Defining Moment #9

Psychic Friends

When I first got insomnia, I was suffering from grief, new baby, new job stress. My best friend, a massage therapist, was trying to help me through this time. As she held my feet to “get a reading,” she asked me, “What does it mean, ‘I’m not there yet’?” Huh? I had no clue what she was talking about. And thinking while my head ached and I hadn’t slept was out of the question.

That night, when I returned home after teaching, I checked my e-mail. A client had finally responded to a job that was contributing to a great deal of anxiety. The job, for a chain of travel plazas, was entitled, “Are we there yet?” The subject line of the e-mail: “We’re not there yet.”

This was the first inkling I got that my friend was psychic. It freaked me out; there’s simply no other way to say it. Now I’m used to it and believe that some people have a direct line to the book in which the future is written. It was hard to reconcile that with atheism. (This isn’t to say I lacked spirit, however; I was and am a strong believer in nature as god.) This has changed the way I think about my friend, of course. And it’s changed what I think in front of her!

I have since had similar psychic experiences with my daughter. Once, when she was two, I asked her what she wanted for breakfast. I was writing my grocery list. “Uh, creamer. Um, cream. Ice cream,” she said. Creamer? I looked down. I had just written creamer on my grocery list. (Insert “Twilight Zone” music here.)

Then there was the time I was thinking, while driving, about a trip we had taken two summers before. “What were there names?” my daughter asked. “Whose names, honey?” “You know, the people we stayed with in New Hampshire.” (More music.)