In the private lore of my family, there is a mysterious being who is invoked now and again in conversation: the lumberjack psychic. I am the only one who knows for sure that he is a real person, because I met him. His words to me have rippled through the years, challenging me to trust what I can’t yet clearly see.
For the first two years of medical school, I lived in Kansas City, Kansas, with four other students in a gently dilapidating, spacious home across the street from the medical center campus. It had been previously owned by an older couple, the husband deceased and the wife shuffled off to a nursing home.
I only knew the woman through her magnificent backyard garden, filled with heirloom peony bushes yielding exuberant blooms in spring that filled the whole house with heady fragrance (and ants). I cared for those peonies tenderly, and to this day I am still seeking plants with the same aromatic wallop.
The lower floor had grass-green carpeting and a galley kitchen that I most remember for being the place I once cut off the tip of my left middle finger. (Fortunately, the emergency room was steps away, and I walked there, holding the detached tip, until the doctor sewed it back on.)
Of the roommates, I was closest to Angie, a studious girl from rural Kansas, the most organized person I had ever met. She seemed to marvel at my relatively carefree disdain for attending classes or going to bed at reasonable hours. One night, from her room, she called to me as I was going out: “You’re going to be the first one to find someone. I’ll still be sitting here studying.”
The truth is that I had anxious and mistrustful feelings about relationships. I had just survived my childhood, with its twin sentinels of violence and silence. I watched my parents’ marriage dissolve in an acid bath of acrimony and avoidance. I had made my external self a smooth mirror reflecting pleasant, bland surfaces, as if to say, “Nothing to see here.”
My mind, however, was a dark thicket. I cut a path as best I could, hoping it would take me, scraped and scoured but intact, to a clearing. Foresight and clarity were unfathomable luxuries. I had picked up a phrase, somewhere, that described how I saw the world: “through a glass, darkly.” At the time, I had no idea of its provenance.
When Angie moved to Denver to start her medical residency, I was completing my last year of medical school in Kansas City. I had taken an extra year to train in pathology, which I thought would be my field of practice (no foresight there, either — I am now an oncologist and geriatrician).
When I talked to Angie, she still lamented the void where she thought a husband should be, plans for family and career unfolding like the peony blooms following their deep, instinctual knowing. We hatched a plan: I would visit, we would go out to bars, I would be her wing-woman. I would activate all the charm and patter of a hostess, a tour guide, a carnival barker. I would line up the most sober men and bring them into the calm, still circle she wrapped around herself wherever she went.
We set out from her apartment on foot toward the nightlife streets of Denver. We passed through a residential neighborhood where the denizens had conjured up a block party, dragging tables and chairs and coolers and grills into the night air.
In front of one house, there was a large round oak table set upon the grass, along with the round-topped, slat-backed chairs that indelibly suggest Midwest dining rooms and casseroles, circa 1985. Several people sat at the table, including one impassive man with a large beard and a buttoned flannel shirt. I couldn’t help it; I immediately pictured him striding through the woods, an ax on his shoulder.
“Hey!” he called out to us. “Do you want a psychic reading?”
This was among the last things I expected to be asked by a bearded man seated at his outdoor dining table. He had his hands palms-down on the table, a bottle of beer beside them. He appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s.
Startled but intrigued, we sat down. He pointed at Angie and said, “We’ll start with you. What do you want to know about — romance?”
We nodded.
“You’re going to meet someone soon,” he said. “I see it. It might even be tonight.” He looked at us expectantly.
Angie and I exchanged glances. “Well, that’s not going to happen,” she said.
His face darkened as he turned to me. “You are not going to meet anyone you trust until you’re 33.” He stopped there and sat back in his chair.
I felt the hot bloom of anxiety in my chest (seven more years?), but I was careful not to show my disappointment. We let the silence hang for a few beats before we awkwardly thanked him, stood up and went on our way, giggling as soon as we were out of earshot.
The night was long. I dutifully wended through crowded bars, cajoling any man who made reasonable but not unblinking eye contact to follow me to where Angie was stationed, regal and waiting. One by one, she dismissed them, and they fell aside and dissolved back into the crowd. She was clearly dismayed at the choices, and stoicism set into her face. We decided to go back to her apartment, in a cab this time.
As we awaited our ride, I slumped into a chair in the entryway of the last bar. Angie stood several feet away, leaning against a wall, arms crossed. Sitting between us was a man staring straight ahead, also waiting. I sighed and struck up a conversation with him. I got his name and a few demographic details and eyed him for any sign of latent psychopathy.
My perfunctory evaluation satisfied, I pointed across him to Angie and said, “You should meet my friend. Please get her number.”
I didn’t overhear what he said when he approached her; I stayed slumped in my chair, my feet aching. The conversation was brief and seemed to elicit little reaction from Angie. As we walked out, however, she told me she had given him her number. It seemed, perhaps, a way to forestall chalking the night up to failed hopes.
He called her. They went on a date, then another. I spoke to Angie on the phone a few times in the following months and she seemed uncertain, anxious about her feelings and his.
“Don’t be hasty,” I said. “Things aren’t always clear at first. Let them become clear. Then you can decide. Only you can know these things.” (Only her and the lumberjack psychic, I thought but did not say.)
They got married, of course; this is not a story to subvert expectations. There is no twist. The tiny slice of foresight the lumberjack psychic offered us that night unfolded exactly how he said it would.
I went off to residency in Chicago the following year, and the next seven years after that would involve several meaningful relationships, each coming achingly close to touching the ineffable and enduring, but a feeling of trust was always missing. This seemed to me to be a byproduct of the deep thicket in which I was still mired rather than a deficit in any of my partners. I could not see. I could not be seen. The glass was still dark.
When I was 33, the age the lumberjack psychic said I would find someone I trust, I met Kevin, my future spouse. He had been to divinity school and was steeped in the mystics, the transcendent, the struggle to see through the deep thicket and the dark glass and into the heart of things.
Unlike him, I had never grappled with sacred texts. He knew the full verse from the Bible I had only partially known: “for now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known.”
Perhaps the lumberjack psychic partook of that divine knowing, or perhaps (as I suspect) he was an ordinary man with a temporary shtick and two lucky guesses. Either way, he has entered the lexicon of our marriage. When Kevin and I feel nervous about the future, one of us will jokingly say, “Wish we could ask the lumberjack psychic what to do next.”
We may laugh about it, but we don’t really want to know in advance how our story will unfold. We gain clarity, like trust, by experiencing the unfolding together, agreeing to walk side by side into a future we can’t yet see.
Erika Ramsdale is an oncologist in Rochester, N.Y.
Modern Love can be reached at [email protected].
To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.
Want more Modern Love? Watch the TV series, sign up for the newsletter and listen to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify. We also have two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”
The post The Lumberjack Psychic Is Never Wrong appeared first on New York Times.
