014.) Burnt Popcorn and Lost Children

I should have known that my Saturday was going to be insert proper adjective here when I experienced something very strange the night before (Did she say, "... the night before?" Yes, I did. Now hold on a minute).

All of my life I have been prone to paranormal events. I know that sounds kooky, like I've been experimenting a wee bit too intensely with brain-altering chemicals or that I'm possessed by Satan - but it's true that I am a lightening rod for queer happenings. I won't go into great detail about these happenings because this entry will be quite long enough, but I will say that I've had premonitions ranging from deep dark things that happened an hour after dreaming this deep dark thing, to mundane and silly things that take anywhere from a week to a month to occur. I've seen ghosts or dead people or whatever term you like. I've had out-of-body experiences when I was an infant (my first memory, actually) and witnesses have confirmed my telling of the event (though they never saw me floating outside my body, they have been able to corroborate the details of the room and the lousy crow which cawed outside of the nursery window, causing me to wake up screaming).

I've also had an entire month of my life revolve around Alaska. The state of Alaska which I've never been, in crossword puzzles and word searches and fill-ins. People who lived in/were born in/visited. On quarters and key chains, bumper stickers and licenses plates, credit cars and hand bags, tattoos and t-shirts. On television documentaries and in books. Bric-a-brac of all manner and beyond. Telephone calls. Everything that could have possibly come up Alaska did. For a month, and then it just stopped. This was not done intentionally and it certainly wasn't an imbalance in my brain, for all of what came about was tangible evidence. Since this event - given the knowledge that Alaska is where my hero died and most of the kooky stuff in my life has happened after 1992, when I was five - I have taken to calling whatever supernatural force is behind these events - Chris. I know it's not actually a dead man doing all of this, but for my own comfort...

Anyway, back to the main thought.

At 9.15PM Friday night (so 10 July), while I was watching the 20/20 General Motors: From Dream to Downfall special, this force I call Chris leaned over the side of my bed and forcefully clapped his hands above my right ear.

Now, this sound could be easily explained away as an object in my bedroom breaking or falling. But upon investigation I found nothing out of the ordinary. Absolutely nothing had broken or fallen or otherwise altered its normal state. Even the closet, on the other side of the wall from where the noise originated, held no answers. The only thing that could have made such an impressive and clean CLAP! (apart from hands) was the snapping of the long, bowing wooden rod in the closet holding all of my dresses (even then that wouldn't be so much a CLAP! but a SNAP!). That rod was still resisting gravity, as was the other ity-bity rod which cuts my closet in half and prevents me from any true use of the closet. The shelves were still in place, as were the items I had placed upon them.

Maybe the sound was from elsewhere in the house? No, it wasn't. Nothing was out of the ordinary in any other room.

Maybe the sound was from outside? After all, I live on the second floor of a 200-year-old duplex and sound carries. The downstairs neighbors were all away. The old woman to the left (or facing my bedroom) is quieter than a church mouse and sometimes I forget that anyone even lives in that house. The people on the right, for that matter in the entire alley, are hardworking people who don't make a lot of noise. Given the location of the noise, the sound could not have been a backfiring car on the main road at the front of the house - that and the sound was a hand clap.

So, yes, when I went to work yesterday in the first of our two buildings I should have known it was going to be interesting.

• Whoever switched on the breakers missed the one for our radio corner. (silly thing to list, but it was a precursor for the things to come)

• Our regular volunteer, who is usually very good with these things (and seemed quite difficult that day, actually), never plugged in the coffee maker. Of course it had to be me, the woman who doesn't drink coffee, who had to empty the steaming hot drink into the thermos to place out on the "FREE COFFEE" table by the shopping carts. I came very close to scalding the skin clean off my hand.

• The popcorn machine and I are not on the best of terms. Typically, the thing just breaks down on me and sprays hot oil and unpopped kernels everywhere. Not this day. This day the first batch of popcorn I make burnt to a blackened crisp because I'm the one who didn't flick the little switch marked "TURN".
  

• When the business got new credit card machines last Monday (I think it was), not only did the company providing the service not activate the debit card option (inciting riots from the elderly who don't seem to realize that the only difference between credit and debit, apart from the wording, is a pin number) - the company also neglected to provide us tape for the machines. Not knowing this at the time, I pulled out a paper roll from a drawer (thankfully the same length) and plopped it into the machine. Alas, the girth was too great. I had to stand there like an idiot, pulling at the tape and collecting yards (I do mean yards) of paper in efforts of making the roll fit into the machine. Seeing all that wasted money in the trash bin, I gave up and assumed that the credit machine would still work even though the tape compartment didn't close. Having myself a temperamental printer/scanner/copier/fax machine at home, I should have realized just how wrong I was.

A man came up to the register with a furniture tag ("large table") from one of our out buildings. He wanted to pay with his credit card. So there I was, swiping the credit card through a machine that beeped at me: "NO PAPER YOU FOOL". Naturally, I yelled at the machine that I just put paper in. So I pulled out another yard or two and finally the compartment closed, though I had no idea whether the transaction went through and am I going to have to charge this guy $10.56 twice? Thankfully enough, the transaction did go through and all I had to do was press a few dozen buttons in order to reprint the receipts.

• We have two smokers stands out front, chained to the metal railings which extend like tentacles from our glass-enclosed atrium. Normally no one gives these any thought (sometimes I think they're even neglected a cleaning). This day was not normal, however, so of course the one I can see through the picture window behind the register, the one that leans so drunkenly, started to billow with smoke. Whoever had last used it, discarded their half-smoked cigarette without properly snuffing it. I had grand visions of the thing blowing up (highly unlikely) and careening like a rocket through the air, possibly taking out a very large bird and a wolverine on its way back to earth.

• Being summertime, the store gets a lot of traffic from the migrant workers. I do like the migrant workers and find 99.9% of them to be stand-up individuals, but there's this one family (and white and purple and green people do it too) notorious for tearing off price tags in order to get things for less. Like: a three piece, brand spanking new (though without the store tags) infant boys outfit - onesie, blue blankie and a mesh bag with a hat, all connected with matching blue ribbon and a silken hanger. I priced that outfit at 6 - 8 dollars. Maybe even 12. The eldest member of this family handed me a tag (completely intact, indicating that it did not fall from the plastic, thorny barb I had used on the outfit because the only way that tag could have come off is if it was torn), a tag that said "2 piece, boys, 2.50". No. No, no, no. Suck dirt and die, lady. Switching prices is stealing.

• Anorexics tend to make me feel ill. Large people I don't really have a problem with, but the chicks who are unnaturally thin sicken me. I myself am tall and slender. I'm not a size zero (nor do I want to be, thank you, I like having breasts and an ass) but I'm thin enough and have had friends who were thin or thinner; I'd like to think I know natural thinness. So when a mother comes in with her two daughters, one of whom are as thin as the mother, with jeans on and a hooker-esque tank top - allowing me to count every single one of her vertebrae - I feel nauseous. When an aging Baby Boomer comes into the store literally all lines and angles, I can't help but contort my face with disgust. And when, this day, a daughter came into the store with her mother and they came to the register - the mother a bit above average height, pleasantly doughy, and the daughter my height but with a sunken face and bones sticking out all over the place and clothes no bigger than a child's 10 and the tell-tale white hair beginning to sprout... I second guessed taking my lunch.

I realize that these people and people like them have a mental disorder and I feel for them, really I do. But as a child I watched my father being eaten away by cancer. Seeing walking skeletons reminds me on a primal, mostly unconscious level of my cancer plagued father.

• A tween to early teen boy lost his mother, or his mother lost him. Such a handsome kid, too, and seeing him running about the store and then the parking lot with his father/uncle/random stranger yelling for his mother in both English and Spanish with that look of torture on his face was saddening. Luckily, after asking him twice, he gave me his mother's name. A quick call and she was found. Madre had simply gone to the other building without telling her son. Or maybe, being 13-ish, he hadn't really paying attention to what was going on around him.

• The only good thing, really: I met a woman who finally understood my left arm. She said, and I quote, "Ah, yes. Robinson Jeffers."