My Friend the Medium, Installment 2

Mary lived up to the promise to be my friend. I couldn’t have asked for a better one. We shared many meals, and her pork chops were delicious. She taught me the secret to slow-cooking them, and I make pork chops the same way today. From my previous blog, you know that Mary professed to be a medium. I suppose that mediums are a middle-class phenomenon. Mary came from a staunchly middle-class background, as did I, and her friends who were mediums were all from the middle of American society. Mary felt a deeply patriotic commitment to the country (as I still do), even though she had lived for a large portion of her life in Canada. When she thought of pain anywhere in the world, she cried. She could not understand why a merciful God would permit the suffering of innocent people.

Mary was also a friend to her students in the program for which she was an instructor and mentor at the university. Her students were homemakers that were striving to reenter the work force while juggling mind-boggling responsibilities of debt, children, government programs, and part-time jobs. Her students couldn’t get enough of her. Mary had instantaneous rapport with her classes, who turned to her for advice they could trust.

At the end of her workday, which often involved evening courses, Mary kicked back to discuss world events with me and maybe to channel a deceased loved one’s reassurance or a spiritual entity’s advice. Years earlier, she had set aside the Ouija board that had introduced her to FGH, her guide in spirit; she had quickly discovered that she could “hear” FGH while meditating. Mary had an extensive library of books about mediums and related topics ranging from healing to popular psychology. As my field, literature, is not devoid of metaphysics, I found it easy to read her books and to discuss their contents with her. I often felt I was trying to learn a craft from a master. While I had no talent and handled the “tools” clumsily, I appreciated her mastery of the vast and complicated subject of spirituality.

Mary in 1939 High School Yearbook

Mary had been raised a Catholic, and she never really left the church. She translated tenets of religious belief into her own terms, which were expansive enough to include the expressions of many religions and philosophies. To her way of thinking, guardian angels were spiritual guides, and FGH was her guardian angel.

At Mary’s suggestion, I read more than a hundred books. Well-written or not, the books informed our discussions. Among them were new books about chakras, and Mary wanted to know more. She discovered that a spiritual community was offering a week-long workshop in using crystals to align the chakras, and she enrolled. She found the colony so exciting that she later recommended I visit it with her. I drove us there.

Quiet outdoor areas were equipped with benches. A bookstore beckoned with sparkling stones, art, and the latest titles on every spiritual topic imaginable. Mediums performed readings throughout the day. I reserved my own half hour with Mary’s favorite medium, and I will admit I was amazed. The medium appeared to know several details about me that she could not have known through any means that I could discover. She might have been adept at extracting clues that I volunteered without realizing how much I was revealing. I might well have been gullible.

Mary and I made the community our destination perhaps twice a year, and, on each trip, I experienced another session with the medium whose talents I perceived as extraordinary.

Throughout the years of reading, discussing, and communing, I began to feel charged with enthusiasm. I thought I was beginning to comprehend a world that had seemed only harsh and paradoxical. I thought I was starting to perceive an order to everything: an order that was benevolent and peaceful. Compassion and charity, I believed, were meant to make the world a better place.

It was at about this time that a student at the university lost his life in a tragic automobile accident. I began to write the story of what he did after his death. Within a few months, I had written a novel. During the next two years, I expanded the novel into a trilogy. Seeking to be published, I wrote to Ruth Aley, a well-known literary agent in New York. When she invited me to meet with her at her apartment in Manhattan, I could hardly believe my good fortune! I spent my meager savings on airfare to New York. I hoped to persuade Ruth to represent my trilogy to publishers. I was convinced that the happy upswing in my writing life resulted from my interaction with Mary.