Lily Dale (21 page)

M
y own white crow was Sherry Lee Calkins. I didn't feel a particular need for a reading. I didn't want a message or need guidance, but I heard so many stories about Sherry Lee's pre-science that I had to try her out.

Her reading room is austere. A little couch for the client sits low enough that I found myself perching on the edge. Sherry Lee sat on a straight-backed chair behind a small table with a blank sheet of paper and artist's crayons. She talked fast and started as soon as I was seated.

“I have a young man here. Tall. Dark hair. Nice-looking young man. He has, what's that? Oh. He has a straw in his mouth. A piece of hay, and he's chewing on it. He's leaning against a tree, very relaxed. Do you know who that might be?”

No.

As she spoke, she was furiously drawing lines and dates on the paper. She said that in July 1997 I started something new. In February 1998 I finished a phase of my life.

I didn't know what she meant.

August was a big change, monumental, she said. That was right. I'd moved to Wisconsin. In January, another big change, she said,
and this one freed me up. Vague, but right again. That was the month I stopped working for the
Dallas Morning News.

In March, my new life really began, she said. That was the month I returned to Lily Dale. Pretty good so far. Then she hit a snag.

By June of next year, I would have completed the book on Lily Dale.

Not possible,
I thought.
She doesn't know enough about books, and she thinks that giving me a year to finish will be enough.
She said a few more things about how I write and my grandfather's character. Nothing that meant much to me.

Then she picked up the blue pencil and began drawing up the side of the paper.

“Your husband became very sick before you started dating, almost died. He also almost died in the country when he was in his twenties. His guardian angel saved him.”

She was right on the first point, but slightly off. “We had already started dating,” I said.

“But you weren't serious about him yet,” she said.

True. As for almost dying in his twenties, I would check.

She grabbed the brown pencil and began sketching ground from which she drew stalks of wheat. “The young man might be your grandfather. Yes, that's it. He's your father's father.”

Now she drew back and scrutinized the paper. Her eyes narrowed.

“I'm seeing an initial. I can't tell what it is,” she said. “What was his name?”

“Dyson.”

“No. It's not a ‘D.' What was his first name?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't remember knowing him. I barely knew his son.”

She squinted at the paper. “It's an ‘L.' Did his name start with an ‘L'?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Check it out,” she snapped.

Now she was tapping the stalks of wheat. “There are three for his children. How many children did he have?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I think two.”

“Three,” she said. “And this one,” she tapped the shortest stalk of wheat, “had something wrong physically. He may have died early.”

I shook my head. “I don't know.”

“I see you teaching,” she said as she filled in the right side of the paper with yellow.

“Not likely,” I said.

“You will,” she said. “Come back in a few years. You'll be saying I was right.” Sherry Lee never backs down.

After the reading, I called my husband. “Did you almost die in the country?”

“Of course,” he said. “I told you about that car wreck. The car was totaled.”

“How old were you?”

“In my thirties.”

I called my mother. “What was Tommy's father's name?” As I waited for her to answer, I tried not to hold my breath, but I couldn't help it. By the time she spoke the blood pounded in my ears.

“Leon.”

I gasped. “How many children did he have?”

“Let me think. Three maybe, but there was something wrong with one of them,” she said. “A miscarriage, or he died young. I can't remember.”

“Oh, my Lord,” I said. “She was right.”

When I saw Sherry Lee later, I said, “You were correct about my husband almost dying in the country, but he was in his thirties, not his twenties.”

“He looked younger,” she said.

I told her about Leon and the three children. Sherry Lee didn't look impressed.

“Of course,” she said.

“But I didn't know that myself,” I said.

“You didn't have to, dear,” she said briskly. “I'm not a mind reader.”

Sherry Lee got eight things right. She mentioned perhaps half a dozen things that I didn't know or didn't relate to. She gave dates I couldn't connect with. She predicted three things in the future that might or might not happen.

Three things she told me were completely wrong: my husband's age when his car was hit, that we hadn't started dating when he almost died, and that my book would be finished in June. I'll accept her excuse on his age and on our dating situation, but it would be a stretch to give her points on the book. The research was finished by June, and I did finally know what I was going to write, but the writing itself was far from done.

Of the eight things she got right, the three dates that supposedly mark changes in my life were the iffiest, because she was general in what she said and because there was a slight chance she might have known them from other sources. So that leaves five facts: my grandfather's initial, the number of his children, that one child died early, and my husband's two brushes with death.

Could she have researched those things? Perhaps. But the name of my grandfather and details about his family weren't facts she could have found out without a lot of work. My birth certificate was changed when my stepfather adopted me. It didn't contain my original last name. Even a crack detective would have found only a handful of people who remembered me from Oklahoma City, where I was born. They would have been hard to find and certain to report that they'd been questioned. If she did get my grand
father's name in a normal way, why not give it? Why just the initial? My husband's two brushes with death never made the papers and weren't experiences I'd discussed with people in Lily Dale.

The wrong, general, or suspect messages far outnumbered the five correct messages, but I expected her to be wrong. That's the norm. Even William James was occasionally too disgusted with Mrs. Piper's “tiresome twaddle” to note it down. But the five times Sherry Lee was right were not coincidence, not good guesswork, not things she knew beforehand. And they were not facts she elicited from me. Those five messages defied any explanation I had. She said the information came from spirits. I didn't think so, but nobody was coming up with a better story.

W
hen Marian Boswell fired up Jack's computer, she checked e-mail first. Among the messages in the delete file were notes from women in Colorado, Australia, New York, Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Florida. They wrote that they'd had a good time, they loved the gifts, and they looked forward to his next visit.

Then she checked the notes he'd sent. He gushed and flattered, recounted romantic evenings, promised love and more fabulous good times. Marian recognized this blather. It was the kind he sent her. As she read, Marian's shock gave way to numb horror. For the first time, the words she heard on that afternoon in Lily Dale seemed as though they might be true. Maybe she was going to lose everything. Marian didn't sleep much that night. When she did drop off, her dreams were all about Jack, a menacing, angry Jack who wanted to hurt her.

The next day she heard the voice in her head again, “There's more.”

He's lied to me. He's cheated. He's in debt,
she thought.
How could there be more?

In the following weeks, Marian's dreams contained messages that led her to other evidence against Jack. She found a box of papers hidden in the garage. She tapped into computer files he thought were safe. She found that he was looking for another job
and had résumés in at companies in New York and Chicago. He had debts and bank accounts she hadn't known of.

She went to a lawyer, who instructed her to gather more information. Every time she suspected something new, she took it to medium Greg Kehn, who confirmed her suspicions. “He never told me anything that I didn't at some level already know,” she said, “but sometimes it seemed as if he was just waiting for me to find out what he knew.”

Marian and Jack began to argue. They started sleeping in separate beds. One morning she awoke hearing her name called. She went into the kitchen. No one was there. As she was making coffee, Jack walked into the kitchen, sleep still blurring his face. “Did you call my name?” he asked. “I thought I heard my name.”

She hadn't. When she took the story to Greg, he said, “You both got wake-up calls. You both can respond if you want to.”

One evening, Jack and Marian argued. As the disagreement grew more and more heated, Marian became afraid. She retreated to the bathroom. Jack was behind her, still yelling. He seemed out of control, furious beyond recall. She slammed the door and crouched in the corner, thinking,
He's going to kill me.

He kicked the door open. Her back was to him, her head in her hands. She felt the air stir. A cool breeze seemed to be circulating about the room. She looked over her shoulder. A purplish haze was filling the air, rising between her and her husband, she said. As she watched, it seemed to her that it formed itself into a big wing. Jack looked surprised, Marian said. He hit out at the form, and his hands stopped as though they'd encountered a wall. He hit it again. It didn't give way. Marian said she saw fear in his face. Then he turned and ran from the bedroom.

Not long afterward Marian packed and fled to her father's house. She filed for divorce and returned to their home only after Jack had been ordered to leave.

The marriage was over. The divorce would drag on for more than a year. Marian's weight shrunk to seventy-eight pounds. She chattered compulsively about the strange turns her life had taken. She was terrified that Jack would hurt her. In February, she had a nervous breakdown and committed herself to a local mental hospital.

While there, she woke up one morning to find a young woman sitting at the foot of her bed sobbing. Her husband had committed her because she was seeing colors swirl about the room, the woman said. Marian believes the meeting was ordained. She convinced the woman that such colors weren't a sign of mental illness. She told her about the purple wing that she believes saved her. They talked for days, and when Marian left, she felt ready to take up her divorce battle again. Soon thereafter the young woman also divorced her husband, Marian said.

Marian got a job and sold her house to help pay taxes, unpaid debts, and attorney's fees.

“It was just like the woman said, I lost everything,” she told me, “and yet I've never been better. I had to know the truth. I prayed that I would know the truth. Now I do.”

 

O
nce Sherry Lee Calkins gave me those five things she couldn't have known, I waved bye-bye to rationality and walked into the great, glorious unknown. Why not? Despite all its silliness, exaggeration, and downright falsehood, Lily Dale was full of stories I couldn't refute. Why not join 'em?

My season of belief was a heady time. Life would go on forever. Life had a plan, and I had a starring role. Everything would turn out all right. There was no way it couldn't.

Before Lily Dale, I'd possessed a limited array of powers—quite limited, in fact. Now I could call upon the universe, cosmic consciousness, Mother/Father God, all the angels, including the Archangel Michael and my own personal guardian angel, all the ghosts
including the Holy One, Jesus, Mother Mary, fairies, alien beings from other planets, the discarnate entities who've never lived, and the elementals who reside after dark in Leolyn Woods. Many of these personages, if I may refer to them as that, were gathered around me on a fairly constant basis. Judging from the stories I'd heard, they would perch on the headlights of my car if I needed to drive through a blizzard, get me parking places, appear in dreams, materialize in meditations, and pop up in the real world to save me from my folly—maybe not all the time, but sometimes, which was more than I had expected. I didn't have to constantly whine and wheedle to get their protection. They were so eager to offer it that all I needed to do was to be aware of them and use them.

If I was doing what my cosmic contract called for—or giving my gift, as Lynn would say—the powers would conspire to help me. “We live in a responsive universe,” said Mary Ann, the therapist who sees dead people.

I'd never be lonely no matter how old I lived to be. “The people who've passed over are all around us,” Greg Kehn told Marian. “I wish people could see what I do. They would realize that they never need to be lonely.”

And death? I could laugh at it. It was nothing more than walking through a door. Easier even, since so many relatives came forward to help.

I'm overstating. I didn't believe all those things. I remembered Anne Gehman's warning, “There's a fine line between believing what's true and turning into a person who's talking to the toaster.” I didn't want to cross that line.

But hope, a big grand hope like this one, with endless surprises, all of them good, is a wonderful thing. I basked in it.

I didn't believe it all. No, I didn't. But I could. I had permission now, enough proof that I could believe anything that seemed real to me. Just to me. I didn't have to prove it to the rest of the world.
I merely had to listen to what I perceived, to know what I knew, to believe what I believed and move forward on it.

The test of that? It was the same one I'd started with from my first days in Lily Dale, the one that old Willie James gave me: How did it work, how did it play out in my life? How did it change me?

It worked pretty good.

I found myself breathlessly telling my friends and relatives what I'd found, which was that the world is full of wonder. I was less afraid. Work was easier. All failure was temporary. Everything counted to the good. Lessons that I learned late were as valuable as lessons I learned early because I had all eternity to use them.

And, as I began paying attention to the true things I heard instead of snagging on the untrue things, Lily Dale began redefining me to myself. It happened with Lauren Thibodeau.

Lauren volunteered to give me a reading. That was typical of her generosity. When I wanted to visit Niagara Falls, Lauren worried that I wouldn't have enough change for the tolls and offered to give me quarters. When I admired a sweet wine called an ice wine that's made in Canada, she tried to give me a bottle to take home. We put the reading off and then weren't able to meet and then almost gave up, but she persisted. And so one day we sat down with a tape recorder, and she started telling me what the spirits said.

I didn't connect with much. She thought she had my father's father again. I was not thrilled to hear from him. To paraphrase Susan B., why didn't he move aside so somebody interesting could come through? He couldn't tell me much that would be evidential because I didn't remember him. He didn't give his name or even his initial this time. The reading was something of a bust, I thought.

Then Lauren smiled and gave me a tender look. “I'm hearing that a lot of men from your past remember you with great affection.”

The look and the message embarrassed me. So I said, “I was kind of rowdy,” which embarrassed me more. I was putting myself
down, and the men too. Why did I do that? The spooks must have been mum about the less praiseworthy parts of my past because Lauren shook her head.

“No. It's not that,” she said.

“These men wanted to marry you. I'm getting the number seven.” Now she smiled another in her repertoire of sweet smiles. This was the one I'd seen her turn toward Shelley every time Shelley challenged some mediumistic belief. My face must have been showing doubt.

“You've really been loved. They're telling me that those men still think of you as someone who was very special in their lives. Do some of them keep in touch with you even now? I'm getting that.”

“Some,” I said grudgingly.

Even so, this was another miss. My love life had been one disaster after another. In my twenties, I married and divorced. In my thirties, I had one dark affair after another. When I married happily for the second time, it was God's own miracle. Nothing else could have done it.

A week later I was on the road, driving the interstate for six hundred miles toward home. As the semis blasted by my little white car and the radio blared, I remembered Lauren's words. Seven? That was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. There had been one or two, but not seven. Anyone who had seven men wanting to marry her would be well loved, I'd give Lauren that.

How many men
had
wanted to marry me?

I started to count. The two I'd married wouldn't be in the list. So let's see, there'd been…seven. Exactly seven.

How could that be? I counted again. Six. Six and two halves? I wasn't sure about all of them. But maybe. Maybe seven.

And I'd failed to notice? I'd dated a long time, two decades. That could explain it.

I went back over those men. One treated me fairly rotten before we split. Only one? I winced as I remembered how often I'd been the partner who pulled away. They'd all risen above it and continued to wish me nothing but good fortune.

This was not good news. For more than twenty years, I'd considered myself a victim of love, a helpless, often scorned woman, a total loser miraculously rescued. If that wasn't true, who was I? A woman blessed?

Couldn't be. I would have noticed.

 

M
y new belief also empowered me to push Shelley and her mentor, the bicycle-riding, praying-for-the-world Lynn, on their beliefs.

First, how could anybody be right all the time, as Lynn said Shelley was? And if it was true of Shelley, was it true of everybody?

It was true of Shelley, Lynn said, because Shelley listened to her true self and did what she wanted to do. It would also be true of others who listened to themselves and followed what their own spirit was telling them.

How could people do what they wanted to do and be right?

“Because what they truly want to do is what spirit is guiding them to do,” Lynn said. “Whatever we don't want to do is not for us to do. Spirit takes care of those things.” Lynn meant God when she said spirit, but she tried not to use a theistic term in deference to Shelley, who didn't believe in God. Or said she didn't, although I thought she did for all practical purposes.

I don't believe Lynn's ideas. Hitler was doing what he wanted. Was that right?

“People can get away from their true selves, which is that bit of God within us that speaks to us all the time,” Lynn said. “If we block that voice, then we get off the path, but that's not what we really want to do,” she said. “It is not what we're born to do.”

“But sometimes we have to think more of others than of ourselves,” I objected.

“Well, of course,” Lynn said. “But when you feel you don't want to and you're a loving person and you've been doing it so far with love, that's the signal that you're to move over and another spirit will take over. And it will. It will.”

What about old people living in nursing homes? If nobody wants to go see them, that's all right?

“Sure,” said Lynn. She laughed at how easy it was. “If you don't want to go, you shouldn't. It's not for you to do. That's a do-gooder doing something for somebody because they think they should. That's sinful.

“Somebody else will do it. Somebody who wants to. And if they don't, spirit will take care of it. You have to trust that that's so. We're trusting universal divine love.”

This was dangerous, and I did not believe it. We could learn to listen to ourselves, yes. That was good. But we could not be trusted to do only what we wanted to do. We could not trust those spirits. Ask anybody who lived through the Holocaust. Or the Rwanda massacres. The world is too evil a place for me to trust Lynn's universal divine love as she does.

One day, during one of our many debates, somebody mentioned the Dalai Lama, and I said, “I met him. Did I tell you that story?”