Jump Girl Read online

  Just as when I saw a statue of Vishnu for the first time, with his blue skin and four arms, I thought, I know him. I didn’t question how; I just knew I had already experienced this being. It’s a funny thing to have knowledge without an apparent basis, to know facts and have memories without all the details necessary to understand the how of the knowing.

  My parents moved regularly, so my childhood was filled with many homes and many bedrooms in which to ponder my existence. I moved fourteen times by the age of nine, and then I stopped counting. Some places we lived in for years; some we lived in more than once; some places held more memories then others.

  Our little trailer on Parker Road is one of the places I remember most, for that is where I started retaining memories of this life and began remembering who I really was. That was where I first met myself in the mirror and where I first saw the other beings who came to visit me. It was also where I started to understand the people who had become my parents—my father with his glass eye and warrior’s spirit; my insecure wild child of a mother who would grow up alongside her children.

  We once spent a whole summer living in a campground because my father didn’t want to give money to “the Man.” Today I laugh when I think of that campground because it was located in White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, owned and operated by the Man. Some of my favorite memories came from that summer. I liked living in a tent, eating food cooked over an open fire, and playing in the river every day. The tent was a giant canvas beast with three compartments that smelled of herbs, bug spray, and mildew. I remember this combined smell and the damp heaviness of lying in my sleeping bag while it rained. I have revisited this rich moment of incarnation more than once in my life.

  By “revisiting,” I don’t mean that I remember the moment with fondness. I mean my adult self has visited my child self, stepping into and connecting with her as she lay in the tent while it rained.

  The longer we lived in the campground, the wilder my life became, and the more we resembled a band of gypsies. I found that fitting because my great-great grandfather was a member of the Irish Travellers, an ethnic group whose people live much like the Roma. Our campsite grew and evolved, with my grandparents bringing furniture and tarps each time they visited, and family and friends came to hang out with us as if we belonged there.

  Living in this manner brought peace to my soul and gave my heart a sense of place and a deep connection to family and ancestry. The blood in my veins sang with joy and knowing. I often thought living at the campground was so much better than living inside the boxes and walls of traditional homes. I didn’t like the bathrooms, though, because I was afraid I would fall into the deep pit below the outhouse. Sandy and I avoided it entirely and just went in the bushes behind the building.

  Our parents encouraged us to be independent, and our father instilled a sense of pride in us that led me to believe we were somehow special, unique, not like most people. After all, most two- and four-year-olds weren’t allowed to roam around a campground unsupervised and go to Sunday School by themselves. Then again, most people didn’t visit spirits in the mirror, either.

  Back then our independence made perfect sense to me because I knew that Sandy and I were much older than our little bodies, and I thought our parents recognized this about us. In retrospect, however, I doubt they thought it out at all, and I’m surprised they gave us so much freedom. I think they figured, What the hell, the girls should be fine. I believe their thought process (or lack thereof) was informed by the fact that, on the one hand, my dad had faced violence and death many times, and he believed himself to be bigger and badder than anything that would even think of harming us. On the other hand, my mother was so young that she was truly guessing at the whole thing, figuring it out as best she could with her childhood wisdom.

  I’m sure my parents granted us so much independence mostly because they weren’t really grown up themselves. When I was born, my father was twenty-one and just out of Vietnam, and my mother was only fifteen. They were young, rebellious, and focused on the experiential. They were not deep thinkers who studied meditation, philosophy, or esoteric thought. They were partying hippies who spent most of their time drinking and smoking pot with their friends, hiking up mountains, and coming up with crazy-ass stunts.

  They made adventure wherever they went: driving backward down back roads with only the hazard lights on and pretending to be piloting a spaceship, lighting raging bonfires with music blaring from speakers on top of the house, daredeviling on motorcycles, throwing crazy sledding parties on snow-covered hills, and making the smoke from more than one joint pour out the windows of our little car. I’m pretty sure I grew up with a constant contact buzz and am damn lucky that I survived the craziness of sitting on the wheel well in the back of the pickup truck as we sped down the road with my mom and her friend sitting in lawn chairs next to me, a cooler full of drinks between them, and my dad and his buddy in the cab, smoking and drinking.

  I never lacked love, food, shelter, or clean clothes. But the rules and boundaries of our lives were created by children playing at being parents. At the time I thought it was fun, goofy, and memorable, but it was also not the way I chose to raise my children when the time came.

  My parents’ meeting was not a story of star-crossed lovers. It was the story of a man having a billfold shoved into his mouth as he suffered a grand mal seizure on a hospital floor. My father shoved the billfold into the mouth of my mother’s old boyfriend as he lay convulsing on the floor of a military hospital in Annapolis, Maryland. My father was neither a doctor nor a nurse; he was a soldier who suffered from seizures himself. He stepped up because no one else was present to do so.

  My mother had traveled to the hospital to visit her old boyfriend, who was there because of a head injury. His parents were present when my father intervened, and they invited him to come to their house for a home-cooked meal. As charismatic as my father was, he was by no means a pretty sight at this time, still recovering from serious war injuries. The relationship between my mother and father did not spring up instantaneously; instead, it grew over time.

  My father had landed in the Bethesda Military Hospital after being blown up in Vietnam. By “blown up,” I mean he jumped the wrong way when someone yelled, “Grenade!” He lost his left eye, and shrapnel was embedded so deeply in his brain that they would never get it out. That’s why he knew how to handle people having seizures.

  My dad’s military service and his status as a marine were the essence of his being, and those facts played a huge role in my own life. He possessed a level of bravery and bad-assedness that anyone who met him experienced. I believe this energy was the energy of his soul, something that directed him and kept him going when the road of his life wound deeply into darkness. He had not been drafted into the military; instead he lied about his age and enlisted in the Marine Corps at seventeen. He loved to brag about this and saw it as a testament to his ferocity and manliness. What he didn’t share with most people was the reason why he’d joined so young.

  My father was raised in the North Woods of New Hampshire by his grandmother, in the town of Whitefield, where I would later spend the first fifteen years of my life. His childhood was one of poverty and abandonment, and it left deep scars on his soul, scars that strengthened him as they pained him. His parents—alcoholics who were unwilling or unable to raise him and his brothers—left them one at a time with my grandfather’s mother, Grammy Brown. Grammy never let “her boys” feel they were a burden to her, and my father grew up with a deep understanding of the power of love and family. In fact, when his parents came back around thinking they were ready to do some parenting, Grammy Brown refused to let them do it and told them they would never take her boys from her.

  She was a powerhouse of a woman, but she was poor, so at the age of eleven my father started working to help support the family by mowing the local graveyards. At seventeen he lied to a recruiting agent, signed the papers, and joined the marines, heading out bo
th to fight for his country and to take care of his beloved grandmother.

  I learned the true extent of my father’s sacrifice and motivation when I was eight. While playing hide-and-seek in Grammy’s house, in the attic above the shed I came across an old trunk that belonged to her. Believing I had found the best hiding place ever, I opened it and was overcome by the musty smell of cedar, dust, old paper, and memories, a smell that had always excited me and filled me with fantasies of lost treasure. There was a stack of letters in the bottom of the trunk. I reached in and rifled through the papers, and I found an envelope with Grammy’s name and a lot of stamps on it. I realized that it was a letter written by my father, and I knew it was a document of great importance, holding secrets about him that I did not know.

  I climbed into the trunk, hiding, knowing I was trespassing by reading something that did not belong to me. The letter was short, filled with heartfelt stories meant to appease the worry of one who sat at home waiting for his return. I could feel his unspoken fear and sorrow, as if the paper itself held the residue of his emotions.

  I sat in that old steamer trunk crying, my senses filled with the heat of a heavy sun, the smell of fear mingled with sweat and blood. It was not unusual for me to have a vicarious transmission of experience, as I often connected to things on a deeper level with more information than I had apparently been given. Sometimes it happened with simple things, like knowing that Richie Cunningham on Happy Days had blue eyes, even though we only had a black-and-white TV. At other times such experiences were layered and detailed with deep scents, sounds, and emotions. That’s how it was when I sat reading my father’s letter.

  I later understood that I was utilizing a psychic art known as psychometry—reading the history of an inanimate object and receiving relevant psychic associations through the object’s energy field. After a few moments of sitting in the trunk crying, I continued reading. I read how my father was excited to be sending money home so Grammy Brown could buy a much-needed refrigerator. His pride at being able to provide her with this machine was also rich and flavorful in my mind, and I was suddenly completely and truly aware of the price of war and how it is fought on the backs of the poor. My father had not gone to war for the sole reason of serving his country but also to take care of his family. I climbed out of that trunk knowing that my father, although tough as nails, was really a soft-hearted boy who loved his grandmother. I realized how heavily the aftermath of war weighed on his soul. His words and the energy carried in that slip of paper made it clear as day to me.

  My father’s time in Vietnam was such a profound component of his life—and, in turn, of mine—because of the damage and vision it bestowed upon him. My father was not without his own gifts, and the experience of battle has a profound impact on one who is psychically sensitive. War infected him with rowdy abandon, turning him into a person who took chances and sought out adrenaline rushes, and it led him to push his children toward the same recklessness and freedom. War also caused him traumatic brain damage, took one of his eyes, and gave him the PTSD that he lived with for the rest of his life. After returning from Vietnam and experiencing the horrific way in which soldiers were treated, he got rid of his uniforms and started talking to other young men about what was really happening in ’Nam and telling them they shouldn’t go if they could avoid it. To the end of his life he was proud of his beliefs and of being a marine, but he was also sorrowful for the acts he had committed.

  When I was four years old, I came into the living room while my father had his eye out for cleaning. I knew that Grammy’s teeth came out, and I suppose I had been told that my father’s eye did too, but nothing had prepared me for that moment. His eye was in his hand, and the space where it belonged was a sagging, puckered wound. I screamed and cried and had to be comforted by my mother until I could see that it was still my father in front of me. As I write of this now, I cry, thinking how it must have felt to him to scare his own child so badly simply by his appearance.

  Later, when he played his games with us, pretending to be a swamp monster, we wondered if he was able to see us with his eye that never shut. I would always come back to that moment of him holding his eye in his hand, and I would be scared and sad at the same time—scared that such a thing could be, and sad that my father had to experience such a loss.

  While my father was rough and craggy, dark and handsome, my mother had a strangeness all her own—a strangeness that came from being such a young mother and from her southern accent, which stated quite plainly “I’m not from around here.” Interestingly, she passed her accent on to me and my sisters. (Stephanie came along when I was five). Each of us was reprimanded in school for the way we pronounced our words.

  My mother was and still is beautiful. As a child-mother she possessed a softness that was sometimes the opposite of my father’s wild-man nature. That’s not to say she was an innocent, but she was quieter and less sure of herself.

  She was the youngest of nine children, with four older brothers and four older sisters. Her oldest brother was more than thirty years older than she, making her the same age as her nieces and nephews. Her running away with a northern boy at age fourteen was not well accepted, and her brothers decided to go after the guy, guns in hand. Thankfully for all involved, they stopped at my Aunt Evelyn’s on the way north, and her husband convinced them that confronting a Vietnam vet with an armload of guns was not a good idea. Knowing my Dad, I have to say that was sage advice. They did continue their trip north and eventually convinced my mother to come home with them. She agreed, knowing that her decision was temporary, as she carried me in her womb. Upon returning home, she told her mother she was pregnant, and my grandmother decided it was best for her to do the proper thing and get married. So at fourteen years of age my mother was pregnant and married, with her own mother signing her approval on the dotted line. To this day that approval baffles me. I revisited the idea when I was fourteen, and again when my daughter was fourteen, each time contemplating how fucked-up and crazy it would have been for either of us to be parents at such a young age.

  My mom had two children by the time she was sixteen and three by the time she was twenty-one. Her friends were women she’d met through my father, and they were either older than she or had no children of their own. My mom didn’t know much about being a parent, which meant we learned as we went. For one, she knew little to nothing about cooking. My young life involved a lot of Hamburger Helper, Rice-a-Roni, and Chef Boyardee. What my mom lacked in cooking skills, she made up for in laughter. For someone who became a mother too young, she never said anything mean, hurtful, or damaging. She was also super-cool and would answer any question put to her with honesty and integrity. She always encouraged us to stand up for ourselves and be the best we could, even if she couldn’t always stand up for herself. I can honestly say she did a great job with the tools she had, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t right there with my father, partying, swearing, and living with wild abandon.

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  Ancestors and Guides

  My life has always been filled with talk of how ancestors and spirits work as our guides. In many cases they can be one and the same, for our guides are often our ancestors from this life or another. The difference is that ancestors are spirits of our family members. We share blood and family history with them, and they are part of our genealogical tree. With enough research we can often discover our physical connection with them.

  Guides can also be spirits we have connected to in other lifetimes or who have volunteered to teach us without any prior connection. The latter are extremely rare, as the role of spirit guide is an intimate one that usually evolves from prior connection and involves plans agreed upon before birth.

  The spirit guide phenomenon is very complex. We all have them. Some of us have many, and some guides stay with us our entire lives. Others step in to help with particular lessons. Our guides do not watch over our every move; they are not interested in watching us brush our teeth and couldn’t care less
whether we flossed or not. They have more important things to do. In fact, many spirit guides have more than one living person they’re watching over.

  While some people need more guidance, and some people are more open to receiving it, we all experience the guidance of spiritual forces. They are there to help us grow as souls, to become whole and evolve.

  I believe we are born into each life with a lesson plan of sorts. It’s not a step-by-step to-do list; it’s more like an agenda, with suggested lessons to learn and experiences to have. As a psychic reader, I see these agenda items as karmic lessons we’re here to work through, lessons that keep coming up again and again until we complete them. These lessons often become more inconvenient the longer we try to ignore them because they’re unavoidable. Our spirit guides keep us on track with these items, sometimes through thoughts in our heads and other times through a sudden deep knowing, like a light switch being flicked on inside our minds.

  Growing up in a family that practiced the old ways of nature and spirits, I often heard tales about spirit guides and ancestors. As I grew older, the educational games Grammy Brown played with me became more complex, and I learned other arts like sewing and crocheting, things I could do with my hands that gave my mind room to wander, listen, and perceive. Grammy liked to talk about death and dying and what spirits did with their time in the afterlife. Sometimes these stories involved mischievous spirits, and on rare dark nights she talked of the misdeeds of troubled spirits. On these occasions she said, “You have nothing to worry about, Sali. You’re a Brown.” She said this so often that I felt there must be some kind of magical protection in our family’s blood.