My Friend the Medium, Installment 1

I still don’t know what to think about this, so I’ll just put it out there to let others decide. Back in 1985, I met Mary. She had a framed photograph of herself in bright 50s clothing. In the photo, she was dancing, tossing her head back over one shoulder, smiling, and clutching a long-stemmed red rose between her teeth. I still remember her like that, even though she was 65 years of age when I met her and only 35 years old in the photo. I was 31 when we met. Mary smiled better than anyone!

How I met her was so convoluted that I shudder to think how to condense it for you. Let’s just say a mutual friend said I should tell her about a job opportunity at the university where I worked, not far from where she was born. Living in Louisville at the time, she applied, was interviewed, was hired, and moved. Before long, I had the joy of daily visits with her at her apartment near where I lived.

She soon confided in me that she was a medium. Many years before, she and her husband were living and working in Quebec City. She was cleaning the basement of their home, and she reached far back on a high shelf behind the bar. She felt something there. It turned out to be a Ouija board in its original box. She read the instructions. Not expecting anything to happen, she set the board on the bar and touched the planchette. It moved! “Who are you?” she asked. The planchette spelled only the central letters, FGH. “Okay,” she said. “Is that your name?” Again, the planchette spelled FGH. Suddenly, the planchette moved for a long time, spelling “You are to life as FGH is to love.”

From that moment, Mary looked forward to coming home from work each day (She managed the English-speaking radio station in Quebec City.) so that she could spend an hour or two with the board and with FGH, whom she perceived as a male spirit. Now and then she met people she thought would be open to hearing about FGH or, at least, not quick to condemn her for believing she was in touch with a spiritual entity. They gradually formed a group wanting to know more. They read books, shared ideas, and conferred about such topics as mediumship and clairvoyance.

Robert T. Rhode, Photo by Teresa

Mary’s husband took a job in Omaha, and they moved to Nebraska. Within a year or two, he died unexpectedly. Mary worked for Boys Town, the charitable village, to pay her bills. In the relatively short time that she spent in Nebraska, she built another group interested in exploring spiritual topics through her emerging abilities as a medium.

Confronting the reality that she could not keep struggling to meet her mortgage obligations, she accepted her brother’s invitation to move to Louisville, where he lived. I have already sketched how she came to return to where she had grown up in the 1920s.

Mary told me that, throughout the downward spiral of her life after leaving Quebec City, FGH had guided her. Once, he told her to “go to the bank and talk to the nice man.” Her finances had gone so far south that she was not sure where the next meal was coming from. Considering FGH’s advice potentially ridiculous, she drove to the bank and was ushered into an office where she was miraculously given a loan that sustained her for several months.

I hardly knew what to believe about Mary’s confidence in her communication with FGH, but I quickly identified her as a real friend. My mother was in and out of hospitals from heart attacks. Once, for fun, I put Mary on the phone with Mom. The two had a lively conversation. My mother told her that I needed a good friend like Mary.

Whenever I was in Mary’s presence, I felt I was in a happy and carefree place full of possibilities. She was genuinely cheerful. Her faith in unseen worlds peopled by angels, guides, ancestors, and deceased human beings was rock solid, and she believed that, with a little practice, people could learn to shape their futures in positive ways. I began to permit myself to dream about publishing books.

I plan to continue this blog for several installments. What I have said here is only the beginning of an arc that stretches across the end of Mary’s life and the beginning of mine as a writer.