Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter One: The Impossible
Growing up in Iowa in the 50s was quite an enriching experience. The summer smelled like sweet corn and everywhere, from some not-too-distant field, while John Deere tractors hummed along every country road in every direction. The winters provided record-breaking snow banks, and the kids could spend hours making snowball forts and hiding from their mothers. We were trudging around in layers of woolen snow suits with frozen nostrils, fingers, and toes, but we had no real cares. There were outdoor ice-skating rinks with campfires to warm our hands while having cocoa, and it was as good as good can be, and most of it was free. It was a June Ward, Leave it to Beaver kind of life for me, and to this day, I appreciate it more than I can say.
When I graduated high school, I had already fallen in love. Denny and I planned to get married, and before we did, we were going to save a little money so I could buy my own wedding cake and have a small party and purchase the material for my mom to sew a little dress for me. It was white with a red bolero, and it was so fashionably 60s short I couldn't raise my arms up to even dance. My dad worked at the post office and Mom worked at Sears, and they weren't rolling in money, so I wanted to pay my way. Luckily, Danny and I were delightfully pretty simple, as we resided in our awareness that money was, at the time, painfully scant.
I had graduated high school with exceptional clerical skills, all of which led me to my first job as a legal secretary in a law firm with three attorneys, and I was the only girl. I got the job through an employment agency called Snelling and Snelling. It had cost me 190 dollars as a finder's fee to get the job; that was just exorbitant at the time, but to be 17 and land a legal job was quite a lucky thing in those days. Secretaries took shorthand dictation, and laughingly, I had never even taken dictation from a live man before, or outside of school.
I was excited, but I was also mortified. I took the bus to downtown Des Moines to my new job. Most of the time, I caught the bus from the west side of town, near Merrell Hay Mall, where I grew up and continued to live with my parents briefly when I got out of school. I only minded the bus trip when it was 10 below zero; the bus heaters were pathetic. Other than that, I enjoyed the droning of the bus engine, pulling the buzzer cord, and being able to watch things go by us with time to ponder my up-and-coming day. There was one spot that was so steep for the bus to drive that I used to close my eyes and hope for the best. That spot was right next to the Veterans Hospital where my mother had her gallbladder taken out for years, and she kept some gallstones in a jar after that. I was young when she had her surgery; I always made that association every time I went down that too-steep-for-a-bus hill and passed some ridiculously painted house in bright purple.
Life was just getting interesting. There were many times that Denny got off work in time to come and pick me up at the end of the day, so I didn't have to bus home. I waited patiently for that time when he would be waiting for me out in front of the office after I'd been typing a hundred words a minute all day. But life was good; I was young and in love. Yet, from time to extraordinary time, I was affirming that what I had always suspected: I was not quite normal.
Denny wore glasses most of the time. When I first met Denny, he had on his aviator glasses, and I thought he was quite dashing. Not to mention he was a wrestler and was built for strength and flexibility. He wore cut-off jean shorts and often no shirt, and my dad cringed and called him "Nature Boy" when he came to pick me up. We often fled the city on his Honda 250 and just roamed the mid-state and just enjoyed being together. He didn't, however, talk much, and I was left to make sure we kept the lines of communication open as much as possible. But talking wasn't really our strong point together, and we let other things dominate and enhance our relationship. After all, we were teenagers in the prime of our lives; we were discovering all adult things together, and I was working at being as normal as I could be. What if he found out that I wasn't? I didn't want to lose him.
We were lucky to have his mother's Pontiac Skylark to get around instead of the Honda bike. For downtown travel, we had to use her car since we had totaled his Ford Fairlane in an intersection when we were seniors in high school. It was not our fault, as an elderly man had turned in front of us who had been losing his vision due to diabetes, and we hit him broadside. I was slightly injured and was unable to compete in the Miss Teen Iowa competition that I was nominated to sing and play guitar in, but I got a dozen red roses instead. My school was very disappointed, and we would just have to get over it, and indeed, life moved on.
On this particular day, Denny picked me up at the law offices. He was agitated and physically quite disturbed. He had a summer job before going to the University of Iowa, and he was mowing grass for the city of Des Moines. He had been working that day when something went awry. I finally got him to tell me what was wrong. He said that he was mowing off Beaver Avenue and didn't have his glasses on but had his contacts in that day. A piece of glass or something had been thrown out of the mower and had hit him right near his eye. He stopped and took out his contact lens to tend to his eye, and the wind took the contact and blew it away. Contacts were very expensive in those days, and it took him a long time to earn the money to replace something like that.
As we drove back to our side of town from downtown, I asked him if he could take me to the mowing site and we could look for it. I wanted to help in any way that I could. I told him we could find it; in fact, I knew we could. He looked at me like I was just out of the looney bin. I begged him to go there, and he said he wasn't even sure which city block he was mowing on when it happened. I begged him nonetheless to go there, and considering how intensely we were trying to save our money, he gave up and decided to drive over to where he thought he was mowing. He wasn't sure, but we parked, and he got out and walked around looking fairly clueless. And I got out and stood for a moment until I knew which direction to go. I was happy that it was sunny because, on that day, I felt this knowing that I always felt since I was young, and walked over and opened the grass and found the contact, which then caught a tiny piece of the sun. "Ah, there you are," I smiled. It was in perfect condition. He took the contact, put it in his case, and we got in the car and drove home.
He didn't speak to me for a while, and apparently, he was stunned. He wasn't sure what had just happened. I wasn't either, but I was learning that I had the capability to feel vibrations and things like that. I wanted to find and to just rest at it when I found it. I wasn't totally perfect at it yet, but I was getting better. I don't believe he told anyone about it, and we never talked to each other about it either, ever again. I wasn't sure whether to feel elated, excited, and explorative about the things I was discovering I could do or to be secretive and feel ashamed. It would be many years before I would stop being afraid of this mysterious skill and start sharing who I was with others.
Today, I am so happy that I can continue to hear, find, share, and laugh about incredible powers I have, and that we all have, once we are aware and just cultivate them. That is what I'm here to tell you: We are all amazing beings, and if we tune into the higher radio station of our inner selves, we can adjust the dial and clear the static and follow the incoming transmission. We can hone in on almost anything we want. Is it a God station? Are there angels talking to us or guides? I would say so. And since that time, I have found other things and heard other very, very important messages; some that actually saved my life. Yes, some that saved my life, as we will see in the upcoming chapter. Let's move forward now and read the deputy.