Taking it On

Or, What I learned from the terribly wrong psychic

I don’t know what to do with myself since I turned in the third draft of my novel to my agent last week. I feel bit like a person wandering the street in search of their lost dog, who occasionally sees something interesting and forgets about the dog. Only to remember the dog again when she turns the corner.

            What to do with all this time? Well I do know, don’t I? I should be attending to all the things I’ve neglected while feverishly applying myself to my writing. My email situation could create anxiety in a sloth. Over 3000 in my inbox, going back fifteen years. I could clean up that situation, for sure. But that would require me going backwards, and I’ve only just emerged from the darkest time of my life so far – let us not deal with the emails just yet.

            I went to a yoga class this morning, for the first time in twenty years. I only really ever went during both pregnancies and then, I think, only to be trendy. I don’t usually care about what’s trendy, but when you’re pregnant you’re not yourself. I wasn’t myself. What I learned in my first yoga class in two decades is that I am stiff and weak and have a lousy sense of balance. I could spend a lot of time on my physical routine.

            Hell, if I spent a month doing yoga and deleting emails, I might be an entirely different human.

            The lost dog in the metaphor, is really myself. I am the searcher and I am the lost. And as I get older, I’m attempting to find peace (even richness) in not-knowingness – both in where I’m going and what I’m looking for. This is particularly hard for me. I mean for my system. I mean for someone from my Calvinist upbringing. I mean for someone with a mother like mine, who made lists every morning of her tasks that day.

            I don’t know who I am without a stated purpose. I am a list-maker too. Last month, when I was in England, my purpose (often stated) was to finish the novel. However, after the first few of days in a flat in London, banging away at my computer for five hours at a time, I realized that I didn’t have to be in England to pound away like that. I could do that at home, in Los Angeles. So I made a decision to allow myself to do what felt right. I’d let myself wake up when I wanted, eat when I wanted, write when I felt like it, and go out and stroll around whenever I was moved to do so.

            I don’t think I’ve ever had a sustained period of time when I’ve given myself this kind of permission, ever. Not even on vacations.

            I’m sixty-three. It seems important to say that.

            I also promised myself to accept anything that came my way. Philosophical ideas, new foods, suggestions of what to see or where to go – that sort of thing. To say “yes” to anything that seemed to offer itself up to me. In this way, I hoped to open up my mind to changes or surprises in my novel and also, frankly, in my life.

            It’s not hard to say “yes” to practically everything in London, so I didn’t think about my pledge much until I got to Newmarket, where I used to live and where the ghosts of my parents still appeared to hover.

            Despite the hovering, I mostly felt/believed/told myself that the presence of my dead parents in my room in the Newmarket hostel where I was staying, and on the main street, and certainly in their old home, was predominantly a manifestation of my own thinking. Surely, I had created these vaporous images and supernatural feelings from ancient stories that have been stored in my bones and DNA. If I added what amounted to an evocation for my parents to hold the key to the end of the novel, it was hard to imagine NOT feeling them around me. And my parents had only just died within the last three years or so, so there was that! I simply missed them.

            I am a funky believer. Straddling the empirical and the miraculous, always. I can’t quite conceive of a God and I certainly can’t imagine existence without her. I tend to believe people who tell me about talking to the dead, the synchronicity of the universe, miracles, visitations, the power of crystals, incantations, and manifestations. I believe it all, it’s simply that these things don’t tend to happen to me. If anything, I think it is a failing that my feet are so firmly planted on terra firma (or what most of us would agree is terra firma).

            I cried a lot in Newmarket. I wasn’t exactly sure why. There was sadness, yes. But something else. Not mournfulness, but something that had to do with being older now. Time passing; that intense and almost wordless understanding that permeates – that everything ends. A profound, universal truth that is the toughest, I find.

            All this was passing through me as I sat in a pub down the street from my hostel, weeping onto the pages of my notebook as I tried to language the unlanguagable. As I got up to order chips from the bar, a quintessentially British woman approached. By that I mean that her thin, blonde hair resisted any haircut to define it; she had lots of teeth, and her eyes were what I could call (unironically) ‘jolly’.

            “I’ve been sitting here,” she said, pointing to her handbag on a table close-by, “watching you.” She placed a hand on my arm, “I am a psychic,” she went on, “and I am sensing that there’s a lot of sadness around you.” She waved her hand in a circular motion in front of my face.

            “Well, yes,” I said (the empiricist in me thinking, ‘you bloody well saw me crying, so yeah--’), “my mother died recently.”

            “Ah,” she said, nodding kindly. I liked her. “Well, I would like to give you a reading. No charge. I’m in training, actually. So I need the practice and there’s something about you.”

            I swelled with a little pride. I’m not going to lie. Strangers never tell me that there’s ‘something about me’. Strangers rarely see me at all (see the part where I say I’m sixty-three). And, I had promised myself to say ‘yes’. So that is how Constance came to be sitting across from me in my hostel room – me on the bed and her teetering on one of those impossible poofs that are placed in front of vanities.

            “You don’t have to say anything but ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” she told me.

            “OK,” I said, squaring my shoulders and taking a deep breath. Feeling like I had to kind of fluff up my aura, breathe in the universe or something. Constance didn’t require any of it, she was leaning a little to the left on the poof.

            She stared earnestly into my eyes. “I’m getting the name ‘Trudy’,” she said. “Can you take that on?”

            I had so many questions, but she had told me to only say, “yes” or “no”. What does ‘take that on’ mean? Was she asking if I knew a Trudy or whether I could ‘take on’ the idea that I might meet one in the future? My first roommate in college was named ‘Gertrude’, but that was definitely something I couldn’t imagine ‘taking on’. She was only my roommate for a couple of months and she barely ever talked to me. Mostly because she slept all day with the curtains closed so tightly that I had to grope around in the dark to do the simplest things. I memorized the amount of steps it took for me to get to my desk, where my schoolbooks perched, and to the door. When Gertrude finally left to bunk with someone else and I could let light back into the room, I found a used Kotex stuck to the top of her desk. It had probably been there for weeks.

            “No” I said to Constance, the edge of the bed digging into the backs of my knees.

            “Really,” she cocked her head like she wasn’t quite sure she believed me.

            I waited as she looked at me softly. Then she said, “What about David? I’m feeling David. Can you take that on?”

            Well, everyone knows a David, I thought. But, no, I couldn’t take it on because there wasn’t a really close David in my life, and the ones that I was fond of were very much alive. Was that what she meant? Any David? Or a dead David?

            “No” I said.

            “Hmmm,” she said. “I really feel a David.”

            I internally waffled, should I dredge up a David that I didn’t feel like taking on? I didn’t want her to be disappointed. She’d left the pub. Walked up the street. I’d taken her at her word that I didn’t have to pay. She should get something out of this. I decided to throw her a bone. “I’m here in Newmarket because – “

            “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Only yeses or nos.”

            Really? I thought, because so far, it’s nos. A yes might feel really good.

            “I’m getting,” she said, circling her palm in front of my face, which almost threw her off the poof, “art. Are you an artist.”

            Bingo! “YES” I almost yelled, and stifled the urge to high-five her.

            She smiled, all teeth, and said, “An artist yes. A painter.”

            Yes, I was an artist, but no – not a painter. Was I supposed to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’? I nodded slowly and also tipped my head from side to side to indicate that she was warm, but not hot.

            “Yes,” she continued. “You are a painter, who paints landscapes?”

            “No.”

            “Portraits?”

            “No.”

            “Ah I see.” Did she? She said something about the challenges of being a painter and then she said something about my art studio and I could feel the whole thing going off the rails.

            “I’m a writer,” I interrupted.

            She looked at me mildly confused. Not hard to understand with what I considered my own mixed-messaging. What I wanted to say was, “My mother was a painter. She was extraordinary. Blending realism with non-realistic elements that were surprising.”

But I didn’t say any of that, mostly because she was off and running with the ‘writer’ part. Was my husband back in the States, she asked – then advised to “give him a little something. Because you are going up, up, up and he is staying still.” She illustrated this with one hand (me?) sailing up at a ninety degree angle and the hand that was my husband Pat (I assume) stayed still in a fist.

            Pat had encouraged, even found some creative way of financing my trip, so this dynamic made little sense to me. But Constance was so happy with her analysis, I couldn’t bear for her to brook another defeat. 

            It felt like we’d been talking for over half-an-hour. I thanked her several times in a let’s wrap-this-up tone, but she kept stabbing around. I kept offering more bones, but she had a stunningly poor strike rate. She’d certainly given me a lot to think about, I said, in a more definitive tone.

            “Well, I’m happy to do it,” she said cheerfully. “There’s something about you,” she repeated. “You’re dealing with so much sadness.”

            “Yes,” I acknowledged, “that’s true.”

            “And I need the training,” she said.

            “Well, I’m – yes – thank you for – this was—you are very kind,” I said. Which was true. She seemed very kind. “Can I walk you out?”

            She looked a bit relieved, frankly. And she gave me a parting insight. I should stop wearing the tear-shaped ring; it invited sadness. She had worked with a woman once who stopped wearing tear-shaped earrings and everything got better.

            I’d certainly consider that, I said. Knowing I wouldn’t.

            After I walked her out, offering to pay—but she declined, I went back up to my room. I sat back down on the bed (the only place to sit other than the poof). I checked my phone; she’d been there more than an hour.

            I sat on the edge of the bed saying yes to all of it. Sat there acknowledging that I had wanted something special to happen, even though I had doubted that it would. I had wanted a sign from either one of my parents. I had wanted something sure. I had wanted answers to unasked, even unknown, questions. I sat there, feeling the limitations of the physical world. I sat there in all that uncertainty. And for the first time in forever, I found profound peace in not knowing anything about any of it.

            What possibility!

Not crying in a pub.