers, with it’s lyrical insinuations of something nasty just bordering on defying legal standards of broadcasting. “Sick, sick, sick!” I thought, “Using art as a medium to convey filth-don’t we get enough of that through other means???”
I tried to focus my thoughts again. “If it’s here the next time I’m in, I’ll cave into it”.
As I walked out with Sir George Solti conducting the Ninth, Clifford Curzon conducting Piano Concertos #4 & 5, and a 5 CD set containing all nine symphonies put out by NAXOS, the gentleman who checked me out suggested that I go the mall on the other side of town to find the other recording. So I went. “Got Beethoven?” Yeah, but nothing that interested me. I walked out with the “Immortal Beloved” soundtrack because it had “VARIETY!” I already knew this from seeing the film. A week later, I went back to the Disc Jockey, looking for something popular for my nieces they specifically asked me for. “Mass in C” was still there. “Well, okaaaaaaaay. Guess I gotta try it. But-if I don’t like it, I’ll wheel-n-deal with mom and trade her out of something for it if she doesn’t already have it, if that is possible. If she does, guess I’ll be forever stuck with it.”
I got home, piped the 9th through the old stereo that had only a radio, a turn-table and an 8 track player with a sound converter signaling gadget and the FM frequency. In so doing, I turned the whole house into a Concert Hall of Piano and Symphony orchestra bouncing off the walls. I could still hear that “Rap Crap” language thumping in my head and I sought to annihilate it by orchestration. Rap is nothing other to me than representational of violent behavior by those who demand respect from the general public regardless of how they conduct themselves. For the next several days, I moped around the house. “What has gotten into you lately?” I asked myself. You don’t have anything wrong with you except that knot at the top of your body controlling your actions!” My mood changed, then. I was tired of listening to the “same old thing”, and finally went over and picked up my latest acquisition, and put it on, and stepped back a couple feet.
“Oh ... my .... God! This is not Mass-this .... is...... b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-1, that’s what this is!” I thought. It was so relaxing that my attention riveted into an involuntary one-pointed concentration. I was holding my breath, listening to the detail of it. I had turned the volume up to the max in the old stereo earlier and had not adjusted it back down. I was standing between the two large speakers, about the size of stage amplifiers. The music slowly approached, winding around me like a key searching for its respective cavern to disengage a lock. The door to my frazzled mind clicked and gently swung open on its creaking hinges. Lisa: “revisited”, I thought, submersed in this thought, examining internally how I felt from one moment to the next. “Oh, what was I doing?” Cleaning! I’d forgotten. “Rats! Guess I should finish!” Then, “Oh fiddle-sticks-put off today what you can do tomorrow. Today, you listen-tomorrow may never come!”
I patted myself on the back for obeying the hunch to buy it. It wasn’t so bad, after all. A thought seemed to nudge, “You’d get more pats on the back if you would just clean out those ears and listen to more of those hunches-you should know better than not to by now”. “Hmm”, I smiled to myself, amused at the ease of the return-thought. “Yeah, silly me”, I answered. I felt weird in how I seemed to be talking to myself all the time, which I had been doing a whole lot of lately. “Well, who in the hell is noticing?” I said out loud just for amusement, then laughter echoed in the otherwise empty house. “Maybe I’m turning into a schitzo or something like it? That ain’t funny-better stop laughing.” The understated beauty of the sounds coming out of the stereo was quite a change from the seemingly forceful and tense three sets of recordings as what I had been listening to earlier. I had worn out, already, the 4th and 5th Piano Concerto, the 5th, 6th, 7th and 9th Symphony, becoming more and more engulfed in something I previously would never have considered.
But having listening to all the thunder and lightning bolts blaring from the stereo, which sounded just as good or better than rock music to me now, I hardly expected that the calming voices and melodic strings intertwining which was very soothing to stretched nerves, could possibly be from the same stormy turbulent character. We are so quick to judge people on first impressions - I realized I was wrong in this, because I would have missed a delightful discovery. I was looking at the booklet trying to figure out which tongue it was being sung in and when I really couldn’t I just started making up my own words. I just wanted to “open up” and learn to sing all over again! No matter how bad I sounded to no one here.
Second track. "Wow! Now this is the way to praise the Lord!" It occurred to me that if music like this was played in churches, there would be no need for a preacher-I'd be tossing him out on his ear - yeah, that's right: I’d be going to church, myself'. The third track approached steadily and then opened fire like sharp instruments! Just when I had my defenses down! It was twilight and I had previously pulled the curtains closed-the chandelier in the dining area dimmed for an evening meal. The music was so loud and intense that I could feel the actual sound waves coursing through my physical body all over and I felt strange electrical vibrations as they traveled seemingly through me. I looked up through the window at the electrical wiring on the utility posts, closed my eyes and imagined myself as being electricity and traveling through one of those long thick black cables bordering my yard. “A signal went off in my brain, “Man you better stop this-you’re fixing to get fried.” But I really didn’t want to interrupt myself in a mad scientist’s moment of discovery about oneself and the world she exists in.
The Orchestral sounds were bleeding and swirling “colors” into the atmosphere about me. Colors result from certain frequency of vibration, I’d read somewhere before, just like everything else that had a certain unique frequency to it. I then recalled also in that moment what I had read somewhere about how a sound beam of a certain frequency directed towards the other side of the earth with enough force and intent could kill those on the other side. “Now how productive can that be?” I thought, mockingly. I didn’t like the way that notion made me feel. Sound does affect, depending on the peculiarities of its ability to vary in frequency. It then, can also be a potentially hazardous thing. I momentarily panicked-remembering all of this stuff that I seemed to have forgotten, coming back at me-thinking I shouldn't be doing this-I had left that all behind a long time ago.
But, now, I felt “wired”. I simply did not feel like I could exercise the will to move out of it-that was definitely a weird feeling-because of the sensation that these sounds produced in my brain centers-like something being released from them in order to relax the mind after being keyed up too long. “My fault for ‘going there’. If this sound kills me, then all I can say is, ‘what a way to go!’” I thought. “Right now I don’t care!” I know it might sound insane to someone else, but at that moment, I really didn’t. I felt like my brain was “trippin’”, as they say, and I was simply absorbed in how sound affects due to sound effects.
All of my senses affected made me feel like I was doing vertical revelations each time I closed my eyes. Suddenly I opened my eyes, realizing the effect that sound indeed was having on me. “The mad scientist just can’t get enough!” I thought to myself. “What the hell are you doing?” Then, I thought about how no one was here calling me down for doing just what I wanted to do. My attitude snapped and I laughed, as though I had just broken loose from some “chains” that have bound me for so long: “Hey! Relax! I know what my problem is! I haven’t yet caught onto the idea that I’m actually free to do EXACTLY as I want right now without someone calling me down about it-because I don’t have anyone here telling me “you can’t”. I was very tired too, even today, from the long hours I kept at work.
But then at the same time I was thinking, “Well, this doesn’t happen every day-and it is something to experience, so, why not?” That settled it. I let go of every notion of reserve against throwing myself completely into the extraordinary moment I’d created to be in. I was still standing in front of the loud stereo, and the sound vibrations were making me feel like I was going backward into everything and experience that had ever made Lisa into what and who she was up to now, like taking an "inward journey". I didn’t understand what they were saying when singing, and didn’t really care, because I was getting a message all of my own from this music, and that’s what was more important, it seemed. I needed to -find out about Lisa-how, when and why I had disconnected with her. I stood in front of that stereo blaring through the first three tracks of that piece, my thoughts definitely way out somewhere else, my body in the house by itself, I guess.
Then I came back into where I was, and sat down on the couch and let the music disk finish out it’s cycle. I got up and moved around the house-feeling vaguely rearranged somehow. I spied the book with the picture on it again. The intense expression didn’t look so intense for some reason anymore. Perhaps my attitude had shifted? Then another thing occurred to me: how did I get off track from trying to prove a point with Mother, to this one-trying to prove something to myself? Interesting, in I observed, that I said “no music”, yet, it seemed now that here I am doing that very thing I’d previously had NO interest in at all.
For the next few days at work, a feeling of ‘energy surging’ comes and goes, giving me a feeling of variation of degree of “rocking” sensation. I feel at times I could just fall out of my chair at my desk. I don’t feel like my usual self. I fins myself with my head in my hands, in deep thought, “Oh what have you done now?” Col K caught me too, once. “You don’t look happy”, he said softly, and my head snaps out of the position. I wasn’t aware of him standing there!
I straightened up in my chair so fast my blood rushes to my head coming to attention to an officer, put on a big smile and said, “Sir, I’m okay! I’m just-in deep thought. Not a problem”. I laughed to assure him I was fine, because he looked funny giving me a sideways, half-smiling look, just to be sure. I smiled again to send him a decoy so that he could be sure that his new secretary really was in fact, a-okay! He was convinced and continued onto his office. I said to myself, “In deep trouble, more like it”.
Today is March 19. God! It takes me all damn day to type a simple letter of memorandum. My thoughts feel so incoherent to one another. I seem to feel ‘hindered’ from one step to the next. I can’t concentrate on the simplest things! Every time I start feeling “that way” akin to the idea of “station interference” my brain goes blank and I forget what I am doing. Do I need to go see a doctor? “Don’t!” I warn myself. No doctors! I wonder if I had been listening to too much music? I have not turned the television on and heard the news. I have deliberately tuned out anything media wise regarding current events. So, I have not heard anything except music in my house, music in my car. Beethoven music in place of everything else I was accustomed to feeding my brain with. I have refused anything else for God only knows why. Am I “slipping” from “tripping”? Well, I don’t know. I never had this sort of experience before to make any kind of judgment call with it.
19 March 2001 Friday Night. I lay down early. Early meaning 8:00 PM. Here again, not normal for me. Just tired, I dozed off, slept rather lightly and comfortably. I wake up around 12:30 or 1:00 and am sitting up abruptly, awake with a loud gasp, before I have even opened my eyes.
I remember dreaming that I was in a vague environment not in my time as I know it, but can’t decide where I could call myself being. My hands have a very noticeable “electrical feeling” that makes me want to rub my hands together in order to relieve myself of the feeling, like current when one scrubs his feet against the carpet and touches something, and the feeling is persistent and the rubbing does nothing. I feel like if I growled loud enough that might relieve it! It is not uncomfortable, but the feeling is weird and intense enough to command my undivided attention. I am wide-awake now and very alert mentally, very quickly.
I lie down and the feeling seems to expand to the rest of me. I sit up again and rub my palms briskly together while a vague and light warm feeling feels like a blanket to me. How would I describe it for another to understand? My first reaction is, “Oh God-what is this?” I clench and unclench my fists back and forth in unison with each other. So much in a “compressed” sense of time. After a couple of moments of not knowing whether or not to lie down or sit up or change positions to stop it, I decide it would be better to “just be with it” in order to determine what is causing it; and after another moment it dies down.
I am awake for most of the “wee hours” of the morning. A ‘nagging’ continues to keep me awake, and my thoughts are focused on the sudden change of my attitude towards things, from a state of contentment to a sudden sort of urgency in worrying about God-only-knows-what. I lay awake trying to sort my feelings out. What is happening to my attitude? I have a new job, a nice new car, and no interpersonal strife with anyone. I simply have no reason at this time to be unhappy! I feel the need to rub my hands over my face and forehead roughly more than once to “bring my focus back” to here and now in my room-that which I base my knowledge of my own personal existence upon. I feel otherwise okay. I am not sick - I don’t feel that anything is out of order physically or mentally. Do I think I was having a heart attack or something like an anxiety attack? No, definitely no. But why should I have reason to go directly from a nice resting slumber to sitting straight up in bed in wide-awake alertness?
If I was really dreaming, I don't remember if there were people involved, but rather being in a certain place at an unknown time. I quickly ‘scanned’ my mental file for reference. I am in full awake mode and realize the kitchen light and living room lights are still burning. Annoyed at myself, I reluctantly get out of bed to turn them off, because I want to know exactly what just happened to me. I lie back down with no intention of going back to sleep but eventually, I drift off. I wake up around 07:30 with no help from the alarm clock, feeling strangely relaxed-physically, mentally and emotionally. Very relaxed, my mind at ease, not at all like I was hours earlier. But I cannot stop thinking about what woke me up so suddenly. It occurs to me that perhaps the best way to describe the experience is as if something or someone had my hands in a comfortable mild electrical “grip”. Yeah, that captures it close enough.
Entry. More and more frequently, now, I cannot concentrate at work because of this stronger persistence of resurging feelings of energy I’d had earlier. That I have learned that sometimes in order to gain information about such things, that it is necessary to tune out the onslaught of outside stimuli. To be honest, come to think of it, perhaps it might be good for me that I have ignored what is generated via the media for a change. I have not kept up with the news. I don’t even turn on the TV anymore to heed the weather watch. But, if I think about turning on anything that might bring me up to date with goings on, the idea seems unnatural a thing to do-like I am “wasting precious time”. This is definitely not me, but I have lived like this for the past 5 or 6 weeks, regardless.
Entry. Something continues to nag me, and where have I learned to head to when this happens? Bookstore. Where I have learned to go “to get it in writing”, if need be. Same book store as before, two years earlier. I am getting the feeling that maybe Barnes and Nobles must be ‘haunted’ - in some way or another. Who knows for sure? Maybe I’m the one doing it. All I know is that if I want a guiding hand to answer my most unanswerable questions, to the bookstore is a learned response for me. Just inside the big brown double doors of the storefront, I pause to see what might “be in store, up front”, for me.
A rack of books sitting directly in my path in the foyer. Retailers use this tactic when they want to "up the sales volume"; setting products right in plain view that a person might need, are easily accessible to him whereas he would otherwise might not see it. I learned this in the seminar on how to buy Internet storefronts and make money using them. "Hmm". I paused and considered the rack. “Meditations From Conversations With God. Now, why do I need a book authored by A MORTAL, who has his/her own opinions, aside from mine, to tell me how to talk with God, when I have done so without a without a mediator thus far in my life? After all, he’s just a “thought away”, is he not?” I asked, just above my breath. “Because you don’t listen”, shot back a thought. My eyes widened at my own thought process, as I let it the pages loosely flip in my hand, and some words on a page caught my eye and I quickly thumbed back to it and read it.
This first passage I saw in the book made me recall something I’d just got through reading in the last purchased book, “Beethoven, Composer as Hero”. “The more he thus lost contact with the outer world, the clearer was his inward vision. The surer he felt of his inner wealth, the more confidently did he make his demands outwards; and he actually required from his friends and patrons they should no longer pay him for his works, but so provide for him that he might work for himself regardless of the world. And it actually came to pass, for the first time in the life of a musician, that a few well-disposed men of rank pledged to keep Beethoven independent in the sense desired.”
“You know, this might come in handy” I thought to myself. Besides, it’s only 4.98-and if I decide later I don’t want it, five dollars isn’t much anymore. Another thought came right behind that one: “Well, you’ve thrown away things before, of greater value”. Okay I am starting to get a load of one thought interrupting another, here”. I arrogantly push through the second set of double doors. “What am I really doing here?” I think, bewildered. I carefully considered my actions and how I am spending money when I had already told myself that I didn't need anything else-that I had everything that I needed at the house and on me to survive-really-for a long time. “Don’t I have enough books already I’ve not read?” I sighed.
I head towards the metaphysical/self help, as if pulled like a magnet into the mysteriousness of “what’s in store” to discover. “And what motivates me this time?” For some reason, I thought of the Montauk Project (Philadelphia Experiment)-for lack of anything else that might come to mind. “Something on time, apparently. Something mentally stimulating and challenging. That, I haven’t had for a long time.” I started really looking, now, for “The Montauk Project,
when I see this cute little book, cute because it’s little compared to the others on it’ shelf. “ Easy reading”, think, considering it’s brevity. Curious, I picked it off the shelf to examine it. Twin Flames and Soul Mates….I had heard of soul mates before, and didn’t really understand the concept or even give a flip about it, but now twin flames? What’s the difference? Or: what’s the point?
“Time to l-e-a-v-e!” I go around the comer of the rack wondering, “What’s on the other side?” On the other side I discover, to my disapproving look I can’t mask, is “gay/lesbian” section. There is this tall and lanky blonde girl standing there that I nearly bump into who gives me a wild eyed glance as if I’m on the wrong turf. “Oops!” I thought, walking the other way. I opened and flipped nervously through the little book to look busy and oblivious to her, because I was approached by just such a person years ago and thankfully was able to avoid any confrontation over it.
A page I yanked it open to in that moment of nervous distraction read, “Each of us has a twin soul who was created with us in the beginning, which He separated into two spheres of being, one with a masculine polarity and one with a feminine polarity, yet, each with the same spiritual origin and unique pattern of identity”. Whoa, what? I’ve always understood by reading Genesis that we have an identity uniquely our own: individually, not dually. But, that a soul has a specific twin “somewhere out there” begs for clarification by more reliable sources. I’m not close-minded, however, just because I don’t understand.
On the way home, I detour off the East Boulevard to Vaughn Road to go to Atlanta Bread Company. I buy two of those sandwiches I have learned to crave. My first visit, I tried the Bella Basil Chicken Sandwich with Pesto spread. Very good, now I’m hooked! Before I leave out, I see a load of bread that I have just got to have! I try to eat one of the sandwiches but cannot satisfy the hunger by doing so, so I lose my appetite. I got home and puttered around, finished off the first and eventually, the second sandwich. I was hungry, after all.
I went back to my room for a little catnap, and opened the little book again. Who would have thought that my research would turn into this? To keep the subject from appearing so foreign to me, I noticed a quote from Matt. 19:6: “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder”. I’d often heard it said, “Real marriages are made in heaven”; I have always taken this to mean that God brings two people together while they are here: thus-marriage made by God before the ceremony conducted by man. I closed the little book and put it down, feeling sheepish-what was I doing?? I’m headed down another road-I just keep getting lost! Why possessed me to even buy it, really? Marriage is not my cup of tea.” I tossed it unceremoniously over to the shelf.
I picked up the first book that I had encountered on my way into in the store, and re-examined it. Although what the one page that stood out at me in the store had said, and might have meant nothing in particular to anything, it was something to consider in respect to the research project I’d started, out of madness, and now it seemed in a whimsical sort of way to be a piece of that puzzle I was putting together the way that my now distortion of thinking that had become quite familiar to me would command that I follow through with it. So, I tore the page out and threw the book away-whereas normally, one tears a page out of a book and throws the page away.
End of log 20 March 2001
Today is 21 March 01. This “log” thing is growing beyond my expectations. I am glad that I started it though. Look how much I’ve written! I haven’t even gotten down to business here too well at the shop. But I feel it is in my best interest somehow keep a running log, as recently my normal sense of my world seems keep filtering in and out. Perhaps I should be tuning into what’s going on in the world-like in this cadet program I am supposed to be a prime functional part of. But as far as I am concerned, that T.V. can “rest in peace”. I still don’t like writing, but perhaps I’ll have something to reference in case I need a mental status check one day. Last night I retired early again (I’ve already established what “early” means, here). I woke from a most unsettling dream feeling rather odd. In the dream I was at a house I once lived in with my family, in Babbie, AL 1975. Only now the family seemed to have nothing to do with the house in this dream.
But, I found myself at the house alone. I looked around. I recognized some of my personal belongings - old clothes - that I had forgotten about and decided to gather them up and take them with me-although I didn’t need them that much. I never like to leave my belongings behind, regardless of what they are. I took a load of them out to my car that I drive now (a Ford Taurus), and put them in the trunk. When I went back in the house to get the remainder of what was once, and obviously still mine, I got a funny feeling that I should hurry in getting the rest out and leave immediately. When I went back out to place the second armload in the car, the first load had been taken out. The trunk was empty. I caught my breath in a state of panic. I put what I had in my arms in the car trunk and hurriedly went back in to find the first load now missing.
I saw the first bundle that I had hanging as though I had never touched it. My mind started racing in fear, and as I went back to the car to close it and leave, I noticed that pile was also gone. By now I was becoming confused-unsure of what I thought I had done and what was now going on. When I went back into the house, everything was as though I had never touched it. The strange part is that nothing seemed to want to hurt me, and as soon as I went back in the house, and I decided to stay instead of leaving, I felt all right and in fact, that it seemed okay to stay if I wanted, otherwise. After all, I used to live here.
I walked towards my old room and I decide, just for old time sake, I would try out my old bed to see how it would feel after all these years. I saw how cluttered it was and I wandered into the room where mom used to sleep. Obviously she was no longer there, but the bed and room wasn’t piled up as she used to have it. In fact, the bed seemed out of place in that it was neatly made and the covers were folded back in the manner one would make a bed for a guest. It didn’t look the way that I remember it did. “Welcome back, eh?” I thought sarcastically to myself. I lay on the bed to try and slow my mental wheels.
Before I had a chance to get comfortable, I suddenly became cognizant I was not alone. Although I could neither hear nor see anyone-I sure could “feel” the weight of an “observer”. That, as usual, made my hair stand on end, and my body felt warm and tingly all over with adrenaline flowing. I started out of the bed as fast as I could, which all of a sudden seemed to have more surface to get across from the middle to the edge than when I first lay down on it. As soon as I started out, I felt an equal and opposite force working against my actions, and I suddenly felt weak all over-like my muscles were made of putty, and giving out. I was afraid that I was not going to be able to get out in time and I exerted an extra effort to move quicker.
The bed mattress itself, suddenly began rolling up around me in its covers it to counter my action, and I feared I was going to suffocate. Whatever prevented me from leaving did not seem to project hostility, but I felt as if in a vice grip. I have had paralysis dreams before as I am sure everyone else has too at one time or another, but this was not paralysis. I could move, but could not get out. Whatever force was causing my problem I did not feel hostility from it, but nevertheless was preventing me from exercising my free will to leave. “LET GO!” I thought with as much intensity as I could muster, as I attempted to mask my fear with anger, but whatever was keeping me there seemed equally determined as I was.
I was afraid I might not get out of this. Whatever-or whoever-it was, certainly had a mind of it’s own, as strong willed as myself, and that it seemed to know my own mind; so was I a victim of my own doing, then? I tried forcefully willing myself out of the situation, but found myself becoming more fatigued due to the activity of mind. I then, for some reason, decided to stay, and that was when I was “released”. I made myself wake up-I was sweating, and I lay awake trying to interpret the dream. I dozed back off in the process and next thing I knew, the alarm clock jolts me awake.
Next weekend. Here I am back at the bookstore 23 March-mid-afternoon. I once heard last year, the line of a black actor in a movie trailer last year: “We don’t find books - they find us”. How whimsical it certainly did appear to me since I was so used to getting still, imagining a guiding hand in the process, “opening a book” to a page. I go back to the “weirdo” section I call it for fun, no pun intended however. I suppose the method of the madness lies in the fact that some dark part of my being “wants some light to understand by”. I saw a book called, “The Dead Are Alive”, by Harold Sherman. “Yeah, someone would eventually say that, wouldn’t they?” I thought about how rich that person might be right now and I wasn’t. The back cover went on to say “....... and they are here right now, able to talk to you..........”O-o-o-o-o-o-h no!” I laughed to myself. “Um-hmm.” I ‘heard’ a counter thought as I hurriedly put the book back before the idea of opening it became too irresistible. “No, no,” I insisted silently to myself, as I walked across the isle-from that section to the scientific community side of things that might offer sounder logic. I felt like I had no real sense of direction or purpose for being there-just drifting with whatever propelled me. I took a deep. My eyes scanned two shelves as I thought of a good place to eat-what was I really hungry for, anyway? I picked up a book, “Parallel Universes”. “This I think belongs over there with that other stuff.” Book in hand, I closed my eyes and pulled it open. I opened my eyes and the page said, halfway down:
Do Thoughts And Wishes Time Travel?"
Earlier on in our first apartment in Mesa, Paul talked to me quite a bit on the subject of “time”. What I remember thinking at the time was how Paul was one of those old fashioned “Southern Baptist” types. But, he said, “When we are born we are at a starting point: a dot. This is the beginning of your “timeline” no one else has but you. We begin to move forward, impressing our line on the screen of space. When we die that timeline stops”. 23 March. Late afternoon. I made it down to Mom’s house. Later on, as I wandered around her house, I noticed she had a new book sitting on her shelf. I pulled it down. “Love Beyond Life”, by Joel Martin and Patricia Romanowski. I thought to myself, “Death & Love. Do they go hand in glove, as it seems to be conveyed to me so frequently of late? And what is mom doing reading books like this all of a sudden? I’ve never seen such as these before in her possession”. I opened the book as I usually do, and looked at the page I cracked it to. “More about ideas on time”.
I closed the book. “Interesting”, I thought, now wondering why the death & love connection seems to be jumping out at me so much? They’re not synonymous, surely! I put the book down, turned my attention to family matters, then I went back home to Wetumpka the next afternoon, which was Saturday. Not too long after getting back I retired to bed, lying on my right side, in the fetal position trying to get comfortable enough will myself to sleep. My thought suddenly changed to thinking a thought in that direction to some intelligence that seemed behind me where I could not see for some reason.
As I turned my thoughts more towards this to think about it, a vague sensation like a “gentle sort of cool warm activity of energy” next to my back. I tried not to breathe because I was trying to focus in on what happening. Usually when things like this would happen, I would block it out telling myself this wasn’t so. But I couldn’t do that now with my hair feeling as if it were standing on its ends. “Please Lord, protect me”, I said out loud so that I could hear myself say it and whatever was there could hear me too.
As I held my breathe and stared into total darkness, a non-threatening sensation like a ‘cool’ force seemed to start at the lower part of my back and move up until it was in the middle of my back, stopped and then I felt something like a cold spot on the inside. I felt almost like I had swallowed cold water as it makes it way too fast down the esophagus. But I was just too tired to do anything else, and so I just closed my eyes, although my curiosity kept me from going to sleep. “Control yourself”, I told myself. “Do not allow your thoughts to wander away from here. Obviously there is nothing to be afraid of”. As soon as I accepted this, I let go of any fear, and relaxed. I got the feeling that what (who) ever it was-knew this. While I was concentrating, I must’ve slipped into sleep, because I can’t remember anything else.
25 March Sunday Morning. I woke up without the alarm clock, and felt like I had slept peacefully. The first thing I thought of was about last night. “Did some sort of hearing take place?” Then I thought again about the experience. I wondered if my mind was playing tricks on me or was something or someone trying to communicate to me? Maybe I have just been working too long hours. Maybe too much music. By then, I had acquired another set of music, “Complete Quartets” Beethoven. I could not understand this compulsion of buying this music and filling up my time other than when I was trying to work, listening to it. It was becoming a habit, from my normal way of living, that way of life that seemed to be slipping away from me by my own hand.
I thought, “Perhaps for a change, I better go talk to someone at work. I thought about how detached I seemed to be feeling from my co-workers lately, and how much less I seemed mentally and intellectually hooked into the aspects of my job. I said out loud, “I really like my job-why can’t I get with the program as I’d like to be?” I couldn’t relate to the fact that I was interested in it, yet there seemed to be a widening sense of detachment from it as if I was adrift away from the safety of the shoreline. I closed my eyes, thought about how oddly comfortable I’d felt with the experience. Remembering that and considering now that I was alright, I became relaxed again, when I woke a second time, my attitude and changed again to one of feeling peaceful on the inside, as if previous moments’ concerns had been totally erased from me as if such no longer mattered, come what may. My room was drenched with morning sun. I got up and walked straight towards the kitchen, a peaceful easy feeling over what a perfect morning it seemed to be already.
I drank coffee out of habit and boredom for years now it seemed, for lack of something better that I could replace it with. I was 42 now, and 40 years of drinking coffee the way I liked it (mom says since I was 2), anything else seemed hardly able to replace the habit. I realized that, and suddenly I didn’t want coffee for the reason I usually want it-to wake up with. The morning somehow was perfect without it-why spoil it up with a routine act? I started not to make coffee, because I didn’t want to disrupt the momentum of this feeling I was trying prolong into the morning. Then, I decided that one cup wasn’t a bad idea. Just one, though; not a pot of the stuff as usual. I have never imagined that anything could be so much better than one’s first cup of coffee in the morning.
I sit at the dining room table, whereas my normal place is on the couch in front of the TV. Instead of inhaling my coffee as usual to see how quickly I could get a caffeine kick, I sip it, actually tasting it, and enjoying it more fully than usual, I realize this is one of the simplest and cost effective pleasures in my life I overlook, thinking, “This is Sunday and I am actually not on anyone’s time today!” So, as I allow thoughts to come and go, I start to wonder about something of a few years ago-interesting it is that things that make the most impression on you, these are the things that you have the clearest and longest memory of.
I remember one morning shortly after getting back to Wetumpka, Paul told me that he was lying on the couch in the den he had learned to sleep on instead of the bed in his room. He suddenly felt close to the ceiling and was looking straight at the top of the foyer entrance to the den area. Why was Paul always having these things to tell me? I now wonder: was he truly afraid of something that prevented him from sleeping in the back rooms? On that note, was there something that I should be more conscious of?
Back to the present. (three days later): 28 March 2001: I go to Wal-Mart Super center in Prattville last night. I am there to shop for a gift for Major Russell’s promotion party. I thought that something gag-gift like would be appropriate, since I always thought of him as a grown man who still knew how to be kid. He may have been promoted to Major, but we will always remember him as “Captain Russell”. I found a set of mini-sports balls. Then went over to the card and wrap section, picked out the paper-Toy Story-yeah-that’s his speed, alright-fits the occasion. I then turn my attention to the necessity of the appropriate card.
I passed by, scanning for the perfect card for this occasion and something caught my eye. A pretty card, with blue butterflies and blue flowers. It said on the front, “..then from the same pattern, God crafted another person-a perfect match…And he thought, someday they will find one another. And everyone will know that they belong together.”
Immediately what that little book said about how God created man and woman came to mind. I took into account the other cards and realized then that I was in the “wedding section” of the cards-just where it was not appropriate for me to be. It didn't look like a wedding card-it just looked like something I had seen before, just worded differently-that's all. I put the card back, found a card for Major Russell, and started towards the check-out. A funny gut feel sent back to the card section and I picked it back up. “I wish I could reverse all this insane stuff, but at this point, as one thing seems to correlate to another, I will just have to keep it.” I intuitively felt I might as well finish what had been started, since I was at this late juncture. “Maybe I might learn something just so that this frustration is not in vain-I’ll allow it on that note. What the hell.”
This last entrance is on 02 April. Turn down a glass! Saturday, the 31st: My eldest niece-Dana’s 11th birthday. On my way down to Elba that morning, I stopped by the Barnes and Nobles bookstore in Montgomery because she is turning out to be a pretty good little singer. She has started with a choir in her church and seems she enjoys it. So, as I didn’t know right off what else to get her, I had spied a book called, “Set Your Voice Free”, which has a CD with it to practice, of which mom has a copy she’s hoarding for some reason, and not using. But upon seeing it in the bookstore, I thought it’d be nice if Dana had her own copy. As I picked it off the shelf, I noticed one that I had brushed aside several days ago, picked it back off the shelf and examined it closer. “Finding your voice: A practical and Spiritual Approach to Singing and Living”.
“Should I?” I wondered carefully, after considering “how goes it” up to this point with my apparent fate of cracking a book to a certain given page that seems always to be telling me the same damn thing, essentially. I stood there trying to “listen” to my gut feel, as I’d learned it’s probably best I do so, and I got the feeling that perhaps here was yet another piece of an overall “picture of health” in discovering more about me, seeing how I had proven to myself I was a bad judge of book covers anyway. After standing there for what seemed like to long for that purpose, I took it down to Elba with me, along with Dana’s gift. Mom had extracted a promise out of me that I would drive her to church and the next morning before we left out, I lay on the bed and glanced through it as I sipped my coffee. I looked at a page that conveyed the idea of “feeling what you were singing” instead of employing the technique of forcing yourself to sing through technological and mechanical means and above all-well, now that’s interesting,” I thought. Then I got to a chapter called: “The Spiritual Master”.
“I don’t see how this is useful to me-a waste of money!” I raised my voice in disappointment that I had bought it after all. “I’ll be getting my money back on this one!” A sudden thought growled back it seemed, “Patience you little ass. You haven’t seen anything yet!” “Yeah, yeah, yeah! Humor me!” I thought back, irritated at the thought. “Damn!” I thought. I was beginning to worry about myself-I’d heard about schizophrenics-was I becoming one?
But, during the communion ritual, as everyone was on their knees on the squat benches, I told mother something I had been dying to tell her for a long, long time: “Mom, I have outgrown these pews. I am too big for them”. She looked at me, smiled, and turned back to the prayer book to “follow the process”. Hey, I wasn’t finished! “In fact”, I started at her again, “I have always been too damn big for them-even when I was little!” She was trying not to laugh, because as my mother, she knew where this was going. “Be quiet Lisa”, she whispered. “Hey!” I whispered, a little bolder now, “I just wanted you to know, after all these years, and that it’s never too late for you to learn.” I just had to get that part out. She gave me a sideways glance and clamped her lips against her teeth without turning her head.
“Behave yourself”, I thought. Mom turned to me, when everyone started towards the front, as expected, and asked, “Are you going to take communion?” She does this every time I go to church with her, and the answer, every time, is “no”. I do confess that I drink from the “cup unseen”, so “outward ritual” does not make me feel closer to heaven. I reason that if my heart is in the right place in respect to my relationship with the Creator, according to the principles that Christ reminded us of in so many words, that is what is more important. If mom says that she knows me better than I know myself, then why is she so worried about the condition of my soul?
When I started to leave her house to come back home, she said something about me still being a member of that church and I ought to go more often. “Mom, you know what you’re asking for”, I gently discouraged her. “I am not a member of that church.” “Why yes you are”, she said. “Why do you keep saying that? Because you ‘committed’ me years ago through a baptismal act that I couldn’t understand in my infancy? Christ didn’t allow anyone to baptize him until he was in his Thirties and considered “of age of mental consent. Shouldn’t parents consider the source, then, and follow that example from the one who without fail demonstrated how well he understood the mind and psyche of man?” With the reassurance that our unconditional love prevailed over our difference of view in the matter discussed, we hugged each other goodbye, and I left out with a feeling of understanding and peace between us. She may not know entirely the “real me” as she asserts to me she does, but she has been heard telling others, “Lisa is not lost”. End of that discussion, thank God.
This is over and done with. I feel better now. I feet that I have gotten to die bottom of the issue and I think that I can put this away, and rest tonight knowing that I can get up in the morning and start on a clean slate. There is nothing on my board now. "Here endeth" the now ridiculously long log.
Afternoon, 03 April. I must acknowledge this, so I will say one more thing: Today went well. I actually got a few things done all in one day.
05 April Mid-morning: This “diary” has gotten to be a force of habit that I can’t stop-considering how far I've come with it-maybe one day I’ll write a story-seems every other trashy book on the market is doing well enough-oh wait a minute-I’m not interested in peddling trash; forget it.! Trip to Maxwell BX to get “going away card” for SMSgt M. I march straight back to the card section in search of the right card and I pick out two thank you cards and two going away cards.
As I am doing so, I become, in the middle of a crowded noisy store, “attuned” to a song from the past that I used to like the music to but never really understood the sense of the words, so I just hummed along: “Time Passages”, by Al Stewart, “the things that you lean on are things that don’t last, well it’s just now and then that my line gets cast into these time passages—there’s something back there that you left behind, time passages--buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight…..”
I make a final selection of cards, one of which I think is kind of risque, which has a port-a-potty on the front and is gray-green in color. On the inside it says, “When you gotta go, you gotta go.” I show these cards to Col King so he can decide, and he picks this one, and says in his usual quiet voice, “Say no more: that’s the card.” Boy, Colonel King is full of surprises, sometimes! Otherwise, he is the officer that is becoming of the perfect gentleman in shining armor.
April 07, late evening: I was playing “Mass in C” while cleaning house. I have literally fallen in love with this piece of music. I take a coffee break. I feel like singing along with the music because it is “powerful stuff” to me. I try to sing and get frustrated that I can’t make a sound without feeling breathless or my throat starts hurting from the strains as I try to keep up with it. “Oh, f--- it,” I said in frustration. As I continued cleaning I came across an old newspaper (1987) tucked in with old recipe clippings in a drawer my Aunt Lois apparently saved, that had an article entitled, “Belting music can ruin the vocal chords”. Why was I finding all these different articles at intervals that seemed to tie into what I was actually doing-almost like they are purposefully in my pathway?
Mr. Glass is now head of the music department. He asked me if I could read music and asked what my goals were. I said “no” to the question of reading music and the goal was “to do so for the pleasure of it, no career change here”. He said he’d try and work me in on a May schedule. I really don’t want to wait that long, I’ve waited long enough already. But I was given no choice, really. Probably because he doesn’t seem too overjoyed at having someone who can’t read music and having expressed no interest in making a singing career out of his efforts invested in me. Why should he care about what I do with it as long as he gets my money? The article says but it takes two years of hard work just to master the management of breath and then fine-tuning of muscular co-ordinations to make it work in loud and soft fast and slow”, and so on. I sat down, discouraged, sipping my coffee. “The best I can do is learn to listen better so that I can appreciate this awesome stuff”, I thought.
Then, I remembered the book that I bought the other day for my own curiosity when I bought the other one for D’s birthday. I found it stuffed in a comer in my room under papers where I had carelessly tossed it. “Finding your voice, hmm”. I considered it and cracked it open, as I was accustomed to doing, to where it says: Exercise To Connect Breath To Emotions. “Sit quietly in a favorite room of your house or garden, close your eyes, and become aware of your breath.
My eyes started to cross as I thought I would doze off. I was losing interest already. I closed the book and it went sailing across the room. I sat, staring, unfocused now, not even trying to think.
“Lie down”, a calm feeling within seemed to advise. “Hmm?” I responded, frowning at the sudden thought.
“On the floor.”
I sat for a moment considering the oddity of the idea. I then stood up out of the chair and I lay down and in fact, felt more relaxed than in the chair, and elelvated my feet up on the couch so that the small of my back was straight and comfortable. The music continued playing and I sang a note. The sound that I made didn’t sound nearly as bad as it did earlier when I tried, and indeed, I felt better in the throat as the sound was clearer and smoother, though not perfectly so. Still, I experienced an improvement. “Was that me? No way!” I thought, smiling, knowing that it was. “This is how you should remember the feeling when you are standing up. Relaxed in your middle”, a thought flickered by. The meaning of the phrase, “Lie down before you hurt yourself”, a sarcastic little line I heard in the movie “Lion King”, I now saw in a different way: no longer to me a ‘loose phrase’ meant to insult the intelligence of another. I saw it now as a serious line of thought from the voice of wisdom.
I looked again at the book, then flipped back one page and read halfway down:
I stopped and thought to myself, “Hey, now. What will I say to Mistuh Glass in order to decline his possibility of having me as his student, now, after I practically got on my knees and begged those people?” Then came my answer, as if a direct response to my own question, “Mr. Glass, I have some breaking news for you. I don’t think I will need your services, after all. I have discovered something that will help me pick up the pieces of my life all by myself”. I remembered the very first time I approached the notion of taking voice in High School.
Saturday Evening 07 April. I take a bath and lie down. I thought about all of the things that had been culminating up to this point of documenting and experiencing. I thought of that “psychic down the road” I passed by every day on the way home and curled my lip up at. I didn’t especially like the idea of it, but the tendency towards her was becoming stronger because I just didn’t feel like myself from one day to the next. Besides who could I turn to that I knew for such matters? There was no one I was acquainted with or in the family who wouldn’t kid me or laugh at me, and I didn’t need that sort of reception right now. But before I did, I typed up a letter to her so that I would not get tongue tied. Why say it when you could write it?
I went up the steps, clutching the letter, feeling a bit apprehensive, not sure what I was about to step into, and cautiously rang the doorbell. The fuller phased moon rising above the area spilled a soft glow on everything-making me feet eerie with my choice of action, here, and at 10:30 P.M. “On second thought, you could turn around and get back in your little car”, I thought, but I felt immobile-torn between the instinctive urge to back out before I got involved and a feeling that I should stay put.
The door opened. “Yes, may I help you?” The short stout dark woman with a long black ponytail asked in a sharp accent. She looked as if she was looking towards me but not focused on me, but as though she was trying to figure me out, and without smiling, I noticed. I didn’t know what to say after all, having previously rehearsed my spiel. Guess I was expecting a little old prune of a woman with a sweet disposition, not this kind of person. “I, uh...,” I couldn’t answer her. She didn’t seem to be in a good mood.
“What’s the matter? I sense confusion”. I opened my mouth to speak and then she asked, “Are you having love problems?” she asked. I raised my eyebrows and my mouth dropped open, “No.” “It is about a man.” “Uh, I well, I don’t know if it is or not”. “What is it then?” “I don't know, exactly.” Truthfully, I didn’t. “Come in”, she said. I cautiously stepped over the threshold, because I felt out of place being in a complete stranger’s house to talk about personal matters-this was like a culture shock. But then again, I felt somewhat “rattled” by instances I wasn’t used to. I reasoned that it was a “hand-in-glove” that goes with the territory sort of thing, then.
I'd never sought outside counseling before, and this particular brand of council went against my usual idea of “help”. But no one else was available at that hour, and so that justified the reason behind my decision. I held out the folded letter to her. “I thought before we start anything I'd give this to you.” “What is it?” she asked suspiciously, keeping her hand to her side. “Well, it’s, a letter.” “What’s it for?” At this point I thought she was being difficult. “Well it’s sort of an icebreaker-and it explains why I came to see you-it’s—“Let's go back in this room and sit down”. She was quick and curt in manner, though somewhat polite-not as much as I was accustomed, but then again I had to remind myself I was in a stranger’s house. As I walked into the small dimly lit room, I looked around. The first thing I saw as a set up on the table in this small room was a bible, candles and then-oh shit-tarot cards- “Oh, no!” I heard about those damned things!” We sat down and I looked up and around over her to see a golden Buddha figure sitting on a mantle. I was uncomfortable with “Buddha”.
“Now. What seems to be your problem?” She asked, directly. Her being too direct scared me. I wanted to take this slowly. I’d thought that warming up to her to ease the nervousness of being with a complete stranger would create a more suitable environment to open up in, but we seemed to have skipped over that important part, I thought. So, I held out the letter that I had written earlier. “Could you read this, first, please?” She said, “I don’t need to see that. What does it say?” “Could you just read it please?”
“No, you read it. Besides, I don’t have my glasses”. She seemed cold. “Is this a good time for you, really? It is rather late, and I could-” “No”, she stopped me. “This is a good time for me. It’s not too late. Read your letter”, she directed. So, I started reading. Halfway through, she interrupted, “What has this got to do with the law?” I stopped in mid-sentence and raised my eyebrows, startled by her question.
“Nothing. It’s just that I know forensic science strives to utilize any and all methods they can these days in solving cases,” I said, referring back to the handwriting analyses I mentioned where she heard me say-law enforcement. I wondered why that she reacted like that? I wondered again if I shouldn't just “cut it short”, and pay her for the short amount of time I’d taken from her.
I wasn’t sure she was actively listening. When I finished, she gave me the 9-yard run down on herself in her defense, and told me that she "had been helping people for 30 years in this area" and was “by no means someone reputed to be as the letter reflected past incidents with me”. She grabbed the bible and yanked it open in a quick, terse manner as she was talking to me and swiftly put her right hand on it with her left hand raised to me. She was talking fast at me. She informed me that she believed God had put her here to help people. “God is judging you for something, not me. You’re going to have to tell me what is bothering you. Now, if you aren’t going to tell me, I cannot help you tonight.” I looked at her, stunned at her reaction to me. She didn’t understand that I really didn’t want to be there, but yet, there I sat, for my own reasons.
“Well,” I started, letting out a heavy sigh, “nothing’s really wrong”, thinking I could taper off the conversation and end this now. “There is or you wouldn’t be here. I felt your energy when you were in my doorway and it is in a state of confusion”, she countered. “Well, um, I’m not really sure why I am here-except for the reasons stated in the letter.” “This concerns love”, she said as if she knew what she was talking about. “Love?” My mouth dropped open. “Oh, no, that’s--” She cut in again, “This is about a man” “No! Well, uh--” I noticed she was looking at me hard and straight. I laughed nervously, trying to lighten up the mood. She didn’t so much as smile even a little. She didn’t move, but kept looking at me; and like a prosecutor, seemed to be determined to get me to crack.
She started again, “This is about someone you know”. “Well, I don’t-no-no, I-uh-I don’t know him no-but now it could be about a man, but I don’t really know. I’m not real sure about it. I sighed heavily as if I was making progress in getting something out of my system. Maybe I’m just a little confused about something, here-that’s all”. What was I saying? Did I know anymore? I went there after I’d thought how I was going to do this, but things weren’t developing as I’d planned. I wanted to leave, but at the same time got a “feeling” that seemed to say “stay”. Because of that, I could not assert myself with an exit strategy stronger than the idea of staying put. I’d never questioned myself being “okay” not”. Certainly now at forty two, I didn't think that I should be doing that. But here I was, doing just that.
“Yes, I told you that twenty minutes ago. See, I knew this when I met you at the door. But you are playing games and throwing riddles up at me. We could sit here all night while you do that and never get anywhere. So you need to start talking straight sense to me.” Riddles? I was trying to get it out. Had I been there that long already? I was so humiliated. I didn’t prefer her rough surface demeanor. All I came here to her for was some reassurances needed to touch back into what I thought was my reality, and now I felt like I was getting “mauled” into cooperation. I felt cold, detached from the “me” I was comfortable with, sitting in front of her. I could feel my defenses crumbling.
She continued, “This is about someone you love that lives with you now.” “No”, I cautiously corrected, toeing the line to stay out of trouble with her. “The last time anyone lived with me was about three years ago. Um ---- this is most likely about a person who is, uh, dead-but-I’m not really sure if it is really about this person in particular.” “This person has been dead for two or three years who lived with you?” “No, he has never lived with me.” I didn’t come here to tell her anything-she was supposed to be telling me! Wasn’t she supposed to be “a psychic”?
She got still and seemed to be starting, unfocused, straight ahead, then said. “There is an entity in here with us-a departed soul. He’s standing behind me to my (I can’t remember if she said “to my right or to my left, but I remember the “standing behind me” part). “What does he want?” I asked, warily, feeling somewhat puzzled over her claim. “That is what you have been led here to find out.” She said.
She then grabbed up the card stack, shuffled it, cut the stack, put the top half on the bottom, then, began laying them out methodically, as she was explaining to me my situation faster than I could take it in. The main message I was getting from her is that this had to do with a man. She was laying down a lot of cards that had “man” figures on them, in a specific pattern, each time she pulled one off the top of the deck, explaining this “man who is here with you” stuff. “Now, this person is someone you loved in your past”. “No that is not true,” I argued. “Then if not, what? You tell me,” she challenged.
I looked away from her. “Well, I don’t know…just that I don’t think that’s it.” She resumed speaking and strategically arranging the cards, the dominant subject revolving around my current situation having to do with “a man”. I was looking at the cards, not knowing what to say. When she finished, and put the rest of the stack down beside the rest, she spoke, “Now are you ready to tell me? I looked at the cards, man this, man that, man, man, etc. I looked at her. I could see that she really was serious. I sensed that I might better get that way, too.
“Well, what do you want to know?” I asked, now afraid not tell her. “Everything!” she said. “I realize from your letter that you read to me that you don’t trust people, but you are going to have to trust me-if I am going to be able to help you.” Silence lingered between us. My thoughts were crashing into each other. Carefully, I picked up the letter and slowly tore it in two. She seemed to relax and smiled a little, then. “That’s better”, she said. “Okay”, I said hesitantly, not recognizing my own voice, “Do you have time for the whole thing?” I was considering the time that it was. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I’m listening”, she said firmly.
I could only look at her, but could not speak. I felt like crying, instead. I think she realized this, so she said, more calmly and assuredly, “Whatever you tell me will be held in total confidence.” I felt rattled, especially after she said something about a departed soul being in the room-now I felt really self conscious and vulnerable, but I also felt that I had better go through with this and get past it. I had not planned things this way-the tables always seem to turn on me when I least expect it.
“Okay”, I started, still apprehensive, “This might-could be-in respect to a man who has been dead for a long, long time, who was a composer”, I said very carefully. She was looking at me as if she expected me to just spit it out. “Um-I was wondering um..... about a person, but I am not sure if it is really is about him, or someone else...” She waited with her arms crossed, silent
I paused, but finally forced it out, “Beethoven”.
There, I said it.
“Yes, okay”, she said curtly and nodding, as if she had been expecting it. And so I commenced briefing her, beginning with about what had happened just recently; I briefed her about the recent events I’d logged. I then told her about the experiment I did on with Paul, what I did. I told her that during the experiment, the figure seemed to be doing things that Paul reported he was observing the man doing, and not actually visualizing what he wanted to see. And I told her what I did and the funny feeling that I got just before Paul made the comment that the figure suddenly looked as if he were afraid of something. She said, “Yes, yes! You knew this person and you were there with him in a far off country. And you loved him”.
“No I didn't”. She said, looking me straight in the eyes, “Yes! You did! “I don’t know him as you said.” He knows you. You knew this person long time ago, and you were there with him in a place far away from here.” The smile disappeared from my face. Now, how the world did she ever “guess” that he was from another country? Perhaps because I just told her who I thought this could be? I didn’t say anything at all about anyone being anywhere except in the apartment, place was non-essential in this discussion
I wasn’t even 100% sure at this point that it was Beethoven-but “Beethoven” somehow was impressed into my brain and I tend to think that this is who it was that Paul talked about. My memory is not very clear.
“Now, this person who is here has used you previously as a channel to give you information. The first time it was just information to you, but now his presence is stronger with you here tonight because he is actually attempting to push you to encourage you to see something he wants you to know. He wants to help you but you are shutting him out.”
I really wasn’t feeling like my usual comfy self anymore was getting compounding itself now. I was sitting stone still, listening, tired at the same time. I figured I would just let this thing play itself out without any resistance at this point.
“What does he want?”
“You were led here to find that out. And that is why you need to be honest with yourself and me. Because this departed soul is here right now trying to help you. But he cannot get through to you because you are deliberately blocking him”, she said as she picked up a card off of one of the stacks she had configured. The card covering the one with a man figure on it was blue with dark yellow diagonal lines on it’s face, “and so what he wants you to know he isn’t able to give you that information. You are frustrated with all of this commotion because you do not understand what is happening with you. Because you’re frustrated, he cannot help you. All of this is creating a block in your mind, so that he cannot give you the information that he needs to”.
“At the time that you were doing this experiment with your friend, instead of continuing forward as you needed to do, you suddenly reversed and traveled backward through the pyramid and came out on the other side of it. You weren’t supposed to, but you did. He was also going forward, and you met up with him. At this point, your two energy cycles locked one into the other and now there are these two cyclic masses coiled and tangled up together, that is creating havoc for you, and this is how it has been for centuries.
The problem is hanging you up and what you are going to have to do is go back to that time in order get yourself untangled and move forward with your life.” I sat, trying to “connect” with what she was saying. My senses were spinning while sitting motionless in front of her as I was trying to see myself “going through a pyramid” and coming out on the opposite side, just to run smack into this person and find myself in some sort of “trouble”, presently.
My thinking was jumbled now at all of this unexpected degree of information-so I asked her to get my bearings, “When did all this happen?” “In your life”. “In my life? I asked. You mean-my life now, or, another life?” I wanted to clarify that she was not referring to the “past life” subject to leave me behind and that I might lose my understanding of this.
“In your life”, she emphasized the word and scrubbed her enunciation of the word “life” like an English teacher. She made no further reference of “this life” or “that life”.
“How?”
“Your energy cycle.”
I was getting the idea from her that this “person” was “here with me” because of something that I did that I was not supposed to do. I was starting to feel bad. I asked her again, just to be sure, “How long ago did you say this was?” “Centuries”, she repeated almost indignantly, as if she wasn’t sure she was getting through to me. It isn’t that I had a hearing problem. I felt as though I were “sitting beside myself” watching and feeling cold, my face felt numb. I also felt like this “departed soul was telling on me things I didn’t know about.
She said, “Something happened when you were involved in this thing you are describing to me, and your energy cycle locked into his and now he is pushing you to encourage you”-she demonstrated a pushing motion with her hands-“and it is something that he wants you to see”.
“That can't be, can it?” was my way of asking her to clarify her statement. “Oh, yes.” she advised. I asked, “So, because of all of this, I’m getting my proverbial butt kicked for something?” “Uh-huh!” She said, nodding, almost laughing, as if to say, “BINGO!!” My next thought was, “Is this “departed person” angry at me for this? I felt my stomach turning. I felt humiliated. “But how come”, I began to wonder, none of this seemed to really happen until I listened to that music-that loud sound-that is when everything really started going awry with me?” Sound does affect, science can prove. But “time-travel” discussions I’m accustomed to commencing on the basis of debating and speculating only.
I drew attention back to the cards, trying to divert attention away from me and to ease my nerves, which were starting to crawl. “What are those cards used for, really? I have never been around anyone who has used Tarot cards before”. Indeed, I had not.
She didn’t answer that as expected, but instead said to me, “We don’t need the cards anymore. See, we are talking now-whereas at first you were having trouble with that. As long as we are communicating like this (she pointed to her mouth), then we don’t need those”. I changed the subject again, because now I was starting to trust her a little better than before, based on what she just said, seeing how she had just answered my question, even if it was in her own way.
I then felt comfortable enough to open up to her a little, and told her about my sudden seeming possession of listening to all that music where after I felt the change in my energy patterns in my psyche. “Well, I try real hard to concentrate on what I am doing, but there is always this interference going on in my ability to think straight-when I think things are going okay-suddenly they are not. I have just started a new job, and I really want it to work out for me. But, this keeps on happening, and it really is interfering with my job”.
“He’s haunting you”, she said, nodding her head to drive home her point.
“HE is haunting ME?”
“Yes.”
It was nearly 11:30. 1 felt turned upside down, and nothing looked like it did before to me with “my problem.” It looked “very complicated”, now. She said, “I am going to have to work with you on this. I’m going to have to take you back so you can find out what you need to do to get out of this mess you’re in, and so that I can bring you forward again back into now so that you can continue on with what is normal”, she said. “He wants you to be happy. It is not going to be easy-it’s scary to think of it, like a twilight zone sort of thing.
I asked, not wanting to really get too tangled up with her too, but my curiosity was too high now about this description of events that I had just had explained to me, as much as I could assimilate, “H-how much is this going to cost?” “Oh, it’s going to cost you a lot.” She was looking and acting excited now, as her eyes fixed on me seemed to light up with fascination. I did not like this. Especially that “cost you a lot” part
My attention focused on her. “How much-$200.00?” I wasn’t about to go beyond that. “O-h-h-h-h-h! A whole lot more than that!” she assured me. “But ask yourself: what’s it worth to you?” she asked. I became uncomfortable, but curious to know if it really was indeed worth finding out ‘what more’, if anything else. What could I possibly find out so important that she couldn’t tell me now? “I-I don’t know”, I replied. She said, “Look, people trust me around here. I have gone to other parts of the world to help people and sometimes they have paid me as high as 10,000.00 to help them. I have been on the channel 8 news a lot-people can vouch for me”.
I was getting very nervous. “Ten thousand? Two-hundred dollars is all I can really afford – I don’t have a lot of money”. She countered quickly, “I know that you do, you have a whole lot more money than you are telling me you do! Money is not a problem with you”.
I looked at her in shock-she actually challenged me directly about what I knew to be a fact about myself! “Uh, at times it most certainly is”, I quickly corrected her, afraid of not keeping my eyes and ears open, now.
She said, “I need to see you back here tomorrow”. I started looking for reasons not to-I began feeling as if I really was being pushed faster than I wanted to go with this. “I can't come back tomorrow”. “Why not? HOW SOON can you get back here?” “I-I have things I have to do tomorrow”. “Monday, then?” “I need to check my schedule – it’s kinda tight. I can check it and get back with you”.
She said, “You need to come back now. You need to work with this thing because when you came in here, I could see here”, she said cupping my face in her hands, “and here,” grabbing my hands firmly, “that your energy is very dark, very clouded, and I need to work with you to clear it up by taking you back there and resolving with this person this thing so that I can bring you back into now, and so that you can go forward with your life.” There suddenly seemed to be a hasty push here-I wasn’t prepared for so much all at once. I needed to pace myself with this.
So, I thought: “Play your cards right, say goodnight, and don’t come back!” “Okay, I can come back, maybe Saturday. At 09:00.” “Nine in the morning?” she asked. “Yes, unless you have something else going on”. I generally had a backbone, but somehow it seemed a little too soft right now. She agreed on the time I gave her. She then wanted a way to contact me-a phone number-two phones. “I only have one at work”, I said, feeling defensive again. I didn’t want to give her my home phone.
She asked me for a pencil to write down my name and information. I said I would find one in the car. I went out to the car, got money to pay her and LEAVE, and not come back. “You idiot!” I kicked myself. I went back in and I laid two hundred dollars on the table in front of her-missing it already, but it would be a severe lesson for me. She asked me again if I had found a pencil for her to write with. I said, “Uh, no, I don’t-sorry”. I now wondered what was up with the damn pencil bit with her. “If she makes the kind of money she claims she does, then why isn’t she offering me a box of damned pencils just for stopping by, instead of asking me to produce one for her.”
She then got up went looking for something to write with-wound up going into another room and came out with a small black pen. She asked me if I had something to write on. “She commands $10,000.00 a pop for her advice, and she doesn’t have pencils or paper?” I frowned to myself.
I sighed, and started scrambling through my bag and found nothing to write on. Any other time it would be trashed with grocery store receipts and overdue bill notices. She cracked open the bible and leafed through a couple of pages until she found the Book of John and asked me to write my name on that page. She walked me to the door to let me out, her parting words were, “Remember, be happy! So, when you come back to see me, I want you to be very positive about this, okay? “Okay,” I said. “And don’t go to another reader!” She yelled as I was getting into my car, waved at me, and smiled for the first time. I got back to the house, pacing, running the conversation over and over in my head.
I then thought about what she had said in reference to “clouded energy” in my face and on my hands, and thought back to my waking up in the middle of the night with that feeling in my hands and on my face. Can people really “see” or “feel” like that?