about crisis communications when I was eight years old, but what my mother and I heard that night convinced me that ghosts do, indeed, exist, and it was the beginning of what would become an obsession that would last for years.
When I was ten years old, my father was assigned to duty in Iceland. We were living in Norfolk, Virginia at the time. He went first, and we followed a few months later so that Meridith, Eddie, and I could finish school. While we were still in Virginia, there was a new addition to our family—my sister Nadine.
When we finally arrived in Iceland, one of the things I remember is because it was so cold that when my father saw us, he started crying and his tears literally froze on his face. Still, to this day, I loved living there.
There was a small library on the military base where we lived. I found and read the book A Gift of Prophecy written by the psychic Jeanne Dixon. It was my first real introduction to anything “psychic.” In her book she wrote that she knew she was “special” because the lines in one of her palms formed a star. I looked at both of my palms—no star. I wasn’t a psychic, and I can’t tell you how disappointed I was. I was, however, so fascinated by her story that I think I read her book, cover to cover, at least three times.
I saw another book in the “base exchange,” which is kind of like a Walmart store for military personnel and their families, entitled How to Tell Fortunes with Ordinary Playing Cards. It was on the same shelf as the monthly magazines my mother would buy that had daily horoscope predictions for every sign in the zodiac. All I saw was the cover of the book. I didn’t pick it up to look at it because I didn’t have the money to buy it, and I didn’t think my mother would buy it for me either.
A few days later my mother was reading the predictions for the day in one of her magazines, and I saw a deck of cards that my parents had been using the night before to play poker with their friends. Remembering the book I had seen about telling fortunes with ordinary cards, I asked my mother if she’d like me to tell her fortune for her.
“How are you going to do that?” she wanted to know.
“With these cards,” I told her, shuffling the deck.
I don’t think she had ever received a “card reading” before, but I am sure that she thought the idea of receiving one from her ten-year-old son was amusing. “Sure,” she said, “Tell me my fortune.”
As I said before, I didn’t look inside of the book, so I really had no idea what I was supposed to do. I hadn’t heard of tarot cards and knew nothing about card spreads. What I did do was lay the cards out in three rows of seven. I got the idea from a card trick my father had taught me.
After I laid the cards out, I looked them over and said the first thing that came to mind. “Your father’s in the hospital.”
“What?” my mother asked. She didn’t seem to find what I was doing as funny as she had a moment ago.
“Your father’s sick. He’s in the hospital.”
“How do you know that?” my mother demanded to know. She wasn’t taking what I said seriously; she just couldn’t believe I had the gall to say what I was saying.
“That’s what the cards are telling me,” I said. “Your father is sick, and he’s in the hospital.”
“If my father is in the hospital, I would know about it. One of my sisters would have called and told me.” With that she got up and walked away.
I shrugged my shoulders and put the cards back together in the deck. I wondered why she was so upset. It wasn’t like I knew what I was doing.
The next day my mother received a phone call from one of her sisters telling her that my grandfather was in the hospital, but not to worry. The doctors said that he was doing fine and would be out soon. After my mother got off of the phone, she asked me, again, how I could possibly have known that my grandfather was in the hospital.
“As I said,” I told her, “it’s what the cards were telling me.” The truth is the cards weren’t telling any such thing. I just remember it was a feeling I got when I was looking at them.
My mother was so shaken by what happened that she told our next door neighbor about it. Our neighbor, while stunned because what I “predicted” turned out to be true, apparently found the whole thing funny as well.
“Wow! Are you a psychic, Anthony? Are you a fortune teller?” she asked me, laughing hysterically.
“I’m not a psychic,” I thought. “I don’t have a star in the palm of my hand.”
A week later my mother asked me to tell her fortune again. I got the cards and started laying them out the same way I had done before. This time I didn’t finish . . . I stopped when I got a “feeling” from one of the cards. Even today, I remember the card; it was the nine of clubs.
“You’re going to break your leg,” I said, hesitantly. I remember being afraid to even look up at her.
Her reaction was exactly the same as when I told her that her father was in the hospital. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re going to have an accident, and you’re going to break your leg,” I told her, still not wanting to look at her, so I just continued staring at the cards.
My mother didn’t want to hear any more of my nonsense. Once again, without saying a word, she got up and walked away.
A couple of days later my mother had taken my sister Nadine, who was just a few months old, for a checkup. When she came back home, she lifted Nadine out of the car and noticed toys in a neighbor’s yard that looked like toys we owned. She kept looking at them wondering if Meridith, or I, had left them in that yard. She kept walking, not paying attention to where she was going and not seeing the ice in front of her on the sidewalk. When she stepped on it and lost her footing, her first instinct was, of course, to make sure Nadine didn’t get hurt. She protected Nadine’s head and body with her arms, and when she fell, she broke her leg.
She never asked me for another “reading” after that nor did our next door neighbor. The idea that I might actually be a “psychic” never came up again. After all, we were still a good Guamanian family.
After Iceland, my father was stationed at a naval base in Indiana. It was there that my youngest brother Steve was born.
We lived in a small town, and I went to a small school several miles away. I developed a reputation for being a weirdo interested in psychics, ghosts, and witches. Virtually every day I went to school, I was harassed about it. So much so that one of my eighth grade teachers brought a “test” to class which was designed to determine if someone had ESP. Guess who was the only one assigned to take the test.
According to my teacher, if I answered seven of the ten questions correctly, then it was “possible” that I might actually have extra sensory perception. I don’t remember what the questions were, but I do remember surprising everyone, including myself, by answering the first six questions correctly.
I also knew the answer to the seventh question. I could see the answer
