Chapter Four, "Dear Noah, How Do You Know What You Know?"

Chapter Four: “Noah, How Do You Know What You Know?”

The date of course doesn’t matter because time doesn’t exist, but for the sake of argument make the date July 3, 2024. That means it is today. This morning. But today and yesterday and tomorrow all of that can fall away.

Anyway, it dawned cool and bluebird clear and sunny like the sunflower, and the hummingbirds

are battling it out at the feeders and sucking at the beebalm.

This morning, I struck a deal with my son, who is visiting from Colorado.

I told Noah that I would make another attempt to read Journey of Souls, Case Studies of Life Between Lives, published exactly 30 years ago, a date which of course is meaningless. In return, he would read the new novel I am writing. I call it "Fi and Me," but really the title is "Finding Filomena." It's the true but made up story of my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who had a baby "OUT OF WEDLOCK" -- oh thank God that term is almost dead! -- in 1870 in Calabria in southern Italy.

Anyway it seemed like a good deal that I was proposing. Reasonable.

I’m not sure whether Noah has read any of my previous four novels. When I have asked him in the past, he has always smiled and said that his best friend Chris from college never read any of his mother’s novels either and well, hey, she was a really famous writer. Unlike me. :)

By the strangest coincidence, Chris recently purchased a home ten minutes down the road from us in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. He also owns an elegant apartment in Manhattan. So yes it does make a difference if you manage to sell your novels, like Anita Shreve did. (Sadly, she passed away from cancer in 2018 at the age of 71.)

Two days ago, my husband Richard and our dog Poco and Noah and I sat with Chris and his lovely wife and their son in Chris' backyard and out of the blue Chris turned to me and said he wants to plant a young sugar maple at one end of the yard in honor of his six-month old son. He asked me what I thought of sugar maples.

I was astonished, and I started to chuckle. Had Chris secretly read my first novel? :) “Oh well, I really really love sugar maple trees,” I said.

At which point Noah piped up and said, “My mom’s first novel is all about maple trees, it’s called "Dreaming Maples." That book, published in 2002, took me ONLY :) five years to complete -- during which time I dwelled in an imaginary sugarbush in Vermont with a group of aging women artists.

So maybe Noah does know my work.

But all this is really irrelevant, as in, IT'S NOT IMPORTANT.

What is important is that this morning he said to me, “Mom, you really should read 'Journey of Souls,' -- because I believe that you and I were souls together in previous lives.”

I blinked. I inhaled.

I know when my son is leveling with me. He is. Was. Completely serious about this.

“OK, honey. I’ll try again. But then you have to promise to read a few pages of this story that I am writing about your great great great grandmother Filomena Scrivano who gave birth to our venerable ancestor, your great great grandfather Pasquale Orzo, in southern Italy in 1870.”

So we made a pact and that morning, meaning this morning, he took the blue folder and started reading my story and instantly he made improvements in the opening paragraph. It's amazing what a good writer he is. But that is really not the point either.

The point is that suddenly I realized that Noah

is going to be part of the book that you are reading, because he is so immersed in thinking about past lives. For the past six or seven years, Noah has been informally studying with a rather remarkable healer in Longmont, Colorado, a wizard of a man that we all refer to as Dr. A. He is a functional medicine doctor.

Noah convinced both me and my husband and my daughter to see Dr. A (in person and via Zoom) and just as Noah promised, he has helped with a variety of difficult health issues. Part of his success comes from the fact that he often focuses on the emotional underpinnnings of illness. Dr. A is the person who introduced Noah to the book, "Journey of Souls."

Past lives is a subject that has long fascinated me. It figured in my third book, Sister Mysteries, which took me ONLY 23 years to write. It was a haunting story about my life as a nun, Sister Renata, in California in the late 1800s. I wasn't able to finish the novel until I underwent Past Life Regression Therapy with a practioner in New York City.

So yes, I have had at least one past life that I know of, living in a stucco convent tucked into a golden hillside, surrounded by bay trees, the sun blazing down on the old blue and white tiled courtyard. But still, reading "Journey of Souls" has been challenging for me. The book has been sitting on my nightstand for who knows how long.

So today I said to my son:

“The outer story I am trying to write honey is all about the soul… and maybe its journies. I realize that you are trying to teach me about the soul just the way you have taught me about so many other spiritual and health matters. So I am going to write about you in the book -- if that’s OK with you. “

He was sitting on the couch, legs propped on the coffee table. He was busy working on his laptop -- he is a consultant to solar energy developers around the U.S. The issues he works on are highly complex. He was, at the same time, listening to an audio by the famous spiritual leader, Ram Das. He told me he wasn't actually absorbing Ram's words. He just liked the sound of Ram's voice in the background. "It really relaxes me," he said.

How he manages to do two things at once I’m not sure but that’s not the point either.

He paused, and looking up at me. He smiled. “Cool, Mom, just be nice to me in the book, will you?”