Part Three, The Present

This is the last of three posts which I have found to be mysteriously wonderful and full of questions. Do I have an answer? Nope. Someday I will and when I do I will be the one thumping on the door which divides and welcomes all of us.

 

Christmas before last I was working on a holiday column. The season was short and I was running out of time. I thought perhaps I could repurpose a piece I had written over twenty years before when my daughters were seven and ten years old. It was a sweet op-ed published in 1994.

I had a copy of the old piece which I was transcribing it into my computer for an eventual book for my children.  When I got to the end of the piece, it had been misaligned, half of the last paragraph was missing.     

The TV was on. (Refer to Part One)

I tried to add what I thought was missing, but the last couple of sentences stumped me. As I was typing the last paragraph, and struggling to fill in the missing words, for no apparent reason I randomly typed, “everyone knows,” at exactly the same time singers on TV sang, “everyone knows.” I think it was Glee. It got my attention. I replayed the scene. I had heard the two words correctly. Did I type them because I heard them? No, I had started to type before the words were sung.

For a few seconds I looked up at the ceiling and said, okay, I get it, I’m on alert. When I went back to typing I still could not come up with all the missing words. “Everyone knows”, did not seem to relate to the old piece. I had to find the original article.

Over the years I’ve saved almost all of my tear sheets.  My mother saved many in her colorful folder as did my mother-in-law, in a big brown envelope. In fact the Christmas before my mother-in-law passed away she gave me an album with many of my articles preserved in plastic photo protectors. The pieces saved were the really old ones, from the ‘80s and ‘90s.  Finding that album, and the original, would take some time. Time, something which I did not have because I had to leave for work. I did a quick search.

Immediately I found the album under the pile of manuscripts I was planning to box and store in the attic. I set the book down and opened the cover. There,  the very first op-ed, as pristine as if cut from the paper that day, the twenty year old Santa piece.

To me finding the article so quickly was like the Mark Twain incident years before. Or was it just a lucky find? And then I remembered the word match, which had put me on alert.                

“For all the skeptics, non-believers and Ebenezer Scrooges, when the hoopla of Christmas Eve is over and you collapse into bed exhausted, listen carefully. Everyone knows what Santa’s bells sound like. If you listen hard enough, you will hear them because Santa lives.”

Yes, I do believe in the higher-ups above us and messages sent from heaven. I also believe that if anyone could get through from the great beyond, my mom and dad could. I believe that just because we can’t explain it, does not mean it does not exist. Because I have experienced a lifetime of quirky little happenstances that have amazed me, and puzzled me, and in three unbelievable head thumping, heart stopping circumstances, saved my financial ass, I am convinced something else is going on.

Do I know what that something else is? Maybe, maybe not. Finding the article so quickly, no big deal. The words tucked away in my mind simply rising to surface at just the right time? Sure. But echoed from the other room as I typed, what is that about? 

What I do know, and learned early on, is that we must live our lives without blinders on and be open to the mysteries of life which surround us.  What is directly in front of us may show us where we think we are, but what goes on peripherally may show us how to get there.