Angels Among Us

I've been touched by an angel. I think.

My mom had a "psychic" party Saturday, and I went into the whole thing pretty skeptical. Don't get me wrong; I believe that there are things around us that can't be explained by science and natural laws and that we each have a soul and all that stuff. But I have always thought most of the people out there claiming to see the future and commune with spirits are phonies who are masters of emotional manipulation and whose "gifts" are nothing more than parlor tricks. I think now I have seen the real deal, though. And I have a lot to ponder.

What made me more skeptical is that my family knows the person who came over Saturday for the readings. She has been my mother's electrolysist for many years. See, the women in my family have facial hair issues. Not so bad that we'd get asked to be the bearded lady in the circus at any point in our lifetime, but bad enough that we're all willing to shell out a moderate amount of cash every eight weeks or so to send jolts of electricity or high-energy laser beams into the hair follicles above our lips (without this woman and a few laser hair removals, I may not have needed a fake moustache last week in order to play a convincing man.) We've known for a while that our hair lady is also a medium; we've seen the cards for her spiritual services in her office, but it's been something she never talked about much. She always told us she kept one job separate from the other, and that she would never dream of telling an electrolysis client that their long-deceased uncle Bob was in the room and wanted to say hello. Over the years, she had only told my mother one or two things that she felt she needed to, and in both cases they were right on, but we hadn't seen enough to convince us that Saturday's event was going to be anything more than a good excuse for us girls and a few of our friends to get together and drink some wine and gossip.

I got to mom's after the first person had gone in for her reading. It was a friend of my sister's, a woman who said she was a skeptic but who had been looking for something interesting to do on a Saturday. A little later, she came out of the room in tears. "She's good," she said. And she told us a string of things our hair lady had told her about the deceased members of her family that seemed to go beyond coincidence. These things were very personal and emotional for her, so I won't replay them here, but suffice to say we were getting chills as she was talking.

When the second person came out of the room with the medium, they were both laughing. Our hair lady told mom that mom's "spirits" had gotten in the way with that reading and kept butting in. "Did you do a lady's hair once and turn it pink?" she asked my mom. My mom thought a minute, and then started laughing. When she worked as a hair dresser in the nursing home, there was a woman with solid white hair whose family used to bring in different home hair color kits for mom to try on the lady; they were very particular and didn't trust mom's salon products. One day they brought in a strawberry blond, and against her better judgement mom put it on her hair, and it turned it a pale pink. She died a short time later, and still had pink hair when she was buried, much to mom's embarrassment. Apparently, pink-haired lady wanted to have some words with my mom Saturday and couldn't wait her turn and butted into this other person's reading. Now, the medium knows that my mom was a hair dresser, but mom doesn't believe she ever had time to talk about something that specific during one of her 15-minute electrolyis appointments (and believe me, when she's doing your upper lip, you don't feel much like chatting.) It wasn't even something I ever remember mom telling me, and she has told me a lot of funny stories from the home. Weird.

Finally it was my turn. Like so many others, what she told me was very personal and not someting I feel like sharing online. I will tell you that I cried. A lot. I strongly believe I heard a message from my father. And one spirit she claimed was in the room was a person who played only a small role in my life, and who I haven't talked about to many people, but she got the details of this person's death exactly right. One thing she did say that I am willing to share: she said that Ainsley has been saying a lot lately that she misses her papaw (and she has; she just started talking about him out of the blue about a month ago) and that her papaw wants her to know that she doesn't need to miss him, because he's always there, and that he talks to her, and sometimes she can hear him. For those of you who have heard me talk about Ainsley's cemetery behavior when we go to visit dad's grave, you know why I think this is true.

Of course, some of the things we heard from my dad have given us things to think about and some riddles to solve; the phone lines have been burning up between my house and mom's as we try to figure out one message we all three heard but can't quite get a handle on.

Even if this all was completely bogus, and no one can commune with the spirits of those who have gone before us, it was a good afternoon with ample doses of laughter, tears, remembrance, and wine. The spirits of our loved ones may not have really been among us, but by talking about them and remembering them, all of us felt their presence and their love. And that's more important than any message from the beyond.