Category Archives: Premonitions

Is My Enchiridion Indulgentiarum Account Balanced?

[Purgatory. Credit: Shown Above]

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

~~Patrick Egan Fantastical Essays v. 1 (2024)

In Saranac Lake, New York, on a warm and humid day in 2017, an elderly woman crossed Church Street safely because of something Sister John James said to me in 1957. This was no small feat because the tourist traffic was thick and heavy that day. The potential for disaster was present at every intersection. But I was behind the wheel of my Honda CRV and I had the words of the gentle nun in my ears, for the last sixty years.

She was safe. I was happy. And I scratched off about 10,000 years of my time in Purgatory (give or take a century or two).

You need to be aware of the backstory for all this to make any sense at all.

I was raised a Roman Catholic. Growing up in Owego, New York, and being Catholic, I attended St. Patrick’s School. During those formative years, I learned the basics of the Vatican’s teachings, which included the concept of eternity. Well, that whole idea of something going on forever and ever, without end, was a hard pill for this little guy to swallow. But swallow it I did. And that’s where the problems started.

There are three places I needed to concern myself with. Heaven. Hell. Purgatory. (I won’t bring up Limbo here. Too touchy).

Heaven–Unattainable.

Hell–Too Scary.

Purgatory–Negotiable.

Forever! Never ending! Too much for a ten-year-old’s brain to appreciate. I mean, I did understand what never-ending meant–to a point. I need to mention that the full realization of what death meant was another of those hard-to-swallow pills. Furthermore, I remember sitting in the last pew of St. Patrick’s Church one afternoon thinking about the fact that I had no choice but to walk the inevitable path to…what? Sunny meadows? Gardens? Heaven? But, wait. I could only go to heaven if I died without sin. Early on, I realized that everyone had a stained soul. It’s common knowledge that only a very few people lived on earth without sin. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and Derek Jeter and perhaps Marjorie Taylor Greene were the only ones that came to mind. I could never go to heaven with a stained soul. And there’s the dilemma. Where would I go? The Church had the answer, and it was Pope Urban II, in 1095, who proclaimed, I could go directly to the right hand of God if I took part in a Crusade. That’s called a Plenary Indulgence. In other words, a wet eraser on a dirty chalkboard. Clean slate.

Crusades are hard to come by these days. They still exist, in many forms, but riding off to Jerusalem on a large horse, with a cross painted on my shield, was not an option in 1957. Perhaps the KKK? Or any people bent on destroying another people because of a religion? Maybe. But, in the end, not my thing.

I had to find another means to save my immortal soul, and I found it in the back pages of my Little Missal. I remember leafing through my prayer book and finding short and not so short prayers that would grant me a Partial Indulgence. A short paragraph might wipe clean fifty days. A longer meditation might earn me a year off (for good behavior). Small change, I thought. I’ll never get anywhere this way.

What was I trying to escape from? A cursory survey of Dante (The Divine Comedy) was enough to raise the tiny hairs on my forearm. If this is Purgatory, what the hell was Hell going to be like?

[Purgatory. Source: Google Search.]

The above illustration looks interesting, at first. Naked women? I can deal with that. But upon closer scrutiny–the objects growing out the foreheads of the beasts gave a whole new meaning to the term horny. I got the point. This wasn’t Studio 54. Or Fort Lauderdale in April. Or Vegas on any given weekend. This was unsettling. I needed a way out. Maybe I could make a hefty donation to the restoration bill of St. So and So’s Church in Iowa. Wait! An indulgence for money? Unthinkable. Besides, that was taken care of during the Reformation. Too late again.

What was a poor, more-or-less-innocent kid from Owego to do?

There I was, driving into Saranac Lake on that warm day in 2017. I turned right on Church Street. An elderly woman was waiting to cross. The traffic was heavy. I saw her, she seemed to be in a hurry. She took a step. An SUV the size of Long Island was approaching. I’m not saying she was about to purchase the ranch, but I couldn’t take any chances. So I slowed and waved at her. Go on, Miss, I said to myself. She did, and I continued on to Radio Shack to purchase an indoor/outdoor thermometer (its AA’s were to last about nine years, but that’s another blog).

Here’s my reasoning: A good deed will earn me a Purgatory Point. How many years or centuries would be erased? I have no idea. But it had to be done without me thinking about what was in it for me. That’s hard to do when you’re driving among the tourists. To get the thought from polluting my mind, I began singing, loudly, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow by Fleetwood Mac. It worked.

Or did it?

I have no way of knowing until I take my last breath. Will the Voice say: Good job with old Beatrice, Patrick, you can skip Purgatory? Or will I hear: Nice try?

Only time will tell.

[One final look at Purgatory. Source: Google Search.]

The Last Quarter Moon Gives A Pale Wintry Light/Late Night Thoughts Following Spinal Surgery

{Author’s Note: This blog post contains a photograph of an x-ray of my lower back taken six days after my spinal fusion. If the image of hardware screwing together two of my vertebra is irksome to you, my gentle readers, then feel free to search for another fine read. I have 645 in the bank. Find a good one and enjoy, just…please don’t check out A Brief History of Chains and Chain-making. It’s good, but there are other good ones out there, and far, far too many people have checked that one out. I have put this graphic at the end of the post for obvious reasons. The lead image is a generic photo taken from Google. Be warned. Enjoy.}

[A surgical room. Place: unknown. My room was more densely packed with instruments that went “Ping”. Source: Google search.]

An idea that fixed him to one spot was that life was a death dance, and that he had quickly passed through the spring and summer of his life and was halfway through the fall. He had better do a better job on the fall because everyone on earth knew what winter was like.

–Jim Harrison “Farmer”.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

–Dylan Thomas “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”.

I removed my Bluetooth earphones and shifted my body up against the pillows that were packed hard against the headboard of our bed. No relief. The pain was white-hot. Intense. Bitter. Sharp. I reached for the small plastic amber bottle of painkillers. I shook it. Not a lot left. I put the bottle back and stared out at the patio. The half disk of the moon lit the patio with a soft light. Enough to see the BBQ, the umbrella, the covered table and the sturdy English Ivy, hanging out, wanting to grow, waiting for the spring warmth.

I had been listening to a podcast called A Voice From Darkness. The narrator, a young man on a road trip, described driving through New Mexico and suddenly finding himself in a city that appeared out of nowhere. He told of becoming hopelessly lost in a labyrinth of passages, streets, tunnels, sidewalks and dark lanes. He was filled with panic. Where did the city come from? It wasn’t Santa Fe. No indeed. And it wasn’t Albuquerque, either.

I looked out at the pale light and the patio.

I pondered what I had heard.

What the guy in the podcast (Category: Fantasy/Horror) was describing was uncannily familiar. I had the exact same experience, in many dreams, of being lost and confused in an endless series of false paths and empty halls and deserted passages. Often, it was set in New York City. I began having these dreams after moving to northern New York State in 2011. Sometimes the landscape was post-apocalyptic in nature. Sometimes it was a version of my hometown of Owego, NY. It was all too close to me. Too close to my own experiences. How did this storyline emerge from me and find its way into a podcast?

Recently, I have found myself having an abundance of reemerging thoughts and memories that I have not felt in decades. Tiny memories of tiny events–if any events in life can be thought of as tiny. In some weird Proustian way, I can smell a little bit of food and find myself back in 1954. I can hear music of a sort that takes me back to the sweet smell of a fifteen-year-old girl in high school. She’s in my arms, and I’m dancing with her in the gym after the big game. It’s 1964. A woman on Amsterdam Avenue is wearing retro bell-bottoms. It’s 1977.

Was I being set up for something? Why was a trickle of long-buried experiences flowing through the levee in my mind that separates the past from the present? Is this what happens to all people as they age? As they see less of the light and more of the twilight?

I reflected on my memories.

Wait! Do I want, really want to expose my inner fears and seemingly morbid thoughts and force them into the minds of my loving readers? They have their own problems. I can’t add to anyone else’s anxiety. That’s not what I do these posts for. I’m here to entertain and amuse, not deflate and depress.

I mulled over my thoughts.

The solution is likely in the extent of my pain. Pain can do odd things to one’s psyche. It can energize and it can terrify. It can lay you low, and it can cattle-prod you to attention. Make you laugh while you cry out. Run when you want to stop running, and get up when you’d rather sit. And sleep in quiet repose instead of writhing in a pool of nerve endings.

And it can remind you of your mortality. Slap you upside the head and say: You’re not twenty-one anymore. “You’re not thirty-three or forty-seven. You’re seventy-six, soon to be…well, do the math”.

Walt Whitman wrote something…

I paraphrase.

Grass. The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

One of my avocations is being a volunteer for Find-a-Grave.com. I get a request to photograph the headstone of someone. The request may come from a relative who lives somewhere on the map but west of New Jersey, who will never plan to make the trip to New York State to visit Aunt Polly’s grave. So, I do the deed. And, more often than not, I get a thank-you email. They are grateful. I am happy. Their family tree fills out, and I had a chance to walk through the uncut hair.

The uncut hair. As I searched for the requested headstone, I often thought of grass as a shroud. But not hair. I get the analogy now. The earth is so very old that perhaps there are only a few places where we do not tread on a forgotten grave.

I mused over these thoughts.

The patio is still bathed in that pale light. I’m tired, but I have a plan. I will listen to one more song by Nanci Griffith: Late Night Grande Hotel.

“I’m just learning to fly away again.”

I will take my headset off and play one game of solitaire on my iPad.

Then I will go on Reddit and read an article I saw earlier:

A Cool Guide To Escaping Killer Bees

Only then will I pull the covers to my chin. Sip ice water and fluff my squishy pillow. Close my eyes and look out at the pale light on the patio.

And as I fall into sleep, fall hopefully into a sweet sleep… I find myself thinking of my hometown. Owego.

It’s that old blue line that you can never go back home…

I don’t know why I always come here in my dreams…

I only come here to remember my dreams.

–Sarah Jarosz

[R-Before. See the offset? L-After. See the Titanium screws? Photo is mine.]

My Premonitions?

“If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate.”

~~Sandy Dahl, wife of United Flight 93 pilot, Jason Dahl

[Split images. Photo: New York Times.]

The memory of that Tuesday morning is still very clear in my mind. That crisp autumn-like day when the sky was deep blue. It was September 11, 2001. I was crossing Central Park in a Yellow taxi on my way to school. As I was about to emerge from the Park onto 5th Avenue, I had something of a premonition of sorts. But I also had a similar feeling the evening before.

I don’t really believe that one can see the future, but whatever it was that happened to me is certainly very curious.

On the evening of Sept. 10th, I was sitting in a taxi heading down 9th Avenue to an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen (now called Clinton). I had been taking the Fiction Writing course with the Gotham Writers Workshop. The classes had ended but a handful of us didn’t want it to be over so we agreed to meet at our various apartments. As the cab sped downtown, I looked to the west. Dark clouds from an approaching cold front were heading toward Manhattan. As I stared at the grey cumulus masses, as each street went by, I remember thinking of an invading army…from the west. It rained hard and furious while we discussed and critiqued each others work. The front passed over, and set the tone for a clear and sunny Tuesday.

As I approached 5th Avenue on Tuesday morning, I had a silly thought. I was looking up at the deep blue sky. I imagined I was inside the movie The Wizard of Oz. I imagined the Wicked Witch, on her broom, sky-writing SURRENDER DOROTHY across the heavens, across the blue sky. I imagined these things, but I could never imagine what was going to happen about an hour later.

[On my way back to the Upper West Side in the afternoon I looked down an avenue. This photo is not exactly what I saw, but it’s very close. Source: Library of Congress.]

I spoke with my wife who was at work at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side. I told her to go home and wait for me. I couldn’t leave until all the students had been picked up and after attending a quick faculty meeting.

My usual ride home was with the school nurse. Normally I was the only passenger she had, but on this day, there were six of us. The NYPD had closed all the transverse roads in Central Park, so we were rerouted to 110th St. I got out of her car on Central Park West. A single bell was tolling from St. John the Divine. The streets were quiet. The skies were empty except for a sole F-16 flying around Manhattan Island.

I got home and found Mariam riveted to the TV.

“Look at this,” she said.

I had not seen any images of the Twin Towers falling until 6 PM. What I saw put me into a shock that lasted for months.

I called the school in Binghamton, NY where my son, Brian was in class. I asked if someone from the office could find his classroom and tell him that his dad was okay. I spoke to my daughter, Erin who was living in Arizona.

Your dad is safe. He’s okay, I told them. Sadly, that wasn’t the message thousands of children were to hear in the days that followed.

What I remember the most about walking home in the weeks that followed were the countless notes, posters, letters and photos pasted to utility poles and windows.

PLEASE HELP ME FIND MY DADDY!

MY HUSBAND IS MISSING. PLEASE LOOK FOR HIM

I HAVEN’T SEEN MY WIFE IN DAYS. PLEASE HELP ME!

I LOVE YOU, DADDY!

I LOVE YOU, SWEETHEART.

I have these images on a photo chip in a box, in a corner, in the dark. I’ll find them someday.

But I don’t need to review my camera’s history to verify what my eyes saw in the days and weeks after that bright blue Tuesday. That Tuesday in September of 2001.

So, were those visions–those ominous feelings I had the night of Sept. 10 and in the minutes before the planes on that Tuesday morning–really premonitions? Was there something in the air of Manhattan that I was breathing, a collective crying out, an over-soul of loss and pain?

I’ll never really know, will I?