Tag Archives: believing

Randy Aalbregtse – Classmate & Neighbor

Posted on by
2

His name was Randy.   He was and still is, despite his far-too early death, a beloved classmate.  He was positivity personified, and he always had a smile for everyone.

From second grade through sixth grade, he was my neighbor.

However, we never spoke during that time.  Not once that I recall.  My brother was the same age as his younger brother, Kevin.  There were probably a total of a dozen of us kids in the immediate neighborhood and I would play hide-and-go-seek, baseball, climb trees, and ride bikes with all of them, but Randy never played with us.  Instead, he was always alone with his basketball: dribbling, spinning, jumping and sinking, or tossing from afar.

He would play for hours at a time.  By himself.  Once in a while, in the evening, he and his father, John, would play one-on-one.  There was always a lot of laughter then and John, who was far taller, appeared to block a good number of throws.  But Randy would find ways to skirt around his father and sink the ball with a layup.

I could see Randy playing from my bedroom window, when I was sitting in the yard reading, or when I was roller skating, usually by myself and on the only sidewalk in the neighborhood that ran across one long yard, located on the opposite side of Randy’s house.  It appeared he was as much a loner as I, if not more so.

When my family moved away from the neighborhood, as he and I were entering sixth grade or middle school as it was called then, I don’t recall seeing Randy again until high school.  By then, he was as tall as his father, a thinner version, and all arms and legs.  He played basketball and became one of the best players the school ever had.  Naturally, he hung out with other basketball players, all equally tall and equally enthusiastic about the sport.

I was quiet, never talking with others in the halls but always thinking about the next class, making sure I had my books, my homework, and such.  It wasn’t in my nature to talk to anyone unless they spoke to me first, and even though I would walk by this group of players every day, words were never exchanged.  Plus, I rarely attended extra-curriculum school events.  I was shy.  Extremely shy.

Time passed.  We graduated.  More time passed.  Our class held a few class reunions, some I helped organize, some I didn’t.  I moved away and then returned to the area.  I had become more outgoing and found it easier to start conversations with people, strangers or not.  It was during that time, that reunion, that I had a chance to chat with Randy and his first words seeing me, accompanied with that infectious grin of his, were, “Hi, neighbor.”

Every reunion thereafter, he greeted me the same way.  “Hi, neighbor.”

And then he became sick, but he never missed a reunion.  He attended one with a cane.  The next time was with crutches.  His smile never changed regardless of his declining health.

October 4, 2012

And then he died.  I saw the obituary and wasn’t able to attend his Celebration of Life that a number of our classmates attended, but I thought about him that entire weekend.

A few months passed.

As was my habit, I came home from work, had dinner, then came into my living room combination office, and turned the knob on my floor lamp, to turn it on.

The knob always required a hard twist, as it was stiff and didn’t turn easily.

This night, though, the knob turned easily, too easily.  In fact, the light wouldn’t stay on.  I puzzled over the problem.  No one had been in the apartment.  No one other than me was using the lamp, so what was different?

Carefully, I twisted the knob to on, finally getting the light to come on, and I started to step away.  The light went out.  Over and over, I tried to get the light to stay on.  And every time I had it on and would start to move away, it would go out.  The knob was so loose, it was difficult to find that small range where the light would even come on, as I could spin it back and forth easily trying to search that perfect on position, where the light would say on.

For several nights, this scenario played out.  After about ten minutes, my frustration got the better of me.  I started swearing.  I couldn’t get the light to stay on, no matter what I did.

And then I heard him.  His laugh.  And the word, “neighbor.”

“Randy?”

More laughter.

“You think this is funny, don’t you?”

I could feel his grin.  “Yes!” he responded.

“Okay, you can stay but stop playing with my lamp.”  I reached up to try to turn the light on and discovered that the hard familiar twist had returned.  I tested it several times.  On and off.  On and off.  Each time, I had to twist the knob hard.  (And ever since, the knob has never changed from this hard twist.)

“Thank you,” I told him, but he was gone.  I couldn’t sense him around anymore.  He’d had his fun and I sensed he was off to have fun with someone else, somewhere else.

Move ahead to July 2014—class reunion weekend

As typical of our reunions, we have both a Friday night casual get-together and a more formal reunion on Saturday night with dinner and a band.   For the first time, I attended the Friday night casual get-together.   I had a chance to chat with Roger, a great friend of Randy’s, along with being a former basketball player with him.  During previous reunions, if I saw Randy, Roger was always right there beside him.  On that night, I felt Randy was there, having a grand time seeing so many of the coaches and teachers who were in attendance.

After I dropped off my high school best friend, I drove home thinking about the conversations, the people I had seen, many of whom wouldn’t be in attendance the next evening.

Then, I sensed a presence with me in the car.  I heard, “Tell him.”

“Randy?”

“Tell Roger, this and whitey.”

I couldn’t make out what the this word was, but I saw Randy’s fists together and then moving away from each other.  He kept repeating the motion, but I couldn’t understand what the word was.

Randy relayed a number to me, too, what sounded like 6 or 16.  I couldn’t tell which.  I wanted to look in our old yearbooks to see Randy’s basketball shirt had been numbered, but since I had destroyed my books years ago, my curiosity would have to wait.

“Tell him!  He’ll know that it’s me.  That I’m here.”

“Okay.”

A long time ago, not having given Kathy’s husband a message she wanted delivered, I had vowed never to not give someone a message being delivered from someone on the other side, no matter how silly or ridiculous it could make me appear.

The next night, Saturday, I saw Roger sitting at a table, alone at the moment, so I joined him.  I told him I had a message to give him, from another classmate, but I didn’t say who.

“I’m supposed to tell you this”—I started making the motion with my fists pulling away from each other and returning and being pulled away again, over and over—“and whitey.”  As I kept making the hand motions, I explained, “I can’t think of the word, what the word is supposed to be.”

Roger said, “Stretch?”

“Yes!” I said excitedly.  I knew without a doubt that stretch was the correct word.  It still didn’t make sense to me, but I knew it to be right.  I knew because I could feel Randy’s grin—big and broader than ever before.

“Who is this message coming from?” he asked.

“Randy.”

He looked at me, both puzzled and in wonderment.

“Why? What does stretch mean to you?”

“That was his nickname.  We called him Stretch.”

“So what does whitey mean?”

“That’s what they call me back at Madison, where I teach and coached basketball.”  We just looked at each other.

“He’s here.  He’s here with you,” I told him.  “The message was for you.”

We talked about the numbers, but Roger couldn’t remember what Randy’s jersey number had been back in high school.  He said he would look in his yearbooks, but I’ve not heard, nor could I pull up any pictures of Randy playing, where the jersey number is visible, at least visible enough to read.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever know what these numbers meant to Randy, to Roger, but at this point, it doesn’t matter.

I’d been given a message to transmit, and I had.  Roger admitted he hadn’t been much of a believer of the beyond, but now I’d given him a lot to think about.

Once I was driving home alone, I sensed Randy was with me.  Again, I could tell he was happy knowing that Roger knew that he, Randy, had attempted communication and that they were at the reunion, together again.

The Winter Coat

Posted on by
5

After the birth of our second daughter, money was tighter than ever.  It was September 19, 1978 and winter was coming.  I needed a new winter coat but I had only $35 to spend on it—tops.  And this was a time when coats started selling at $50-60 a piece.  While it felt early in the season, it was actually late.  Coats had been picked over and I’d been looking already for several weeks.

I remembered listening to some Norman Vincent Peale tapes where he stated that in order to draw to you what you need, you have to believe that you already own it.  That it’s already yours.  That it’s meant to be yours.  The secret was to speak and believe as if you already owned it, so the choice of verb tense was important.  Peale’s most famous work—now a true classic—is The Power of Positive Thinking, first published in 1952.  It can still be found on popular bookstore shelves today.

This positive-thinking philosophy would be repeated every decade by someone new.  In the 1970s, that person was Dr. Wayne Dyer, followed by Anthony Robbins in the 1980s.  By the twenty-first century, both would be talking about higher consciousness and our need to connect with our inner consciousness, that our power comes from within.

And then, a little tiny book authored by Rhonda Byrne would make headlines in 2006 unlike other books of self-fulfillment.  That book was The Secret and many of the philosophies that were being introduced to the public I was already practicing.  In fact, I had practiced it back on that day in 1978.

It was a typical shopping day for me where I was on a hunt for a specific item and coming up with nothing.  As I stood in the store, I visualized.  In my mind’s eye, I saw the coat that I desired—brown plaid fabric, a long coat that came down to my boots or knees, and with a hood.

At that very moment, my glaze fell upon the bin in front of me, which was full of mittens, gloves, and hats.  I wasn’t normally a hat wearer, but I noticed a rust-colored hat that I knew would match this desired coat perfectly.  I bought the hat.  I even began wearing it and carrying it, not caring that it didn’t go with the light-weight fall jacket or sweaters I was wearing while still on the hunt.

Two weeks later, I found the coat on sale for $32.  It was on a rack where it should not have been hanging.  It was almost as if it was there for me to find at that moment.  I happened to be wearing the hat.  When I put on the coat and looked in the mirror, the hat appeared as if it originally came with the coat.

Several days later, the winter’s first snow fell.  Every time thereafter, for the decade or more that I owned that coat, whenever I put it on, I was reminded that visualization works.  More importantly, I learned how my belief could not waver.  I had to see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, taste it.  All the senses had to be engaged.

This was not be the first time that I would draw to me that which I needed.  The future would hold far bigger needs, seemingly impossible goals, needs, or desires.  But what I did learn this day was not only did the secret work, but I learned how it worked.  Unbeknownst to me, the future was filled with opportunities for practice.

The Red Thread

Posted on by
2

By the time I was 24, I was married and expecting my first child.  We lived out in the country, so going to town to run errands was a planned event and with a list.  If something wasn’t purchased, most generally, the item would have to be put on the list again for the next trip.

On this particular trip to town, I needed to pick up a spool of red thread, but I had forgotten to bring a piece of the material I was using with me.  I needed an exact match.  I didn’t want to wait until my next trip to make the purchase because my ability to finish the project had already been delayed by several days already.  The thought of having to wait several more days if not a week displeased me.

At the time, I’d been reading a lot of books about intuition, how we are all born with an intuitive ability but that for most people, it remains underdeveloped because it wasn’t understood at the time.  While it was known that women were often seen as being more intuitive than men, the science wasn’t clear at the time as to why.  That science would come decades later, but at that time, a woman’s intuitive was something to joke about.

I was curious about my own intuition, but I wasn’t sure how to develop it.  While books spoke about it, there weren’t how-to books on the market back then as there are now.  At least, these books weren’t in the stacks of the public library that I used.

I been wondering if I could develop my intuition, let alone trust it.  And now, on this day, I had an opportunity, so I decided to test my intuitive power on red thread.  I was down to two possibilities.  Thread A was the one that I rationalized was the correct color.  I saw the fabric in my mind’s eye.  I sincerely thought it was THE thread to buy.  Thread B was the one that my intuition was telling me to buy, but I had no rationale behind that feeling.  None.  I couldn’t base the feeling on a single fact.  I thought it looked too dark, that it wasn’t even the right family of shades; it was a wine red, not the more cherry red Thread A was.

Because I didn’t want to take one spool home and discover it was the wrong choice, I decided the best way to test my intuitive powers was to purchase both.  Spending even so much as an extra dollar on a limited budget taxed my sensibilities, but I was desperate to have usable thread that evening so I could finish my sewing project.  As much as I hated returning items, I decided if I needed, I could return the spool that ended up being the wrong color.

So, I marked the threads lightly on the spool’s ends, marking the one I thought was the true color as A, and marking the one my intuition was telling to buy as B.

When I got home, I was astonished and surprised to find that thread B was a perfect match.  It was so perfect, in fact, that when the thread was laid on the material, the thread completely disappeared.  I had to look hard to see it.  Thread A, which I’d been so sure was the perfect match, was hideously incorrect.

The test was a small one, but my intuition had been correct and convincingly so.  The question in my mind now was, how trustworthy would this intuition be on larger purchases or events that had outcomes that were more important, if not downright critical.  Would I be able to trust my intuition no matter what?