The Lost Violin

Being psychic has many advantages, along with the obvious drawbacks, such as knowing which people don’t really like you and foreseeing that you’re going to have a bad experience at a gig but can’t do anything about it because you signed the contract. One advantage of being psychic is it helps you find things. Here is an example so dramatic and stark that it warrants a TV episode.

It was the late spring of 1994 and I was biking with my cousin Kelton in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. It was hot, at least 88º and I was in an irritable mood. I suggested that we stop in a second hand dump of a thrift store, just to get out of the heat for a few minutes. We dragged ourselves in. Kelton looked at the clothes and shoes, I stared apathetically at the books. There was only one book that I had been keeping an eye out for over the past couple years, a children’s story by Clara Ingram Judson called The Lost Violin about a Czech family in Chicago, circa 1900. It had been published in the 1940’s and was out of print. I was about to turn away and tell Kelton, “Let’s get out of here,” when I heard the voice of my Spirit. It told me to look behind the book in front of me “because The Lost Violin might be there.” I pulled out the book, and staring me in the face was that Lost Violin!

What happened next was one of the most brainless manipulations of reality in my entire psychic repertoire. All I wanted was to go home, take a shower, lie down and read my new book. Kelton and I had discussed going to a neighborhood restaurant, The Daily Bar and Grill, but I didn’t want to. I pulled a dimwitted unconscious psychic trick, thinking vaguely, “If I get hurt, maybe I won’t have to go to the Daily.” On the way back I rode up against a hose and fell off my bike, cutting a huge gash in my shin and badly skinning my knee. A snot-nosed, overweight pre-teen boy was casually slurping water out of the hose. I shoved my injured leg in his face and asked, “Do you mind if I use your hose to wash off my blood?” He blanched and backed away.

The worst part was now I had to prove to myself and my cousin that I didn’t wipe out on purpose so I said to Kelton, “OK, let’s go to the Daily. But you walk in front of me so they won’t see all my blood.” (This was in the days of AIDS hysteria.) So we did indeed go to the Daily. I ordered an artichoke and looked into the heart. The heart looked back and said, “You used your gift twice today. Once wisely, and once un.”