This Changes Everything Read online

CHAPTER INTERLUDE IV

  Excerpts from the Chief Communicator’s Occasional Log, Ackerman Family's Adventures in Psychokinesis

  A reminiscence, Summer, 1977, Bayonne, Missouri, USA

  There is a wristwatch graveyard on the high windowsill above the kitchen sink in the house I grow up in because my mom, my middle sister, Cassie, and I murder watches by wearing them. Somehow we can’t bear to trash them, so there they sit, waiting for…. Resurrection? Redemption? Godot?

  My two sisters, Violet (12), Cassie (17), our mom, Rose (46), our sister-in-law, Raisa (24) and I (23) are sitting at the kitchen table during one of my rare visits “home” from New England, where I live from 1974 - 98. Only Raisa and Thomas (24) have a child, so far, and he is asleep. For another rarity, no one has recently died or is getting married during this visit, so it is not frenetic.

  The house I spend twelve years growing up in (ages 6 – 18) is brand-new when we move in (1960), the “model” house for the others like it in the neighborhood: split-level, almost “ranch,” “open concept,” meaning, none of the main rooms has doors, just doorways or open spaces "between" the kitchen, dining and living rooms and front foyer.

  These spaces open onto both the up and down staircases, so there are views and audio contact with almost all rooms at all times if one stands by the two staircases (which are side-by-side). In that position, you can hear and see three active televisions (downstairs den, kitchen counter, living room), and hear one more from upstairs in my mom’s bedroom, each on a different channel.

  All TVs on, all the time, seems to be the usual situation when a lot of us are at the house. Between the cacophony of multiple TV channels playing at moderate to high volume and all of us, it is always noisy.

  This hot, humid-turned-to-rainy summer afternoon, Raisa is kibbitzing (look it up; great Yiddish word!) while the rest of us are playing cards (cribbage) and joking, teasing, laughing, talking, trying to be heard over the competing sounds, when Uri Gellar comes on, a guest on the mid-afternoon, local talk show, hosted by Charlotte Peters (the first woman on television in St. Louis and a twenty-three year veteran of a daily one-hour show on KSD-TV). I know who Uri Gellar is, but no one else does, so I explain that he is a renowned self-proclaimed psychic with powers of telekinesis (notably, spoon-bending), psychometry and other abilities.

  “He has had his aura photographed via ‘Kirlian’ photographic methods and his aura goes into the next room, seemingly,” I explain to my skeptical family.

  Today, Uri is showing Charlotte’s studio audience how he bends spoons without touching them, one of his signature “tricks.” My family is not impressed.

  Then, Uri speaks in his sonorous tones and Israeli accent to everyone watching (there and “at home”): “Does anyone have a broken watch?” We look at each other and at the watch graveyard and start giggling. “Go get it,” Uri urges, commandingly.

  My sisters and I immediately get up and race to the windowsill to retrieve the dead watches. There are enough (5) for each of us to have one. We sit back down and wait for Uri’s instructions, laughing, with our watches in front of us on the table.

  Uri tells us to “Concentrate!” on the dead watches. We are told: “See the second hand moving. FOCUS. Move it with your mind!” We are completely silent as we each concentrate on our watches.

  A clap of thunder outside startles us all, but even more surprising, I leap up: “It’s moving! It’s moving!” My watch has started working, again. One by one, my sisters, Raisa and my mom all look at me, then look at their own watches, and they each say, “Mine, too!” sounding surprised.

  People in the studio audience are also popping up, shouting at Uri: “It’s moving! It’s working!”

  We are all laughing, breathless, eyes on the TV and on the watches’ faces, amazed that the second hands keep moving.

  The quickly moving storm picks up outside, with rain pounding on the windows as Uri goes on to explain about the “power of our minds” and a bunch of other stuff, but we’re not really listening. We’re kind of stunned, sitting there, observing the watches, all still working. We also habitually check the color of the sky. Any color but green is fine; green means tornadoes.

  The show continues for about twenty more minutes, accompanied by ever-more distant thunder claps. Uri keeps talking and does a few more demonstrations, but none is as dramatic as this one, so we go back to our games. The music swells as the show and the storm outside end.

  The sudden quiet pulls my attention from my cards. I absentmindedly glance down at “my” watch, which suddenly stops.

  “Hey!” I exclaim, “mine stopped!” One by one, each of my sisters, Raisa and my mom notice that theirs have also stopped. I look up to catch the closing credits and discover, to my shock, that this is not a “live” show, happening right now in downtown St. Louis' TV studio for this talk show, as I believe it usually is: the show is taped at an earlier date…several days before!

  “Holy shit!” I yell. “This isn't even a live show! He is not even there and it still worked! Let’s try to get them working, again,” I suggest.

  We each focus on our own watches, but none of us has any success. They are all back to being dead. We try for a few more minutes, then I get up and gather them up to bring them back to the graveyard, sighing. I toot “Taps” as if I am playing a bugle at a military funeral. My sisters join in.

  “That is so weird!” I say, as I sit back down. We all nod. No one else says anything, maybe because this is odd, but not totally unusual.

  In my mother’s family, many of us, including her mom, her sister’s daughter, and two of us (Cassie and I) along with my mom, all kill watches regularly. Not on purpose; we just can’t keep them working when we wear them. My mom says she can get hers to go backwards, but I never see that.

  We have some luck with a bit of distance: my mom can usually keep a watch going if it’s on a chain around her neck and on top of her clothes; I can sometimes keep a new one for a while if I wear it on a belt loop or clip it to my backpack or purse strap.

  Over the years, once digital watches are invented, I try them: no luck there, either. But, instead of simply dying, many run away or commit suicide, escaping me by falling off my pants' belt loop, backpack or purse strap, getting lost or stolen.

  When I buy a travel alarm clock and put it in my backpack or purse, it works and stays with me longer than a watch. But, never for very long do any portable timepieces keep working or stay with me.

  I have problems with other devices as well, and so does my son, Zephyr.

  I tell Zephyr about putting this anecdote into the book, and this is what he writes back to me about all this electric and electronic interference that I usually encounter. Email dated today, February 27, 2012:

  Your ongoing problem with electronic devices could be caused by ongoing telemetric scrutiny by the MWC’s long-range planning committee members. The MWC is watching only females in your line (doesn't happen to Uncle Thomas [My brother] right?) because the MWC’s Omniblix InterPotentiator can't lock effectively onto the timelines of Chief Communicators until later in the Communicators' actual lifetimes.

  Also, your latent, innate ability to pierce the veil of timulverstantiation (variations within the multiverse) may be a factor in timepieces’ malfunctioning for or around you.

  Interpotentiation (the act of seeing multiple possible timelines and focusing on one which is desired), timulting, is inexact at best. You are fumbling around haphazardly and unconsciously before you are given the tools to fully grok the process, which means you are blasting your local physical area with chronons (particles which are manipulated and whose behaviors are analyzed) during interpotentiation.

  My son is ‘way smart. Right?