Remembrance

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Everyone has many lives and it is difficult to find the specific lives that are causing trouble.”

“Oh,” I said. “So last night you flipped back through my lives, rather like going through a deck of cards, but you couldn’t find the one or ones that have the Great Passion in them.”

“Right,” she said tiredly.

Obviously this whole concept of past lives was not as fascinating to her as it was to me. “Mind sharing a few cards with me? I bet I would recognize Great Passion if I saw it.” I was doing my best not to jump up and say, “Tell me, tell me, tell me and tell me now!”

She peeped at me through the fingers she was rubbing her eyes with, and I felt that she knew very well that I was excited—and she was enjoying my anticipation as much as an actor loves the moments before the curtain goes up. Vain, I thought, using my unpsychic powers of observation. She’s quite proud of her talent and loves making people drag things out of her.

“Which life do you want to know about?” she asked.

I sent her my thoughts on that remark and managed to make her smile.

“You have written before, in France.”

“Who? What was her name?” Visions of a biography (autobiography?) danced through my head. Also, the horrors of trying to learn to read French.

Nora waved her hand in dismissal. “I don’t know. She doesn’t matter. Your karma lies with the man.”

Karma—I thought but didn’t ask Nora to explain this word, but later I looked it up. Karma is: You get what you deserve. The theory is that if you hurt people in one life you’ll be hurt in the next one. I think this is also a law of physics—for every action there is an equal reaction. Also in the Bible: Whatsoever ye sow, so shall ye reap. In fact, I think the law of karma just might be everywhere in lots of different forms.

Nora was going on and telling me more about my lives: one in Vienna (very unhappy), several in England, a bad one in Italy.

She said, “You have a friend now…”

I was still smarting over her remarks yesterday about my life of no love so I rattled off about twenty names of people I considered my friends.

Nora gave me a look of disgust, letting me know that I couldn’t bamboozle her. “You have only two real friends.”

“Yes,” I answered, trying not to blush in embarrassment at being caught being a snob. Daria, young, gorgeous legs that started at her earlobes, men drooling over her. And Milly, an overweight romance writer I’d met years ago, not pretty, not sexy, unmarried, only thirty-five but looking fifty, with a heart as big as the earth.

“Yes,” I said, “I have two friends: Daria and Milly.”

“You have known them many times. They are your true friends and they wish you only happiness.”

“I take it this isn’t usually the case.”

A look of profound disgust crossed Nora’s face, letting me know of the awful things she usually saw in people’s heads. I can hardly stand to look inside my own head, much less anyone else’s. What filth must lurk inside a child molester’s mind?

“What were these women to me in the past?” I asked.

“The young one designed something for you—I don’t know what—and the older one was…I believe she was your mother yet not your mother.”

Nice, concise, pinpoint information telling me absolutely nothing, I thought. I tried to encourage her. “Wasn’t I ever a gunslinger’s girl? A real femme fatale or some sultry singer in a bar? Something…I don’t know, something very different from what I am now.”

“No,” Nora said, then proceeded to tell me about the “rules” of past lives.

Pardon me, I hadn’t reconciled myself to the idea of there being past lives, much less to the idea of “rules.”

Nora explained to me about character. Character—or as we often call it, personality—doesn’t change. What you are now is what you’ve always been. At least in terms of character.

If in this life you’re a stay-at-home, then you were a stay-at-home in the past. Mousy little women were not flamboyant seductresses in a past life, no matter what charlatans may try to make you believe. She also said that talents you have in this life may have been developed in another life (in that case I have never played the piano). Countries you want to visit may be places where you had a happy life. Your style of dress, the furniture you like, pretty much your taste in everything is influenced by your past lives.

She went on to tell me that what a person likes to read and, in my case, write, are often based on past lives.

I interrupted at this. “Is this why I write books set in the Middle Ages with such ease? And why I hate pirate books and books about Vikings? And why I love just about everything Edwardian?”