A PERSONAL STORY

Growing up, my father’s earning stability was periodically a source of fraught concern for my mother. Their only child, I never missed a meal, always slept in my own bed in my own room, enjoyed ample toys, and even attended a day or overnight camp for two months every summer between the ages of six and 15 years. We always lived in modest yet comfortable three-bedroom apartments, I had a live-in nanny for several years, and my parents were long-time members of both a suburban swim club and a yacht club. My father regularly changed jobs, however, which always entailed the sale of securities or some industrial product on commission. As a result, his income often fluctuated from ample to meagre. Being Depression-era children, my parents had both known the effects of economic privation in their own families. Thus, even though I rarely knew any detail about what was bedeviling their relationship financially, the emotional tension in my home between them was often elevated – and quite palpable to me as an empathic child. My chronic exposure to this as a child and adolescent likely “wired” me to becoming anxious about having enough money to live on, even though I never directly experienced any such hardship myself. In response, though, I made a conscious effort through my earning years to save and invest, and always live within my means. Consequently, I have always had sufficient financial resources to lead a comfortable, if relatively modest, life.

My father passed away in December 2008 at the age of 83 of natural causes, having outlived my mother by almost 20 years; she had been seven years his senior. I was his chief caretaker for the last two years of his life, which were spent in a modern nursing home. During that time, I visited my father virtually every other day.

Within a year after my father’s transition, I began to find money on a regular basis while I was outdoors running errands, recreating in some way, or travelling. My finds were almost always shiny U.S. coins, but, on rare occasions, a green paper bill would catch my eye. It started off infrequently, but soon began to happen with increasing frequency and in unusual places — and sometimes in such numbers as to be truly anomalous. I have experienced this phenomenon for the last twelve years episodically, sometimes as often as three times in a single day! Early on, I decided to store my finds in an uncovered brass urn, separate from my everyday pocket change, not being quite sure what to make of these discoveries.

Several short examples will demonstrate that my discovery “habit” was hardly commonplace:

• I emerged one mid-afternoon from a concert hall on a college campus to find forty (40) pennies piled close together beside the driver’s side front wheel of my car. My car was parked at the curb of a public street in open daylight.
• Walking with a friend in an upscale city neighborhood, I cast my eyes downward and noticed a pile of twenty (20) pennies on the small median strip of grass that separated the sidewalk from the street curb, on the front periphery of a private home.
• Returning to my car in a marina parking lot, I looked down as I passed the rear end of a parked sport utility vehicle and noticed six quarters lying close together on the pavement.
• Alighting on the grass near a public swimming pool in Denver with my swim towel, I felt something small and hard underneath it. Lifting the towel aside, I spied a single dime — a Canadian dime! I was living in Denver at the time, but this was noteworthy because my then deceased father had spent almost his entire married life in Toronto, in Canada.
• While walking in daylight on a sidewalk in downtown Toronto alongside pedestrians in both directions, I cast my eyes down momentarily and saw a dime (yes, a Canadian dime again, but that would be expected there) and picked it up. Walking ten paces further on, I again glanced down and saw another dime! Walking on yet another ten paces or so – but now with my eyes alert to the pavement, I found a third dime! Now on even higher alert, I walked an additional ten paces still and mirabile dictu! found a fourth dime. Each coin had been directly in my path as I walked, right in front of my footfalls. I had not had any motivation initially at all to scan the ground as I walked, actively in search of anything.
• Many times when I have stopped at gas stations to fill my car’s gas tank, I have opened my car door and looked down as I exited the vehicle. There, near the side of my car and just under my gaze, would be a shiny penny. Always a penny. Always shiny. Many times.
• At the airport, while lifting my baggage from a conveyor, I looked down at the metal slot between the belt and the nearer rail and saw a quarter, within easy reach. Twice again that same day, I found a coin, but in different locations.

The unusualness of these incidents, in frequency, character, and circumstances, was stark to me early on, and I could not conjure or conceive any rational explanation for them. While it was an enigma at the mundane level, I nonetheless was drawn to conjecturing to myself that something somehow paranormal was at work, having to do with some kind of discarnate sentient energy. Without any evidence of anything, though, I had no choice but to remain “in the question” as to the source and the reason for the occurrences of this idiosyncratic habit. .

An answer did come at last, quite unexpectedly. In November 2017, I attended a daylong New Age fair known as “The Athena Festival.” Held annually at a hotel north of Denver, it plays host to practitioners of various alternative healing modalities and psychic arts such as tarot, astrology, and clairvoyance; the practitioners offer their services to the attendees in short time slots for low preset fees. The declared meme of the fair is what is known in New Age circles as “the Divine Feminine”; as such, booths offering jewelry, stylish women’s clothing, crystals and pendula, and spiritual objets d’art abound. Unsurprisingly, most of the people attending are indeed women and teenaged girls. Another regular feature of this fair is the presence of speakers who present lectures in a handful of rooms off the main hall on topics reflecting their expertise and practices. Many of these practices have long fascinated me; being rational and discerning yet open-minded, I am both familiar and generally simpatico with their reputed validity and efficacy.

That day, I entered a room where a local medium, Kim Moore, was scheduled to speak and “do her thing”, which purportedly was to “connect with” and channel information from the spirits of people who have passed away. This would be a “gallery reading”, so called because, with only a limited amount of time for engagement, most attendees will not experience communication from some deceased relative or friend; they must therefore enjoy the experience vicariously, through the episodes of the fortunate few in the room around them who become so favored. What – or who — determines who gets a reading in a gallery reading? No one knows for sure, including the medium. It is always just billed as a case of “you show up, and you take your chances.” At this event, the gallery reading was done gratis, a nice perk of the fair. The best guess of many is that the spirits of the dead folks themselves decide which of them will come through in every time-constricted session when many living people are present.

I got lucky that day! After the spirits of two departed persons had come in, spoken sequentially through the medium to their relatives present in the room, the medium cleared herself and then began to describe an elderly man living in a nursing home. He didn’t want to be there, she said, even though he was confined to a wheelchair due to advancing Parkinson’s disease and thus no longer able to live on his own. He was somewhat cantankerous as a result, she related, and given to playing pranks on the nursing staff. Remembering how mischievous my father could be with many people (including me) while alive, I cautiously raised my hand from my seat in the third row. I said, “I think that may be my father.” She paused, squinted, and then asked, “Was your dad in the service?” I affirmed that he had been so (when young). “Was he an officer?” “Yes,” I replied. “Because he’s showing me the buttons on his uniform — he’s very proud of his service,” she related. “That’s my Dad,” I confirmed.

Squinting once again, she tilted her head to one side. “Was your Dad a coin collector?” “No,” I replied. “He’s talking to me about coins. Do you find money?” she asked tentatively. Skipping no beat, I affirmed, “Everywhere I go!” “Well, he’s putting them there!” she responded. “And your mother’s in on it too! Has she passed too?” I confirmed that she had. “Well, they’re together now. They’re doing it to let you know they’re still around and with you. They love you very much!” And with that, the communication was complete, and the medium released her connection with them, moving on to somebody else’s now disembodied formerly human relation. In an hour and a half, only eight identifiable relatives came through the medium as spirits that day, and so most of the 60-odd people in the room left having had only a vicarious experience. I had truly lucked out, for sure. What splendid good fortune!

What made — and continues to make — this experience so compelling is that I had never met Kim Moore before that day and session, and had never communicated any details of my life or the life of my father to her ahead of time. Whatever she was doing, it was happening spontaneously and without any “front-loading” of her by me with clues, cues, or any other substantive information. Wholly on her own, she got right my Dad’s personality, a major element of his personal history, and the living circumstances at the end of his life. And, most scintillating of all, she captured the “prime mover” behind all the money I had been finding since 2009 – and continue to find to this day! With no objective reason to doubt the veracity of Ms. Moore’s talent, I am buoyed by the thought of my parents, now long passed, still being very much alive and concerned about me in a loving and supportive way. It’s a big deal, for sure, for an only child with no emotionally close relatives among the living.

I have since had readings with other mediums, and my father has come through again on separate occasions, several years apart. One medium, a particularly gifted man named Anthony Quinata, without any prompting from me with informative details, described my father as a naval officer with the rank of lieutenant and an over-indulger of alcohol who died of natural causes. Quinata correctly identified my Dad as having been overly hard on me as a youngster, and relayed to me that he was now sorry for how he had been and loves me very much. These messages, because of their clarity and, especially, their repetition by several mediums to date, have served me well. They have been a healing balm for some emotional wounding in my personality and a window into a greater reality that exceeds mortal life. By the real-time, direct experiences of my senses, and those of many others, it appears that consciousness is transcendental in nature, untethered to one’s physical existence as a human being — and perhaps eternal. The implications within easy grasp, and the ramifications further out, of such a truth are staggering to contemplate and should serve to impel each of us to examine afresh what it means to be a person on this earth and, more particularly, the person we individually are. And perhaps even more vitally, why.

ADDENDUM

Partial Transcript

Kim Moore (KM), Medium, Gallery Reading at Athena Festival, November 13, 2016, in Thornton, Colorado

KM:  I feel a father with dementia before he crossed over into the spirit world, in a nursing home, which he didn’t like – it pissed him off that he was there.  He’s got a lot of spunk; he must have been a handful at the nursing home.  He might have collected coins or there’s something about seeing coins, pennies – seen not from him; he keeps showing me coins connected to him.  So, he might have collected coins or leaves you pennies or dimes all the time.  He has a woman with him, seems to be close in age to him, who might be the mother or who he had children with.  He’s got a lot of energy about him.  This is like a sister to him or wife with him in the spirit world; she did not have dementia and would have passed before him.   Seems like a set here:  A mom and a dad, but he’s like a spicy one as he comes through.

.  .  .  .

KM:  Would you understand about him collecting coins or finding coins?

WP:  I find coins, everywhere I go.

KM:  Perfect!  He leaves them for you!  That’s what they’re for.  Pennies, and like they’re everywhere.  This is your Dad, and there’s something about being frugal with money or he really cared about money, and so for him to be leaving pennies is a big deal.   And your Mom is also over there, and she would have gone before him.  She didn’t have dementia . . . .

.  .  .  .

The pennies are also from your mother as well.  They seem to both be wanting to help you right now, a desire to help you, to uplift you, to help you feel better from both of your parents, as they’re coming through.  And they just want to acknowledge that they’re here today.

.  .  .  .

Your mother and father are here, the pennies are from them, they’re doing good, . . . . [L]ots of love from him and just know that they’re here with you today. . . .   [T]hey want to acknowledge you, they’re here, the pennies are from them, and lots of love from them.