Saturday, March 13, 2010 may go down in the history books for me as significant for its fun factor and for its diversity. It all began much to early for me on a Saturday, when I was rustled out of bed about the same time I would awaken for a work day. I hate that early-rising shit like poison.

We had to wake up early, because M.’s co-worker, a friend really, with whom we recently trundled off to Tahoe, because she believes in psychics. Or, more correctly, she believes in Felix the Psychic. Actually, he’s a medium, and while not all psychics are mediums, all mediums are psychic, or so I think Felix explained. Point is, M.’s friend hosted a brunch where Felix would give a reading to 10 or 11 of us gathered around her sunny, large living room in the suburbs of the East Bay.

To say I am skeptical about this kind of shit is an understatement. Worse, I kind of wonder about the ethical realm in which professional psychics work. Too often, I think, they work among and prey upon vulnerable folks who want answers or are coping with grief and generally are casting about for a shoulder to support them or ears to listen. I’ve had my tarot cards read after a bad breakup and burst into tears to a strange woman, who was in retrospect an inexpensive therapist for my broken heart with her vision of a wounded animal outside my door afraid to come in or commit, as metaphor for that now-forgotten boyfriend. Best case, it’s a few bucks and a few tears. Worst case, it’s a terrible and potentially expensive bandaid to deeper issues.

On the lighter side, I’m not 100 percent opposed to entertaining psychic shenanigans, both for their entertainment value and for the exercise of a different perspective. I read Carl Jung as an impressionable, precocious youth, and who the fuck knows what is buried in the various layers of our subconscious, collective and otherwise? I used to carry around my own pack of tarot cards and a handy interpretation guide and what it did for me was essentially, in new age hippie speak, guided meditation. The cards images and alleged meanings could get me thinking about my actual problems and thoughts, but aligned in a different direction or with a fresh perspective. I could also talk other people through their readings the same way.

I only really except three things when it comes to this stuff, though. Life is complicated and not everything makes sense, coincidences happen and human brains like to organize and find solutions and organization. Cold readings work, because everyone likes to help out, because everyone likes to hear about themselves in all their glorious uniqueness, and because everyone likes to connect dots. We are predictable beasts, we humans.

All of that being said, old Felix creeped me and the rest of the room out with his specificity.

He had a lot to say to everyone in the room, and much of it was infinitely explainable as standard carnival fare. Who doesn’t know someone with a J. name? How can you verify alleged past life identities? Who doesn’t want to be told they are intuitive or a people person? Many in the room were gifted with their own psychic abilities, many missed loved ones from the past. Some replied freely working with Felix to prompt more answers to his questions before he asked. Others, M. in particular, gave him little traction.

By the way, he told M. and me that we were brother and sister in a past life, ew, and thus our close relationship in this life. We are compatible, it seems, and the spirits think we’re fine together.

When it was my turn, I was not going to be swayed. Skeptical and unwilling were my mantras. But, Felix said some shit that I can’t explain. With the wonders of modern technology, I’ll get to play and replay the recording someone made of the readings, and then decide what was magical, what I am now remembering positively and the “truth.”

Quickly, he pegged the most significant death and the most grief I ever felt in my life. I won’t go into the details, because I’m not looking to irritate the living, but it was an eerily accurate jump point. We chatted, me trying to keep my answers fairly monosyllabic, while Felix probed. He asked me if there was a quilter or someone who sews in my family. Yes, of course, my sister. He went on to say that my mother wore something she made, well actually that’s how I’m remembering it, I’ll have a recording to verify if that’s what he said. In that moment, he was talking about my mother in the present tense, so I corrected him.

Medium that he is, communicator with the “spirit world,” he summoned good, old Pat forth to get in touch with us all. Somewhere in here, he didn’t ask, he stated that my mother had suffered hair loss, that she was in his words bald. And, that she was, unfortunately. I admitted that she didn’t just wear something that my sister, the seamstress, had made, but it was a polar fleece cap that was all but glued to her head up until the day she died. He passed along Pat’s message from the other side, “I have my hair back.”

As my brother Danny laughed, it’s funny that in communicating through the veil of death she wouldn’t have something more momentous to mention.

Of all of the words Felix could have used, the identifier he had for Pat’s spirit when she came forth and spoke to him was strangely familiar. The first word he used to describe her, according to what she herself was allegedly communicating, was “stubborn.” He said she acknowledged she was stubborn.

Now, this word is either certain proof that there is an afterlife and she was communicating from it. Or, it’s certain proof that it wasn’t her, because the Pat on earth would NEVER acknowledge that characteristic for herself. In fact, it was a running joke with my aunt and I, one with which we would tweak her whenever the opportunity arose, that is, fairly often. Pat would call my aunt and let her know how stubborn I was for not listening to her. In phone calls to me, the stubborn one would be if not me often my aunt. We would laugh and point out how it was always one of us who was stubborn, never her.

Why, I couldn’t help my skeptical but confused mind wonder, would Felix use stubborn?

I think it was later in the whole party, after the readings were done and Felix offered more time for questions, when I asked about myself and writing and performing. Early on, he saw me in a different job than I have now within two years, a different career. He “saw” teaching, because I was standing up in front of people explaining something in his vision. I mentioned writing and performing and he went with that.

I’m not sure when, but when he was chatting up Pat, she mentioned to him that her love for me was symbolized by a single, long-stemmed rose, thorns and all. He repeated about the rose and said there was some connection with me and my mom and a rose, asking, as folks in his line of work do, if this rose meant anything to me. A single rose.

Others in the room were shocked by my answer — I saved a single, red rose from my mother’s grave before they lowered her into it. A few of us did. I still have the petals, high up on a shelf in an antique blue willow glass that was her mother’s.

Old Felix told me that my mother, the one now chilling on the other side, was fine now. She’s with our old family dog, Ben, the Irish Setter, who she begrudgingly grew fond of over time. There’s another dog, he said, from our family who had “passed.” In my interpretation, I like to think in the afterlife it’s a calmer Sherlock, my aunt’s, uncle’s and cousins’, well really my uncle’s terrier, who Pat mostly referred to with the word “damn” or “damned” as a preface. It would kind of serve her right for her philosophy and strong opinions on pets here on the earthly plane for Sherlock and Ben to be underfoot.

Apart from mentioning stand-up comedy, I didn’t say anything about what I have written. Felix asked/stated that I wrote about my mother. Cue spooky music.

He went on to say that she knows that I write about her, and Pat is proud of me and my writing. She wants me to continue and isn’t angry at all, hoping that I will go ahead and live my life as I need to live. He said that she said I had to write and get my emotions out and it was a good thing. Somewhere in there he also blurted out, after I mentioned that I had moved here to try to live said life, Ma…Massachusetts. The spirit on the other side, my alleged mother, had insisted we were from Massachusetts. Could I have signaled all of that to some kind of wildly receptive con artist; I’m not even sure if I said enough to belie an accent?

Pat of the other world also said that she likes M. and that he seems to be a sweet guy. Again, my brother Danny was skeptical if it was truly her, since Felix didn’t mention that she said anything about his being Asian or Oriental. Our Pat would have had some reference to that.

One other eerie moment I have to hear the recording again to figure out if I agree still with where I thought Felix was going. We were talking about my siblings. He mentioned the Beatles and someone playing their music over and over again. The story it sparked for me was one that the brother in question would vehemently deny. I suddenly remembered a story from when we were kids and one of my brothers was angry at the rest of the household or someone in it. His revenge was to lie on his bed behind the closed door of his room, not budging to unstick a skipping album on his stereo. “Let it be…click…let it be…click…let it be.”

Similarly for M., Felix had some pretty specific things to say. He declared his mother as a cook, which seems common enough, but then he said she was a “big cook,” a person known for her cooking. She is truly a fabulous cook, and when he was growing up, she was a cook for a living. Felix also seemed to know that M.’s grandmother lives with his mother, and his mother is her caretaker. M. was pokerfaced, and I’m not sure ever admitted that was the arrangement even while Felix insisted that he saw his mother taking care of an older woman.

M.’s eerie moment of psychic truth was over his now deceased grandfather, a drinker back in the day, who came forward to tell M. that he apologizes to his mother. If you knew the whole story, which isn’t mine to tell, you’d be a bit blown away by that one.

Right at the outset with him, he also confirmed what everyone in the room, many of them his co-workers knew, that M. was working on developing a side business that had to do with design or making something. Here in the real world, M. indeed is working on a custom tailoring idea, with measurements and orders taken here and suits made back in Asia. It was one of the reasons we went to Thailand.

Per Felix, and I sure hope he’s right, the business will bring money to M.

On another note, the uncooperative M. denied any musical tendencies, even while Felix talked up someone playing a guitar and singing. The funny thing about Felix and that one for me was M.’s high school reputation. On my first and subsequent visits to Malaysia it’s been a key part of his family’s narrative about him. They remember him and his best friend at the time, Peter, pairing up and serenading the girls in their school and their neighborhood with their pop crooning. M. was an ’80s (or maybe ’70s) idol in some circles.

My favorite little thing for M. was about collecting and piling up junk. He actually hates doing that, I’m the pack rat in our house. But, ever since he’s been able to settle down here with a steady paycheck, M. has increasingly embraced the ownership, consumer culture middle-class America enjoys. So much so, he now wants to live through his own reenactment of the bastion of suburban weekend renewal — The garage sale. He’s looking forward to piling up our shit on the driveway, so that we have room for newer, shinier shit.

Felix decided M. was a hoarder and that the time had come for spring cleaning and M.’s getting rid of things he doesn’t need. Did Felix intuit the garage sale?

There was more. Some I believe I can use as information to ponder. Some stuff is dubious at best. A bit would be too personal for other people for me to share, including an allegation about a family member that I don’t know I believe.

Apart from the mimosas and the bear claw, it was an interesting way to spend a morning.

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