Maggie

It was the summer of 1976. I was six years old, and as usual, my parents and I were on our annual camping trip to Nickerson State Park in Cape Cod. We were accompanied by three more pairs of aunts and uncles and a total of fourteen cousins, all sharing three adjoining campsites. We were like a commune but without the weirdness.

Every year we managed to score a sweet location in the highly coveted Area 5. This particular year, all three campsites were along the ledge that led to the freshwater lake below with a beach around it. The lake was surrounded with pine trees, which were ideal for shade, and when most of your family is 100% Irish, it was the best place to spend a day with kids. The only creepy part of that lake was this: all of the pine needles from the trees would fall into the water, rot, and turn black. It made the lake look like the portal to Hell. But it made for cool sandcastles if one were to scoop some black sand from the water to mix in with the white sand from the beach.

On one day of that vacation, I had been playing with all of my cousins on the beach while the adults causally looked on. It was 1976 and it was pretty likely (and later proven by photos) that the adults had started drinking by 11:00AM. They would get into the water mostly to cool off, and then go back to talking and playing cards.

The kids were all roughly six to ten years old and we weren’t allowed to venture into deep water. It was about noon and pretty hot outside. Someone pulled out one of the many rafts and water toys that we had accumulated and put a large, round raft into the water. I remember that about six of us were playing on it/in it, pushing each other off and splashing each other. Somehow I got thrown off of the raft, and ended up under it, in about two feet of water, with five other kids on top of it. I was wedged between the raft and the bottom of the lake and I was drowning. I remember the panic like it was yesterday. I was trying to yell, but couldn’t, and if I did, no one could hear me. And suddenly, I was out. I stood up and started crying. It seemed as though no one had even missed me and I didn’t know how I had gotten out. All of the adults came running and checked me out, including my aunt, who was a nurse. I was fine and was consoled with some cookies from the campsite. Since then, I had rarely thought of that incident and had never mentioned it to anyone else. I was lucky it didn’t make me afraid of water or swimming. I was even on the swim team in high school. In a way, it may have made me stronger.

Flash forward to 2006: I was thirty-six years old and had been told by a group of friends that they had all been to see a local psychic, Robin, whom they described as “incredible”. Each of them relayed to me an excerpt of her “reading” with Robin and how amazing it was that she could know such intimate things about them. They all insisted I see her. At first I refused and politely said that she had to be a fraud, that she must have dug up information on all of them from someone. Each of them emphatically denied this and continued to badger me until I finally caved in.

As it turned out, Robin rented a small office space that was unmarked on the outside. She did not have a website and did not advertise her “readings”. She did all of her business by word of mouth. When I sat down with her, she lit a candle and handed me a legal pad and pen in case I wanted to write anything down. Then she handed me a well-used deck of playing cards and asked me to repeatedly shuffle them and handle them so that my “energy” would be on them. I did as she asked and then she spread the cards out in a huge fan, facedown. She then had me choose cards at random, not look at them, and pass them to her. And then it began….

Robin said that quite a few people wanted to speak to me. My Dad had passed in 2001 and she said that he was there. She told me that he likes to grow roses and tomatoes, and drink beer, and take care of our black lab, Clancy. She said that he told her that he had “chosen” my boyfriend (and future husband) Jeff, for me, because he knew he would love me and take care of me. I started to doubt her when she said that my Dad told her that he was with all of his “brothers”. My father only had one sister and she was still alive. But then Robin told me that he was holding up a firefighter’s uniform/gear, and pointing to it.

Robin mentioned other things, both past and future, that she couldn’t have known. She said that Jeff’s mother, Catherine, was sick, and that no one knew it, not even Catherine. She said that my cousin, Bobby, came through and told her that he thought it was pretty awesome that I wore Mardi Gras beads to his funeral, because he loved New Orleans so much. All of it was true. Every single thing she mentioned had either happened already or would happen in the future.

Robin went on to say that I had a guardian angle named Maggie. She said that Maggie had saved my life a number of times, including that time I almost drowned. When I asked her what she meant, she said that when I was six I had been playing on a beach on Cape Cod when I became trapped under a raft. She said that Maggie had grabbed me and pulled me out. I was so flabbergasted I didn’t know what to say or do. To say that my mind was completely blown would be a gross understatement.

I still cry when I think about that reading, for so many different reasons, and have since returned for two more. Each reading was just as accurate and intense as the first one. And now I regularly make a point of thanking Maggie whenever I think of the times that I got lucky, which probably wasn’t luck at all.