A Psychic Told Me

I’ve lived in Waltham now for about a month. Every time Dixie, the Airedale dog, and I go out we meet somebody new, get into a conversation, and once more answer the question – What brought you up here? I’ve developed a stock reply about having become bored in my position of 13 years as a non-profit executive director and about having had a long distance relationship with a woman who lived in northeastern Connecticut that fizzled out and how the relocation just took on a life of its own. And, that’s all true. It’s not the entire truth, though. The real truth is that a Psychic told me that I would move to New England; two of them did, in fact. In two separate readings about a month apart: one in May 2004 in Leiscester, Massachusetts and the other a month later in Linthicum, Maryland. The skeptics I’ve told this to have just looked at me like I was nuts; the believers nodded their heads knowingly; the others, who sit on the fence on these kinds of things, said “well, what about free will? You didn’t have to do it.”

A few years ago I read a book, written in 1997, entitled “A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East” by Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani. In 1976 he was told by a psychic not to fly on any airplanes for all of 1993. He covered the far east and traveled extensively, mostly by plane. However, he remembered what the psychic had said and, during 1993, traveled by bus, train, taxi and boat as he went through Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Thailand, and into Russia where he went by train back to Italy. In every town he went through he looked up the local Fortune Teller and asked to have his fortune told. It was a fascinating book about what each of them told him – there are charlatans and then there are those whose perceptions cannot be ignored. Whether he was right not to fly that year I’ll leave up to you. I suggest reading the book, be you skeptic, believer or on the fence.

I had gone to the first psychic, the one in Leiscester, on a fluke. She was a local area celebrity of sorts. She and her sister have a call in radio show called “The Psychic Sisters.” The person with whom I was having a long distance relationship with and for whom I had traveled up to her place for a long weekend had booked two slots with one of the Sisters. I went in place of someone else who decided at the last minute not to have a reading done. When I went in to meet with the Psychic Sister she said – “I thought you were going to be a woman.” Surprise! She recovered and asked me my name, date and time of birth. She then proceeded to tell me a number of things, the most significant of which, to me, was that I was going to be moving either to the northwest or to the northeast, but in either place it would be both near the woods and the ocean, that I would be working with people as a teacher of sorts and that the move would occur within a year. I decided to get a second opinion.

The second psychic pretty much corroborated the first, but said that I would be heading to New England, not the Pacific Northwest. She said, among a lot of other things, that I would be working somehow around group homes, that I would be living near water and that I would be spending a lot of spare time in the woods. She told me I was going to struggle with being a recluse. And, she said that right around my birthday there would be a lot of activity about my getting a new job and relocating. I decided not to go for a third opinion.

At the end of September I traveled up to CT, hooked up with the long distance since fizzled out relationship person and went to Boston and up into New Hampshire, where I spread around my resume. While in Boston talking to a professional acquaintance it was mentioned, almost as an aside, why didn’t I apply for a Trainer position within the department in which she was employed. So I did. On the last day that applications were being accepted. A couple months later, right around my birthday, I had an interview and, a couple months after that, got the job. I moved to Waltham in February, a few months shy of a year after the first psychic’s reading.

It’s funny how things work out. You know how people say “it was meant to be.” My house sold in a week without a hitch. I came up to Waltham over Martin Luther King Holiday, looked at five different places on that Sunday and took an apartment without problem. While trying to arrange moving my furniture and stuff up here I was able to trade my sofa and love seat for the move itself. My only brush with Murphy’s Law was my computer crashing while trying to install a CDRW drive. Fortunately, my own psychic sister, Andrea, was available to completely reinstall the operating system and re-load all the software. No matter what the psychics may tell you about what’s going to happen to yourself, without friends you have nothing.

So here I am in Waltham. I’m a few minutes walk from the Charles River, a few minutes drive from the woods and about an hour from Boston’s portion of the Atlantic Ocean. My job is going to be working with people with mental retardation, many of whom live in group homes and my position is that of a trainer, a teacher of sorts. Since I’ve taken the apartment, aside from walking Dixie, I’ve holed up writing to this blog. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?