psychic friends network

So lately, I've been talking to dead people. Well, not too often, and just to my father and my father in law.

I spoke with my father in November or December of 2006. He died on April 1st, 2006. That was just the kinda guy he was. Total joker.

My friends, my crazy internet friends the BEER (Bitchy Evil E-mail Ring) had a star named for my dad on his death. I knew nothing about it, and the package with the framed international star registry certificate and other goodies showed up at the house when my husband, daughter and myself were on vacation last summer. It was a great big cardboard box and as I wasn't expecting anything, I immediately sat down and started tearing into it.

It was the star. And it came with one of the nicest notes ever. I don't know which one of the evil bitches thought this up, but I'm forever grateful to all of them. It just goes to prove that you can't always get what you want...

Later that year, I got out of the car at night, in Christiansburg, and it just so happened that Dad's star was right over our house. I glanced up and said "Hey, Dad." and in response I got "Life's a bitch, kid, and then you die." And some cosmic giggling and nothing. (No bamboo, girls.) It was something that my dad totally would have done.

And, I might add, the star is the only grave marker my dad has, and probably ever will have. Right now, what's left of him is sitting on a table at my mother's house wrapped up in burgundy paper with a gold ribbon. It amuses me to no end that the funeral home wrapped my dad's ashes.

Yeah, talking to my dad was pretty normal. I seriously doubt it'll happen again. I think he's now headed off to wherever the peacefully dead head off to. Or is in line for reincarnation or something.

My husband's dad, however...

I was sitting at my husband's godmother's table in New York City writing in my journal one evening. I'd been doing my morning pages for quite some time for The Artist's Way and was just writing away with a stream of consciousness type of thing for a while, when suddenly Bruce Sr. started to have a pretty intense conversation with me. I've got it all written down. This happened about five weeks ago, and I haven't really been able to write or talk about it much. To his credit, when I told my husband, Bruce Jr. about it, he just took it in stride. Asked "Oh, how is he?" and didn't really freak out or anything.

Bruce Sr. seems a little tortured. He's feeling guilty about how badly he treated his family while he was still alive, and about some specific things he did. He wanted to know if his children had forgiven him.

I told him that I think he did the best he could under the circumstances, which were pretty rough. I also told him that I knew Bruce Jr. had forgiven him completely, but I wasn't sure at all about the other siblings. I don't think that J or S have forgiven him, but E is a different story all together. She was too young to have harbored much resentment or hatred of him, and she was raised by Bruce Jr. so she's a pretty mellow kid.

That was the gist of our conversation. I was pretty tripped out for a while after talking to him, as that sort of thing has never really happened to me before. Well, obviously one sentence and a giggle with my dad, but no actual conversations. Then again, my father wasn't much of a conversationalist when he was alive, so there's no reason for that to change after his death.

Bruce Sr. was a talker though.

So that's it. It feels really normal. I've been having some other all the hair standing up on my body gotta do or say something RIGHT NOW experiences, but they've seemed relatively inconsequential. Although you'd better read that book SOON, Stacey.

I'm very grateful for these experiences. I think that the entire universe is conspiring to rid me of any last prejudice that I might have.

the inner spark

I was reading somewhere, I forget exactly what I was reading, but I was reading it. Really.

Anyway, I was reading somewhere about aging and the author mentioned how beautiful all children and teenagers are, no matter how homely they might be, every last one of them has this amazing glow about them. Maybe it's just the youth. Maybe it's because they haven't had the years of experience that older people have.

I'm only 12 years out of my teens, and my face has changed immeasurably since then. It's truly amazing how much it has morphed. And, I look back at photos of myself from then, and I'm blown away at how beautiful I was.

Well, still am. It's just different now.

That, and reading Martha Beck's book, Expecting Adam. It's about her pregnancy with, and raising of her son with Down Syndrome. She wrote about dealing with appearances, especially that of a child who isn't "normal."

"I've had a hard enough time learning to handle difference without discomfort, to look beneath the surface. I do feel sad, though, for parents who might have had an opportunity to learn a new way of seeing, to look into the magical part of life, and let it pass them by... Maybe it's just Adam himself. In his strange, not-quite-human way, he is constantly reminding me that real magic doesn't come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being Cinderella at the ball with both glass slippers and a killer hairstyle. The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it."

So I've spent all morning on the subways and streets of New York, looking for the inner beauty in everyone I've met.

And I can tell you exactly where my prejudices lay. I can see the beauty in the crazy homeless lady who gets in everybody's way on the street, I can see it in the traffic cops and the sidewalk vendors and the subway buskers. I can see it in the retarded and the blind and the little 20 year old girls who are incredibly concerned with their own appearances and their places in New York, while attempting to land a rich husband and some sweet real estate on Central Park.

It's much much harder for me to see that spark in the older insanely wealthy women that I meet on the streets. Well, let's say nearly impossible. I can see it in maybe every one out of a hundred that I meet. And, it depresses me. It makes me feel really uncomfortable. And I'm not sure how to combat it. Part of it is trying to make them smile when I see them on the streets. That only works some of the time, and mostly when I have George with me. I don't know. I'll have to meditate on this one.

However, on the whole, the people of New York City are gorgeous. There is some light and some joy there, from the girl who gives me shit at the bakery in Harlem, to the world's worst steel drum player, busking at the Times Square subway station. Or to the girls helping me out at Sephora, or the little gay boys prancing around at H&M.

It's ridiculous how much love there is here. And you don't even have to look very deep for it. I'm so incredibly wealthy.