ESP IN THE ‘60S
My Psychic Childhood and Uncanny Eavesdropping Superpowers
How a curious and wacko kid became an oddly-perceptive adult
I was a snoopy little fat kid who listened in on my parents through the heater vents. We all did — my brother, sister and me.
We lived in an old farmhouse with a large grate at the top of the stairs. Lying on the floor with our heads on the vent gave us a direct pipeline to our parents’ bedroom downstairs. Their real conversations echoed through the vent.
Authentic conversation overheard through heater vent
“My bladder’s about to burst!”
“Well, burst it on your side of the bed!”
This access to parental discourse was solid gold!
Okay, conversations were disturbing on occasion, but yielded real adult information. Not the watered-down pablum grownups fed us.
It was the ’60s and and sex, drugs, and rock n roll were coming alive! Not so much on the farm though.
Rural Oregon lacked excitement
So we just made shit up best we could and searched for dirt under every rock.
I was that kid who wanted to know everything.
I made everything my business! The adults, including my parents and grandparents a stone’s throw down the road, hid what they could from me.
To no avail!
It was the decade of a-man-on-the-moon, Kennedy’s assassination from the grassy knoll, and UFOs. I wasn’t going to let anything past me.
Julia Child on TV? Wouldn’t miss it!
Candy Hits by ZaSu Pitts? One of Grandma’s recipe books, but the cover was bright pink and green, and I scanned the recipes. Fudge, penoche, mints.
I got to the bottom of everything
When my aunt died in a car crash, I heard the sad story through the heater vent as Mom and Dad talked in their bedroom.
My aunt had gone through the windshield.
Dad walked around in circles downstairs.
I went down and wrapped my arms around him. I told him I was so sorry he lost his sister. I wasn’t yet thirteen.
How did I know to wrap Dad in love? Years later, he remembered I pulled him in and held him tight. He couldn’t guess how I even knew.
I felt it was my role to know and care. Knowledge is one thing. What are you going to do with it?
Now that’s the important part.
I discovered why my deceased aunt had divorced my uncle
I heard Grandma talking with Mom. Gram said he was a pervert. He was a suspected Peeping Tom in his neighborhood.
That came as no surprise. I’d caught him watching my sister with strange eyes. My sister was beautiful and everyone stared at her. Understandable.
It was how he stared, assessing.
Measuring.
I have a photo of myself at fourteen, head back and laughing. I’m a young, pretty girl with a beautiful body. I loved my orange T-shirt from India with little mirrors all over the front of it.
Lights reflected from my shirt, and I wiggled around, shining light on the table and so excited with it.
Sitting opposite me at the picnic table, my uncle isn’t laughing and joining in the fun.
In the photo, he’s leering at me. Downing a shot of whiskey, and staring at my body as I wiggle and reflect mirrored light.
I talked with Mom and Grandma
Not just about my perverse uncle. About everything that occurred to me.
Consequently, they were sure I had psychic abilities. Back then, information floated around like fairy dust. Breezing up with warmth through the heater vent!
A seeker of information, I found the dirty books, the pot pipe, the old love letters Mom kept tied with a pink ribbon.
And on top of the kitchen cabinets?
Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
My best friend Kat and I read passages aloud to each other and howled with laughter. Did people do this stuff?
No way! We screamed!
Sleeping with animals? With sheep? What the heck! We have sheep! No!
69? Putting your face in someone else’s stinky crotch? No way! Oh, God, no!
I remember putting the book back above the cabinet and feeling so guilty. I knew too much now.
A curious kid, I was a stalwart consumer of all available medias
Radio, TV, magazines, CB radio, my adults — I read, listened, watched, and viewed.
In the Reader’s Digest, I read about Charles Manson, the creepy cult leader, who dropped acid with his followers. They murdered beautiful Sharon Tate and her unborn child. I didn’t bother pondering them much. Evil was evil.
On Laugh-In, Goldie Hawn danced around in a bikini. Why was she laughing? I couldn’t figure it out. “Sock it to me?” What did it all mean? Some things I couldn’t figure out. I would understand later, I told myself.
My aunt taught me about my sign, Virgo. Critical, analytical, loyal.
“You’re such a virgin!” my brother said.
“Yeah, well, you’re a scales!” I said back.
Back in the ’60s, we all knew our signs. It was the Age of Aquarius, baby!
“Do you believe in ESP?” was a popular question
Based on what we saw in the media, it existed. Mom thought so.
Grandma didn’t say much about it. If Grandma even faintly believed in ESP, so did I.
By hook, crook, or heater vent, I sure as hell did. At the very least, I was a tenacious eavesdropper and should have been a detective!
Mom got ESP Zener cards to test me
Holding one card, she stared at me and asked, “What do you see? A star, waves, a circle, square, cross? Focus on me. Free your thoughts!”
I tried, I really did. The Zener cards weren’t my strong suit!
Neither were the horror movies Mom dragged me to, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby.
My mom and sister loved scary movies.
Horror and evil all tangled up with Catholicism? No, thanks.
Not even The Exorcist? Nope! That stuff just scared me to death. Not my flavor of ESP or weirdness.
I disappointed Mom by failing the Zener card test
But truth was, I made up for it in different ways. I was an odd child.
One morning I got up and stood on a footstool in the living room, trying to fly. I focused and willed myself off the stool into the air. I kicked my fat little legs and jumped several times.
The entire night, I’d flown many places in my dreams. My parents looked at each other and raised their eyebrows.
“Come and eat some breakfast,” Mom said.
When I was nineteen, Cathy died in a car accident. We were friends — working together, going to a concert, at each other’s houses.
She “visited” me in a dream and we flew around Portland together, perched on a ledge, and talked.
“It’s not bad,” she said “being dead.”
I woke up comforted. Was it “astral projection”? Who knows?
As a young person, I learned to notice everything. I could read emotion and connect impressions like I was reading printed words from a page. I was open to everything.
Prescience is knowing something before it happens
Here is an example of prescience in my life.
This isn’t heater-vent snooping. It’s the real deal. Here’s the memory.
I am ten years old. I open the cabinet door. I’m holding a heavy white book in my hand, reading. The bronzed green prayer hands hang on the wall nearby. My parents’ bedroom is down the hall. It’s a sunny day. I remember with clarity.
A sketch shows a woman’s reproductive organs. A tiny egg is stuck in the tube. It says this in fine print: the fetus can lodge in the fallopian tube, or even the abdominal wall. It is the most frequent cause of death in first-trimester pregnancies.
The medical book lures me back every few months. The book falls open to that page I look at it so much.
Why? Why not the page about babies? why not the images of reproductive organs? Why am I drawn to this horrible kind of miscarriage?
It was grotesque, like the two-headed calf a teacher kept in formaldehyde. Life and death tangled up close in nasty fluid.
Here’s why that page spoke to me
In 1997, an ectopic pregnancy nearly killed me in Cambodia. In the space of a few hours, I made decisions and took actions that saved my life. Split-second decisions kept me alive and well.
- I rely on all the language skills I had to push for an ultrasound. I’m bleeding internally. It’s as far up as my liver. I’m in trouble.
- Kon Krou S’bone. Baby outside tube. I know to say this.
- I refuse transfusions, which were untested for HIV and Hep C at that time in Cambodia. Saline is okay, I say. No blood transfusions for me.
- I wait for my husband. He appears quickly. He contacts my British doctor.
- I refuse an immediate surgery when they say I am dying. I wait patiently for my doctor to assemble a surgical team with an excellent surgeon. They arrive within the half hour.
When all doctors came together, I had emergency surgery in a dusty little operating clinic, an old cabinet with a mirror reflecting the surgeon’s work. I watched.
Death’s fingers were on me, but I escaped
The pain was horrible. Developing country horrible. No pain reliever horrible. Slapping-a-wall-and-begging-to-die horrible.
But I’m alive.
It has given me pause many times to remember ten-year-old me staring at a page of information that would help me two decades later.
When the doctor diagnosed the problem, ten-year-old me already knew all about it. As a girl, I studied intently for my adult self.
I remembered everything.
The door opened again when my brother died
I was 19. It was June 26, 1979.
I’d spent the evening fighting with an asshole boyfriend. I’d nearly jumped out of my car to join my 18-year-old brother in his red Chevy Malibu Supersport.
Now, in the wee hours of the night — about 2 a.m. — I sat up in bed. I’d woken with a start, and called out. I was breathing hard. I sat still and listened.
Waited. Listened.
The crunch of gravel came down our long driveway. Tires on the gravel.
A quiet knock on the door. My parents’ sleepy voices — You get up. No, you. Who could it be? Murmuring voices.
A police officer told my parents my brother had died, just four miles away, in a single-car accident.
He end-over-ended his big American steel car, folding it like an accordion gasping in on itself. A discordant sound.
I heard my mother dissolve. I went downstairs and stared at the cop, making him tell me everything again.
But I already knew. A loud crash. His friend honking the horn, over and over. Screaming for help.
It is possible the crash woke me up. It was so nearby. I don’t know.
I’ve seen the accident play out in my mind a thousand times, but have learned to close it down fast.
Except when I’m writing and the flow takes me down the river, over the falls. Like now.
There is so much more. I’m sparing myself, pulling my canoe back into the eddy. Slow, girl. Breathe. Lift the paddles.
So was I a psychic kid?
I was at least very perceptive, and attentive to everything in my surroundings and imagination. I paid deep attention.
I haven’t lost my deep curiosity, and it serves me well as a writer. I stop and focus when a thought randomly crosses my mind. Often it’s a fleeting thought, not even in language.
An idea is like a giant mosquito hawk bouncing in the door at night — Wait, what’s that? Come back here. Let’s have a look at you.
I’ll pull the impression back to consider it with my mind’s eye. I’ve learned over the years it might be important. I’m attentive, more than most, perhaps.
I’m not above resorting to a heater vent, either! There’s always that.
