Choosing Hard

A couple weekends ago, my mom and I went to a holistic fair. It was a square-figure-8 of tables in a auditorium-like community center. Mediums, crystals, stones, wire jewelry, pet psychics and tarot cards. We got there fifteen minutes before it was scheduled to close, so they let us in for free. Mom was determined to find me a psychic.

We watched people getting readings and doing readings. There was one woman, we'll call her Oda Mae Brown, who was talking to a woman. The woman started to cry and Oda Mae handed her a tissue box. Instead of wiping her face, the woman sat through her reading with streaked cheeks, riveted by what Oda Mae was telling her. After circling the tables for awhile, eyeing a tarot card reader in the corner, Mom decided Oda Mae was the psychic for me.

We waited until the weeping woman finished and Mom approached. It wasn't until I was in the chair and she started to tell me about herself did I realize Oda Mae was/is a medium. I'd never met with a medium one-on-one. Several years ago in my writing group we'd hired a man to come to our group and work his medium powers, but I mostly remember the odd way he kicked out his leg every few minutes.

For full disclosure, I don't disbelieve in psychics. There's a woman in Solvang, a tiny dutch town in California, named Madam Rosinka (real name) who's incredible. I think of psychics as highly intuitive people who tune into a radio wave that's out there for anyone with the right antenna. I also think there are a lot of crocks of shit who make up stuff.

Anyway, mediums. I wasn't looking to talk to the dead. I don't feel like I have any unfinished business with dead people. I don't worry about them. I miss them. It'd be cool if they weren't dead, but most of the ones I know were suffering and they are probably feeling a whole lot better if they are feeling anything. I don't think there's a heaven, but maybe just that each person dissolves into the matter that goes back into the earth. Their atoms floating out adding to new things and the parts of them that lives on is who they touched while they were alive.

So, when Oda Mae asked me who I wanted to talk to, I just picked my Grandma Henry because she was the grandparent I was closest to. The whole reading was strange. Oda Mae asked me lots of questions and told me some specific (watch out for anemia?) and lots of vague ("You're not done learning") things. Part of the confusion for me was, none of it sounded like Gram. I don't know if I expected Oda Mae's voice to change or her eyes to recognize me or what. But even the types of things she was saying didn't seem like Gram.

I shared as much as I could remember with Mom in the car ride home. Mom, despite her cynicism in everyday life, is a firm believer. "Maybe Grandma feels more at peace now so she feels she can say these things." "I think Grandma mentioned something like that... once." I remembered Oda Mae telling me Gram said "You aren't a victim in life."

"What does that even mean?" I asked Mom.

"You do like to choose hard things," Mom started. "You've always had an ingrained sense of justice and a desire to protect the underdog. It's not you being a victim, but that can be a hard life. Standing up for other people. Not always for yourself. Why do you always choose hard things?"

I didn't have a good answer. But it pinged something in me more than anything Oda Mae said.

So I changed the subject to Oda Mae saying whenever I smell sweet peas, Gram is near. Mom breathed in suddenly and said, "Grandma grew sweet peas on her farm!" As I started to protest, a huge bird flew right at our windshield, inches away from smashing in my side. I screamed, Mom swerved slightly and the bird flew off like it hadn't just almost died.

"It's Grandma," Mom said. "She's mad you don't believe her." She smiled while watching the road and we both laughed.

Mom insisted I relay this story to Jared and Dad that night and I realized, in the telling, I'm not sure what Gram would sound like. What she would say. We didn't have one-sided conversations in real life. She didn't give me speeches or long bits of advice. She told me stories about her childhood, her adulthood, her family and she listened.

Maybe mediums are more like funerals - a ceremony for the living under the guise of honoring the dead. They sometimes say something provocative enough that the listener, the hoper, can make that into something significant. And if it stirs something, does it matter where it came from?

Because rather than thinking of Gram's ethereal wisdom, I keep thinking of Mom's "You like to choose hard things."