by Cheryl Peck
Who makes up these thoughts and sifts them through your brains like they were your own? I am not a stupid woman—I know better than to thumb my nose at the goddess of the unexplained . . .
In the fall some friends and I went to a psychic fair in Camp Chesterfield, Indiana. Psychics of every imaginable specialty had set up tables in the dining room and for a small fee we could pick and choose our imagined fortunes. There was even a psychic willing to “read” my pet, and the idea made me laugh out loud.
At the same time . . . Babycakes had been steadily losing weight since the death of his companion cat. They had never struck me as being particularly good friends, nor did he give any other indication he was grieving. He did not appear to be unhealthy. But I was becoming concerned. In the end, my curiosity won.
The pet psychic was a kind woman who obviously loved animals and who obviously believed in what she was doing. This did not necessarily mean I believed in her, but I tried to be open to the experience. We determined that cats (even psychically) are “very secretive” about their health, but that he (a) was beginning his final transition, (b) had some sort of systemic disorder that prevented him from eating properly, or (c) had a hairball.
Laughing about it later with my friends, I agreed she probably had it covered.
Babycakes met me at the door when I got home, which is not unusual. He seemed exceptionally pleased to see me and could hardly bring himself to leave my side the entire evening. When I went to bed, he was right there, singing and purring in my ear. I remember thinking, Apparently he likes the idea that I had a spiritualist talk to him, but pushed it aside. We have always had a sort of feast or famine relationship. When he was younger he would be aloof and fairly see-if-I-care about my gallivanting, but since he has become an only cat—or perhaps just an older one—he has become more forgiving, more willing to waive the penalty period so we can get directly to forgiveness.
After my visit with the psychic, he began steadily gaining weight.
He also became . . . flightier. Noises that he used to shrug off seemed to startle him into flight. I began to notice gradually that he often behaved as if there were someone/something else in the house.
I put this down to a writer’s imagination.
About a week after my visit with the cat psychic I happened to be home in the early evening—something of a rarity—and it occurred to me that I had been gradually becoming aware of the fact that this house, which once seemed utterly silent and unmoving, has developed any number of odd thumps and thuds and . . . essentially the kind of unexplained phenomena that I’ve always kept cats around to excuse.
You’re losing it, I reproved myself. You’re going to have the whole family hunkered down behind the couch again if you keep this up.
Behind me—perhaps in the next room—there was a loud BANG! and someone said, “Boo!”
It startled me: I jumped, and then I sat there, wondering who was in the next room, reminding myself that it hadn’t sounded exactly like “Boo” and that little voice in my head said, They can’t make it sound exactly like one person talking to another—there’s a rule against that.
And I realized belatedly that I had just imagined a ghost who said, “Boo!” A spirit with a sense of humor, no less, I admired . . .
And my cat—my insurance against unexplained entities—roared into the computer room at about a hundred miles an hour and came to a dead stop and stared at me. His hair was all sticking straight up, his eyes were like saucers, and he stared at me with that eerie cat-stare . . .
“As you open up, more and more things like that will happen,” my Beloved counseled me, and told me about adventures she had had in one of her own homes.
“If you smudge your house, that stuff will stop,” another friend counseled me, referring to the ancient art of burning sage or another herb to cleanse one’s space of spirits.
I spent some time wondering why smudging my house would repel spirits. I mean, what are the rules, exactly? And did I truly want to repel this spirit, or ghosts, or . . . whatever it may be? What I wanted was more specific than that: I wanted to know. Had I opened myself to something beyond the ordinary realm of see/hear/feel, or was I torturing myself with my own overactive imagination?
I was still pondering this in some obscure way when I went away for the weekend. We had a lovely time, took our time coming home, and as I walked into the house I realized I was a little curious about what my “spirit” might have in mind to surprise me with next. I felt fairly safe because these adventures were too small and happened too infrequently to keep me keyed up enough to really scare me. I was being “open” to whatever life had to offer.
I looked down at the loving cat at my feet, and I thought to myself, “God, he’s a beautiful animal.” And I stroked him . . .
And then I sat down and I looked at him.
Every hair on that cat was in perfect alignment with every other hair. His ruff was spread out just the way I like it, his tail was fluffed, his coat was thick and neatly brushed. He looked clean and healthy and just exquisitely groomed.
I don’t know who brushed out my normally tacky-looking cat. I can’t swear he didn’t groom himself. The noises have stopped, and I no longer have that sense of “otherness” in the house . . . And I have no idea what any of it means. Perhaps I never had any experience with a spirit—perhaps Babycakes had some sort of psychic experience with which he eventually came to terms, and I only saw the iceberg tips of this event.
I have always been curious about the paranormal. I have always wanted to know, one way or the other: is there a spirit world, and if so, is it accessible to those of us who live on this side of the door? But my mother’s oldest daughter has always known one thing for sure—the problem with keeping the door open is you’re never sure what might walk in.
about the author
CHERYL PECK: I was an imaginative (if not an overly motivated) child whose creative bent went largely unappreciated in the Midwest, where I was born and raised. We will probably never really know how many literary masterpieces were lost through my mother’s insistence that I “come back down here to earth, where the rest of us are.” I attended the University of Michigan, where I discovered diversity, social injustice, political activism, loud gay people, drugs, the counterculture, butt-kicking art fairs, and the women’s movement. Terrified, I scurried back to the rural red-and-white-checked work ethic I had known and despised as a child. I have lived within the confines of my imagination for most of my life and I am relatively happy there. Recently I have begun releasing small personal works on the general public.
As always, I am contemplating writing a book about something more interesting than my own life.
5 SPOT • • • • • SEND OFF
five things i have learned in fifty years
1.The fact that it smells delicious does not guarantee it will taste good.
2.Kicking small boys in the shins as hard as I can will not make me feel better.
3.When you step on the brakes and they are “mushy”—even if they kick in a second later—park the car.
4.The small red indicator light on the dashboard that says OIL should say IF YOU CAN READ THIS I’M PROBABLY ALREADY DEAD.
5.If you are an imaginative child who makes up her own friends, you should not let your parents watch movies about ventriloquists whose dummies take over their lives. It never happens: but it will fire the latent imagination of a brooding parent in just so many different ways.
five things i am still learning
1.The fact that it smells delicious does not guarantee it will be good for me.
2.Kicking grown men in the shins as hard as I can will not always make me feel better.
3. The actual mechanical reason why stepping on a pedal inside the car will make the wheels stop turning may not be a concept I will memorize in this lifetime: sometimes it’s enough to know that it will.
4.Even newer, better-engineered cars require those same old annoying fluid e
xchanges.
5.If you are an imaginative child who makes up her own friends, buy a computer. Sooner or later someone may pay you to print what you’ve created out of someone else’s life and besides, writers are a little odd anyway.
* This is a historical reference for those of us born and functional before 1982. In those dim, gray times before CDs we had “records,” or “albums,” which were larger than CDs and more fragile (they scratched easily), and if we played an album too many times the needle would wear on the vinyl and the track we were playing would literally turn whitish. If you doubt this, I have a whole crate of used albums waiting for their comeback in my basement and I can show you. To this day it annoys me to pick up a CD I haven’t played in a long time and have to read all of the song titles and try to figure out why I bought it—on an album, it was the gray track.(back to text)