Tuesday, March 22, 2011

May the Force Be With You

There were two issues that predominated our Cousins Day (1) my mother's fingers and (2) the force field that she found herself sitting in.

Perhaps a bit of explanation is necessary.

We had scheduled Cousins Day for today (Tuesday), but my mother had a doctor's appointment on Monday and, since Kathy hasn't been feeling well and we didn't think she was going to make Cousins Day at all, Peach decided to come with me to take my mother to her doctor's appointment, saving me a second trip.

And that's what we did. My mother has symptoms of "trigger finger" and had been to a private doctor some time ago, on the recommendation of her step-son. Of course she hadn't called Kaiser about it and ended up paying $400 for the appointment, which included an injection of cortisone mixed with a couple of other medications. It eliminated her pain instantly.

The doctor told her then that she shouldn't have to pay out of pocket for when Kaiser has a guy who was "better than I am" who could treat her. "The guy" turned out to be the doctor who operated on my mother's ankle.

Her first injection has lasted a year, but she has been having problems again and so made an appointment to see her doctor. Having been with her at doctor's appointment, I really feel strongly about accompanying her because she really forgets an awful lot of stuff and I just feel better if I can be on top of what her doctor tells her and what regimen she is supposed to follow so I can remind her when she forgets.

So we went to see the doctor and he gave her the injections. Within minute, her fingers turned numb, as he told they would. The numbness was beginning to wear off this morning, as he told her it would, but last night she must have told us 100 times if she told us once that her fingers felt weird and that she didn't like them feeling like that.

The only thing that kept her from telling us this 200 time was the force field.

I don't know if I can adequately describe the force field, but this is how it was explained to us. We started playing 65 when we got home from the doctor's. Now, before we left, we played canasta, which takes a different deck of cards than we use for 65. So when we began to play with the 65 deck. Something happened and every single time she picked a card off of the deck, she would let out a sound of surprise and tell us that there was something that was pushing the card toward her body and that the cards felt like if she let them go they would fly away (but when she tried, they didn't).

Peach and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes, but this complaint about what we came to call her force field went on and on and on. Every single time she picked up a card, she had that sensation.

Finally we had her change seats with Peach. The force field stopped. She didn't feel it sitting in Peach's chair and Peach didn't feel it in my mother's chair. We played one round that way but my mother didn't like sitting in Peach's chair, so they switched back. Instantly the force field was there again. We decided it must be our aunt Betsy, who was very into things like this.

My aunt Betsy was an artist, a very good artist. In fact, she introduced my parents. My father met her when she was one of the street artists at the Worlds Fair in San Francisco in about 1940 She was dating his best friend, and she arranged a double date with my father and my mother...and the rest, as they say, is history.

But Betsy was also into the supernatural and life after death and anything mystical. The story goes that she woke up one morning and wasn't feeling "right." She decided to draw something and got a piece of paper and a pencil and started drawing, only the pencil moved by itself, she says, to the opposite side of the paper and started making teeny triangles. She ended up just barely holding the pencil by the eraser and it seemingly drew a picture of a Chinese man all by itself, the entire picture done in tiny triangles. My mother swears that she saw it happen.

ChineseMan.jpg (38639 bytes)

This is actually an enlargement of the small picture she first drew. If you look at the very bottom of the picture, over on the left side, you see a dark spot. That was a mayonnaise stain on the original paper she used.

She actually produced two pictures like that, the second one a woman, drawn with tiny circles. They say that she once took them to a Chinese store to have the characters at the bottom translated and that it so upset the man who read them that he went to the back of the store and wouldn't talk with her (this may be apocryphal, but that is the story I was told).

So, as you can see, it was a logical assumption that this was Betsy trying to communicate. Or maybe someone else in the family who has crossed over trying to contact my mother.

At one point, Peach changed the deck of cards and shuffled and dealt a different deck and again, there was no force field. So we don't know what it was but at one point we could actually see a card kind of fighting with her hand and every time it happened (and it happened every time she made a move), she would comment on it and wonder why this was happening to her.

A part of me halfway expected to wake up in the morning and to discover that she had died in the night--and that this had been a premonition of things to come. But no, she was awake at the regular time and when we started playing cards, the force field started again.

Eventually Peach and I had to leave, so we've left her alone with the force field and who knows what is going to happen now!

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