In other words, my daughter. She’s prone to visions of
future events and she wrote about one of them recently, about the vision she
had of her husband-to-be, a very detailed picture except the face was blank.
So when she met said future husband and one day saw him in exactly that same
situation, only now she saw his face, she knew. She KNEW!
She assures me, though, that this happened after she had
stated in her inimitable categoric no-nonsense I-will-brook-no-argument-end-of-conversation way
that he would never ever be The One.
Let’s go back and start this story from the beginning, with
my vision. Along with a lot of other people Heidi and I had attended an all-day meeting and
now were in the car getting ready to visit a local friend for some hang-out
time. David, a new acquaintance, was in our car because we were not local and didn’t know how to get
to the friend’s house, so he offered to ride with us and direct us. And it was
in the car when there was this Moment. A very quick, but oh so vivid, sort of
flash when I looked at him talking to my daughter and suddenly saw them as if
framed like a photograph. The picture kind of jumped at me as if it lit by a
strobe. On, off, just like that.
And just like that, I knew. I really, really KNEW.
So it was no surprise to me after that day to watch the two of
them became good friends and spend a great deal of time emailing back and
forth. (David wasn’t too fond of phones back then.) I’d see Heidi madly
keyboarding and laughing out loud as she answered his latest posts. I didn’t
see what he did while he answered hers, but presumably he was enjoying their communications to an equal degree.
Finally one day, being nosy, anxious to become a grandma,
and naturally possessed of the matchmaking gene (probably inherited from some long ago Jewish yenta ancestor), I asked Heidi whether something was going on with her and
David. We were sitting at the kitchen table in my apartment, and I have a very
clear picture (not a vision, just your every day garden variety memory) of her
giving me the daughter look. You know, the one that says, poor me, woe is me,
the long suffering daughter of this relentless, deluded woman. Then she told
me, very sternly and with great emphasis (after she asked me to please stop
trying to matchmake her yet again!), that no, she and David were not a couple,
and besides: “Mom, I guarantee you, it will never be David Baker.”
That was about a month or so before they came to all us
parents to ask for consent to be married in a Bahá'í ceremony.
Meanwhile, after that conversation I tried my darndest to put the whole idea out
of mind. I really tried. I did. Honest. But one night a couple weeks after the
kitchen table denial, I woke up from a sound sleep and saw the vision
again and knew, just KNEW, that he really was The One. No matter what she said. Or how firmly she said it. So I got out of bed and wrote his name on a piece of paper and put it in an
envelope and addressed the envelope to myself. Mailed it the next day. Received
it a couple days later. Put it away unopened.
That’s the envelope Heidi mentions in her blog, the one that
is in her wedding book. She and David have never opened the envelope. They just
take my word about its contents.
Not everyone is so trusting.
A couple weeks after I’d mailed myself the envelope, I was
talking to Heidi’s dad (my once and once again husband, but not at that time) and
told him about my vision and about the sealed envelope with its pre-engagement
postmark date that was proof that the vision had actually happened. He
responded by laughing with most undignified gusto, and said, “Hah! You probably
have 16 envelopes with 16 different names in it, and whoever she ends up with,
you’ll say, “See, I knew!”’
Now why didn’t I think of that?
