TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 66

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 21, 200006


Dear Pipples,

	Today is a big day.  I have to go for a 
divorce settlement conference at 9:30 a.m., and 
then after we get through tossing my insides 
around about that, I have to show up at the 
realtors' place and accept bids on the house at 
3:00.  That's a whole day of avoiding villainman 
while being in close proximity to him.  I really 
don't look forward to this.  I already have an 
uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.  With 
hope, we get the whole case settled today.  That 
would be good.  The closer we get to having him 
be removed from my life for good, the better I'll 
feel.  He and his new wife (my old friend) have 
been doing nothing short of stalking me with 
their harassing letters and accusations that I've 
taken things, or lied or, God only knows what 
they think I'm capable of doing.  All I know is 
that I've conducted myself honestly and ethically 
during this whole insane process, and have been 
as gracious as I could be considering the 
circumstances.  I've never lobbed an unnecessary 
letter, nor thought awful things about 
villainman.  I've disliked him fervently, but I 
haven't thought awful things about his demise. 
So I can rest in peace about my behaviour. 
Still, I get this knot in my stomach about the 
whole process.  I know I'm going to be in dire 
financial straits when this is all over.  And how 
will I take care of my twins?  There's the big 
question.

	Here is something hard to believe


 
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Do not suspend your disbelief

	There are some things that have happened 
to me, or that I have happened to me, that I 
cannot explain.  Science just doesn't have a 
grasp of it.  Yet, I know there are explanations, 
actual phenomena taking place.  These things have 
happened most of my life, and I suppose, though I 
hate the word, they are psychic experiences. 
"Psychic" conjures all sorts of ridiculous images 
and personalities:  the serious tarot card reader 
at a fair, the medium at her hollow table with 
the darkened room and the extras she hires to 
play dead relatives, the true believer that 
rejects all of science in favour of the extra 
terrestrials who are communicating with her 
through her breakfast cereal, palmists, 
phrenologists, Uri Geller, people who are sure 
they've seen ghosts in their front room playing 
cards.  I am a skeptic.  I am at heart and at 
mind skeptical.  If someone told me about the 
things I will tell you, I wouldn't believe it, 
not unless I were there at the time it happened, 
and then only after I'd exhausted all logical 
approaches, done my interrogating and been 
satisfied.  Still, I'd harbour a suspicion that I 
just hadn't caught the hitch, the hole in the 
reasoning, the true explanation.

	With that said, I have to say that I am 
psychic.  It's not anything I could do on 
purpose.  It happens when it happens.  Neither 
could I prevent it from happening, because it 
happens in my sleep, most of the time.  I  have 
premonitive dreams.  The dream will have a 
certain glow to it, an ethereal glow, a powerful 
one, and even in my sleep I will know that I'm 
having one of those dreams.  They are quite 
literal: no metaphors or wiggle room.  I will 
give examples.  I will.

	When I was 19 or so, I used to visit at 
my sister's house frequently.  She and Fred lived 
on Derby Street, not far from the campus of the 
University of California.  They had a host of 
friends, most of them pot heads and psychedelic 
druggies.  Among these was Rima, Dana's best 
friend from college days, and her partner Ian 
Douglas.  Ian was the local dealer, a wiry, long 
limbed and soft spoken guy with a full beard and 
mustache who took acid so many times it must have 
been his regular state of mind.  I dreampt one 
night while I was staying with Arthur Glickman, 
that war broke out in the Middle east between 
Israel and her Arab neighbors, and that I got on 
my bicycle to ride down to my sister's house to 
tell them.  When I opened the front door, Ian was 
sitting in a lotus position on the floor in the 
living room and when he looked up at me.  I saw 
that he'd shaved his beard and mustache.  He 
looked completely different without them, almost 
unrecognizable.  I woke up.  I went into the 
kitchen, and Arthur's room mates were slouching 
around making breakfast.  One of them turned on 
the radio.  The six day war had broken out in the 
Middle-east.  This alarmed me.  So I got on my 
bicycle and rode down to Dana's and Fred's house. 
When I opened the front door, Ian was sitting in 
a lotus position on the living room floor.  He'd 
shaved off his beard and mustache and looked 
utterly different.  But he looked just like the 
man in my dream.

	When I was in junior high school, I had 
an English and Social Studies teacher, Joe 
Garcia, who pleased me no end.  I had one of my 
daddy crushes on him.  Wouldn't it be great if he 
were my father instead of the man who was?  We 
became close while I was his student.  He was 
invited over to listen to chamber music when his 
friend, a clarinettist, was playing with my 
father and company.  They played Prokofiev's 
Overture on Hebrew Themes.  Joe and his pretty 
young red headed wife sat on our couch listening, 
and I glowed with warmth for him.  After I 
graduated from high school, Joseph Garcia went to 
Cuba to help out Castro and his fledgling 
communist country.  He was gone a few years and 
came back saying that the Cubans didn't really 
want his help.  I was a junior in high school. 
Then he disappeared.  The only time I heard 
anything about him was right before taking my 
final exam in Zoology in the twelfth grade. 
Another student who'd gone to Willard Junior High 
School with me leaned over and said, "Remember 
Joe Garcia from Willard?  Well, he committed 
suicide."  I could barely move my pen, so stunned 
was I.  I went to the teacher and told him that I 
was shocked and would have to take a make up exam 
some other time.  He allowed me to do so. 
Fourteen years after his initial disappearance, I 
had a glowing dream that Joe Garcia sent me a 
postcard.  It was sitting in my mother's kitchen 
and she said, "Look who wrote you a postcard! 
Joe Garcia!"  The next day, I came to visit my 
mother and she said, "Look who wrote you a 
postcard!  Joe Garcia!" and she swept the 
postcard off the shelf in the kitchen and handed 
it to me.  So he wasn't dead.  He was very much 
alive.  When I was asleep, I knew.

	I felt it.  I knew I was pregnant.  A lot 
of women have a sixth sense about it.  I knew 
before my gynecologist knew.  She wanted me to 
wait until my period was due and then get a test. 
But my periods were so irregular that it could be 
due any time:  four weeks, three weeks, six 
weeks, eight weeks.  We waited for 28 days and 
then I gave them my urine sample.  The 
gynecologist called me to say that I had been 
right.  I was indeed pregnant.  My first 
pregnancy, my first attempt at a pregnancy.  I 
was delighted.  That night I had a dream.  And it 
had a glow to it.  I dreampt I was lying in the 
bed I was lying in, surrounded by the clutter in 
the room that crowded us.  Everything was in that 
bedroom: my cello, my computer, my art supplies, 
my guitar.  But in the dream, in addition to all 
that, there were two huge round topped, round 
bottomed black perambulators at the foot of the 
bed.  I stared at them, stunned.  I awoke sitting 
up in bed.  I said, out loud, "Oh my God!  It's 
twins.  We've got to get a bigger house."  I 
decided not to tell my husband this because I 
figured he'd think I'd sprung a leak.  So I kept 
it to myself.  A few weeks later, we had the 
first sonogram.  The practitioner squirted the 
warm jelly on my belly, and smoothed it out with 
the scanner.  She pressed the tool against me and 
watched the screen.  Then, suddenly, she turned 
it off.  She said, "I have a surprise for you. 
It's twins."  Even though I knew to trust my 
dreams when they glow, I was dumb struck that I 
was right.

	A few years later, we were living in the 
house that eventually burned down in the fire of 
1991.  One night I had a glowing dream.  I was in 
my grandparents' house in San Francisco.  In the 
living room, many of my relatives were assembled. 
I was standing near the front windows on one side 
of the room where there was a couch, and on the 
other side of the room was another couch.  That's 
where I saw my grandmother, my grandfather, my 
uncle Max, my uncle Al, my aunt Gussie, all 
sitting on the couch.  Then I saw my great uncle 
Louie, a man who deserves some special 
consideration in some future story.  He was 
walking with his walker into the room from the 
dining room.  He was crossing from my side of the 
room to the other, singing, "I LOVE LIFE!  I WANT 
TO LIVE!" which was  his favourite song to burst 
out and sing while he waved his arms around.  In 
this case, I looked across the room, where he was 
heading, and I said to myself, "They're all dead. 
Does this mean Louie's dying?  Maybe I should 
warn him."  And I began to move forward to 
intercede, but stopped myself.  "He's 99 years 
old.  He's feeble.  He's lived a long life.  Let 
him go."  And I stood back, instead conjuring up 
the voices of my dead relatives.  Each one I 
could hear perfectly, just as they'd sounded when 
they were alive.  It was like visiting them 
again.  When I woke up, I looked at the clock. 
It was one thirty in the morning.  I went back to 
sleep.  In the morning, my mother called me.  She 
said, "Uncle Louie died last night."  I asked her 
what time, and she said, "About one thirty in the 
morning."

	I have no explanation for these 
occurrences.  There have been many more than the 
ones I've told you about.  Each time, the dream 
has a glow; each time, it proves to be correct. 
I've dreampt about family members dying, and I 
dreampt about the attacks on the twin towers in 
New York City.  They all proved true.  And, as I 
said, if someone were to tell me he or she had 
experienced these things, I would not believe it. 
But it's I telling these stories and I believe 
it.  To make sense of it is another thing 
altogether.


 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net