Not Ready To Call Ghost Hunters

A strange thing happened one day last week. To get the true picture you need a description of my stove in my kitchen: just your basic old fashioned four-eye stove with an oven underneath. On my stove top I keep one of those scented candles in a jar. I've noticed that when I use the oven the heat will melt the wax and give off a fragrant smell (in this case, blueberry) - and this without lighting my candle. It has lasted for many years this way. Finally, my favorite pot holder sits in the center, safely away from the eyes.

 

One day last week I came home from work to find my candle moved out of its place on the back of the stove top and now turned face down on my potholder in the center. Of course I was shocked. It looked so deliberate.

 

The only other person who has a key to my home is my mom, and she wouldn't come over without telling me. And if she had I doubted she would turn a candle upside on my stove in lieu of a calling card or note! Also dismissed out of hand was the idea that someone might have broken in without leaving a trace of entry, turn over the candle, and then leave without doing anything else or taking anything.

 

I thought it was the weirdest thing, but went on with my evening. I remembered many years ago reading a book by the late Bishop James Pike, whose son had committed suicide, telling of finding clues (like a couple of safety pins configured in the clock position of the time his son died) around his apartment that indicated to him his son was trying to communicate with him from the Great Beyond.

 

Was this an attempted communication from one of my loved ones no longer a part of this world?

 

That was a solution I couldn't seriously entertain, so I went about thinking how this strange thing might have happened naturally rather than supernaturally.

 

My daily custom is to take my insulated lunch bag and load it up with drinks and snacks for my work day just before I leave for work. I use my stove top for this task because it sits right beside my refrigerator. Was it possible I might have inadvertently hooked the strap of my lunch bag around the candle and flipped it over as I pulled my bag off the stove in my haste to get on the road? I wondered.

 

I did set up this experiment and duplicated the upturned candle on the pot holder (perfectly centered, no less!) on the very first try. Mystery solved.

 

There resides in my mind no firm belief in postmortem survival, but I am open to be convinced. One big reason for my lack of belief is that none of my loved ones, my beloved father or older brother, or my former lover/friend Pam who died a year ago this very month, have returned to me (other than dreams, which I don't consider evidence of survival).

 

With all due respect to Bishop Pike and many, many others who see signs of hauntings so readily and in so many things, I myself need a better example. Don't call Ghost Hunters yet!

Maggie

In the category of interesting people I've known I must place Maggie, who was my neighbor when I lived in a set of apartments in around my thirtieth year. She was an interesting character for a number of reasons. She still worked full time as a nurse in a nursing home - on third shift, no less - even though she was in her late seventies. She was a Seventh-Day Adventist Christian, which I found interesting, especially their doctrine of conditional immortality (as opposed to the traditional orthodox position of endless punishment for sinners), and she gave me some literature which detailed their thinking on this and a number of other subjects. She was very active despite her age and drove herself everywhere she went, even some twenty or so miles away to a local SDA community where she shopped for healthy foods for her vegetarian diet. That interested me, too. And partially with her help I managed to make the switch to vegetarianism (something I had been interested in for quite a while for philosophical reasons). She gave me a recipe for something called Special K Loaf - a vegetarian meatloaf substitute using that cereal as the main ingredient. That recipe (which is quite delicious and the recipe is now widely available on the internet) did the most to help me over the transition to a meatless diet, which I rigidly adhered to for over a year. (It was a fun experiment, but I slowly went back to including a little meat in my diet, which is the way I still eat - a part-time vegetarian at best.)

 

Maggie was good company - slightly cranky, but still lots of fun. She was intelligent, informed, and motivated. She did all of her own cooking, in fact, all of her own everything, living alone as she did. Her son lived in Ohio, but she had a niece locally she was close too and who kept an eye on her. Even though she was quite the Christian, she still made a big-to-do over Halloween, and decked out her apartment entry with ghosts and monsters and made certain she had some sweet treats for the children.

 

So for nearly a year this fascinating lady was part of my life and the life of my then live-in girlfriend, who was also very fond of her. We spoke to her one morning as she arrived home after her shift of work at the nursing home. As always, she was full of plans and went over with us her agenda for the days ahead. She complained of some discomfort in her shoulders, which she was attributing to overuse of those muscles while moving a patient around in his bed. We thought no more about it as we said goodbye and gave her our wishes that she would have a restful sleep.

 

Later that night, well actually around midnight as I recall, I was lying on my couch watching TV in front of my open front door. It was early spring and I was enjoying the pleasant night air. There suddenly was a prolonged period of knocking outside my door which I went out to investigate. Stepping outside on the porch I encountered Maggie's niece, who told me the nursing home had called her because Maggie failed to show up for her shift. There she was knocking away to no answer. She told me she didn't know if Maggie was dead-to-the-world asleep or - long pause - simply dead. There was a mail slot in the front door which I then pushed open enough to see Maggie lying peacefully there on the couch, illuminated only by the flickering glow of her television. Immediately I drew the conclusion that those shoulder pains might have been something other than sore muscles, even though she was in good health and had no history of heart problems. I told her niece to wait and that I would go get the complex's maintenance man, who lived on-site and who I knew quite well.

 

With the maintenance man we were able to gain entry to the apartment through the back door. Maggie's niece ran immediately into the living room and grabbed her aunt's arm. "She's already cold," she exclaimed. One look at Maggie's sweet face was enough to assure me that it was her corpse we were now viewing. I still remember all this very well because it was quite traumatic for me. Maggie was my friend and I had grown fond of her over the months. Her niece's shock and grief were heart-rending, and I stayed with her until the ambulance came to remove the body to the funeral home and the police made their routine investigation to assure it was a natural death. I was also there for her when she placed the call to Maggie's son in Ohio to break the news to him. Sad. Very sad.

 

At this particular point in my life I had left my childhood religion and embraced agnosticism, if not outright atheism. Still, Maggie's death impacted me emotionally and I found myself rethinking anew this whole business of life, death and the human hopes of immortality. According to her theory she had merely went to sleep awaiting the great resurrection day when God would restore her to life. According to mine, she had passed into peaceful nonexistence. Is this life all there is? Could there possibly be more? Is hope in life beyond this one vain and pointless? I'm agnostic (but can't deny harboring some wishful thinking).

 

Maggie was my friend and I remember her fondly all these years later. She never tried to convert me and, of course, I never tried to deconvert her. She was content to let her life speak for itself. And I was impressed by her simple, purposeful life. She was a good and decent woman. Maybe that's the most important thing - not the ideas we cherish or strongly believe, but rather our commitment to decency and kindness toward our fellow creatures. That is what Maggie was about.

Strange Coincidences: The Amazing Jim Twins

I've only known one set of identical twins in my lifetime. They were two gorgeous ladies who were my classmates in college. A little shy, they still had fabulous personalities. It is with regret that I now look back and realize I didn't take advantage of the opportunity to study the various ways they were similar and how they differed. So much for lost opportunities.

Because coincidences and synchronicities are a favorite study of mine in recent years, I stand almost slack-jawed when looking at the eerie similarities between identical twins Jim Springer and Jim Lewis, who were raised apart from each other by adoptive parents. 

They were studied by psychologist Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. who, according to this story in People magazine, thought he would find many differences that would "surprise even the twins." Instead, as People reports, "what was immediately apparent were eerie similarities that left even Bouchard 'flabbergasted.'"

The scientific response to this, I suppose, is that genes may play a larger part in our lives than what at first might seem reasonable to think. The Jims, among many similarities, both married women named Linda. Then later, after divorces, they both married women named Betty. Then if that isn't weird enough, they both had sons which they named James Alan (although the middle name was spelled slightly differently). They both had dogs that they had named Toy.

But surely their genes don't explain the fact that the adoptive parents chose to name their children Jim. And I'm not sure if it can explain why they both smoked Salem cigarettes, drove blue Chevrolets. and vacationed at the same beach in Florida.

Twins provide a fascinating opportunity to study coincidence. Even my twin friends told me about their "psychic" connection. I just didn't take the opportunity to probe the matter. But, fortunately, others have collected stories of twins and their connections. Guy Lyon Playfair wrote a book about twin connections, Twin Telepathy: The Psychic Connection, that has long been on my list of books to read. I just haven't gotten around to finding a used copy at a good price. Now that I'm thinking about, I believe I will start looking.

Bud Abbott's Strange Coincidence

Nearly a century ago psychologist Carl Jung coined the word Synchronicity to describe what he considered meaningful coincidences. Life is full of coincidences and most of us, I suppose, have had these things happen to us at one time or another under circumstances that caused us to ponder if there is not something more than mere chance at work. Maybe not. But I've been captivated by Jung's concept for a long time.

 

It was while reading about the old comedy team of Abbott & Costello that I stumbled upon one of these meaningful circumstances - at least meaningful for Bud Abbott.

 

I've included a link to a March 4, 1959 newspaper account of the death of Lou Costello, from which I quote the following:

 

Death called the final cue for chubby comedian Lou Costello while, by coincidence, Bud Abbott watched a TV movie of the team's famed "Who's on First?" routine.

 

"Tell me, why was I watching that picture at that particular time? I never watch it. After all, I've seen it a thousand times." 

 

Now I'm not saying this is anything more than one of those weird coincidences which fill life, but it must have been extremely striking to Abbott.

 

"It's just one of those things," the nonbeliever in Synchronicity would say. And that may be right. All of us tend to center the cosmos around ourselves, or at least often fall into the rut of thinking that way. Still, when one of these meaningful coincidences occur in our own lives, it is certainly an attention getter.  

 

Certainly Jung and his Synchronicity seem out there to many in today's modern, materialistic world. Not necessarily to me, however.