6th Sense

I said that I'd write about it and so tonight it seems appropriate. It was 46 minute ago, exactly. It's not a missed connection, it's that always, always, always we both just KNOW. I feel him reaching out to me; we miss each other by moments, or by hours, it's never more than 24. It was 46 minutes ago that he looked at my profile. It's his way of telling me that he's thinking about me...

The first time it happened that I can recall, I was in 7th grade. Something inside of me kept telling me to be careful or I would get hit by a car all night long...I did--just a block from home...but I knew for hours that it would happen.

We all have it in the family. My mother once woke up my father telling him that she had just had a bad dream that his cousin's house was on fire and as she was telling him, the phone rang...it was his cousin--and the house was up in flames.

There was the time that my father needed to go somewhere on business and was taking the company car. As he got out to the parking lot, he walked back into his office and took his keys. Instead of going where he needed to, he drove past our house and saw my mother outside. He asked what was wrong; she had locked herself out.

My brother's have it as well...but these are my stories. I guess what surprises me is the 'one of a kind' experiences. There was Phyllis--and she's the only person that I've ever met that I had this experience with. I would look at her and see a white glow around her...like a halo but it was not only her head, but her body. I used to call her 'the woman of the white light'. She would ask me to describe it to her and I said it was like a holiness--like if you saw Jesus walking down the street, you would expect a glow. After a couple of years, I told her that I didn't see the halo anymore...she waited a few years after that to tell me that she had lost her virginity--and that was the only thing she could think of. I didn't have a sense of that was the reason, but I've never had that experience with anyone else.

And then there was Lee. When I met him he was laughing and clowning around with a bunch of guys and I don't remember anything about that conversation accept him saying 'I'm always like this'. I couldn't stop thinking about him and after a few weeks, I realized what it was...although he appeared to be perfectly happy, that there was a depressive episode--he was either in the middle of it or it was coming...and I was supposed to save his life. I've saved a life before, but never felt with anyone else that I was supposed to. It took about two years before his melt down; I didn't save his life; he wouldn't let me in...

Kathy and I talked a lot this week about moving from relationships when you're supposed to. I believe that it time that she ended her marriage. I told her a story about a girl who lived down the block from me when we were growing up. A few times per year, I get together with my grammar school friends, we head out to dinner and pick back up where we left off as if one moment of time hasn't gone by. So on occasion, I still see her. Her mother died a few years back and I went to the funeral. I said hello to her much older brother Paul who couldn't put my name to my face but told me that he kept thinking that he knew my eyes. I have an aunt with dementia--she stares at my eyes, too. She knows that she knows them; they're her eyes. None of her children or grandchildren have her green-gray eyes; I did. In some ways, I am her kindred spirit. She was in the hospital with me when I spoke to the doctors out in the hall when my father was dying. I told them about his medications--what he was taking; how often and dosages. I talked to them about his testing, what he should or shouldn't be taking before and after anesthesia and she looked at me in awe and said 'you know everything'. She had been a nurse in Israel and there is an expression in Jewish that I'm not sure will translate well, but in essence, it means beaming with pride at the growth and knowledge of a young person before you. Her kids and grandchildren didn't give that to her either. She used to always say that I was her favorite neice. To be fair, I was her only neice; but that remained with a wink, just between us.

Paul told me a story of how he had come home and come home to a church around the corner. His newly found faith has sustained him when his wife left him after years of living in the middle of no where and doing lots of drugs. He lamented at the end of that relationship and I smiled at him. I told him that I knew something that he didn't--that she had to go. God had to remove that obstacle in order for him to find his way back to the spirit that sustains him. He hugged me for the moment of clarity.

I think about those moments of serendipity when the matrix lines intersect and why it is that Joshua's never here and he's never gone...it's some great siren's song that pulls at me and doesn't let go like some secreted unfulfilled date with destiny...tonight, I'm directionless and adrift...