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Four days before my mother's birthday a couple years back, we were sitting around in her kitchen and she says to me "How would you like to go down to the Colorado Heritage Museum with me today and look at the exhibit they have on 'The 30's' decade?"

There were two little voices inside my brain with two different ideas. My puny little reptile brain (the basic survival core brain named by Dr. Paul MacLean) is saying "Ugh, how boring. Doesn't your mother know you have better things to do with your time? The big game is on this afternoon, you've got music to work on, people to see ... Tell her you're BUSY!" (The reptile brain thinks "me me ME!")

Okay, so I then I CLICK MY AMYGDALA FORWARD which causes an increase of electrochemical activity to occur in my frontal lobes, and THEN there's this other little voice inside my head and it's saying "Well, you know, your mother does stuff for you all the time, I mean you're HERE aren't you? It might be nice to actually do something with her once in a while. You would make her happy, which could be good for you. Go on." (The frontal lobes compute cooperation).

So, I remember the time my brain teacher T. D. A. Lingo actually said to me "Take care of your mom", and so mom and I happily head off down to the museum. We get there, and they've got all this stuff from the 30's, and it's actually QUITE interesting.

There's furniture, cars, clothes, and some old newspapers and magazines.

My mom is standing there looking at these old magazines and she says, "You know, your father [he died in 1986] once told me when he was a kid and he was a caddy, some famous artist saw him on the golf course and asked him if he could paint his picture, and it ended up on the front of some magazine. I think he said it was the Saturday Evening Post."

"What? Are you sure?," I exclaimed. "He never said anything to me about that."

Mom, trying to remember, said, "Yes, I think that's what he said. It seems to me he said The Saturday Evening Post," She was slightly scratching her head, perhaps jogging a few neural connections with her fingertips.

"Did you ever see it? I mean didn't he save a copy or anything?" I asked.

"No. I never saw anything. He just told me it once. You know, he was maybe eleven or twelve years old, and I'm sure his parents didn't even make a big deal about it, they were too busy taking care of the chickens on their chicken farm."

So, a couple of days later I went across the street to the big Denver Public Library and asked to see all the Saturday Evening Posts from 1930 to 1938. This was the time when my father would have been around the age my mom said. It took the librarian about fifteen minutes before they brought the old bound issues upstairs on a cart. The pile of magazines was literally five feet high. The Post came out every week. So I sat down and started at 1930 and went through every single volume, one week's cover at a time.

After about a half an hour I turned the page at July 18, 1936 and yelled....

"That's him!!"

Everyone in the library must have heard me. THERE was MY DAD, a young golf caddy holding a bag of clubs, exactly as my mother had described the picture. The caddy had a scowl on his face. In the portrait he was rubbing his butt, turned around looking to see who had hit him with a mis-aimed golf ball, the ball now lying on the ground after bouncing off of his rear-end.

(My dad later turned out to be an incredible golfer, one year winning the New Jersey Pro-Am championship.)

I talked the librarian into letting me borrow the bound volume for an hour and I went and made a copy of it. I took the magazine cover over to Mom's house, right on time for her birthday and left it there on the kitchen table.

I stopped by again a couple hours later, and there she was, sitting at the table with tears in her eyes. It was the first time she had ever actually seen the magazine. We got out some old pictures when my dad was 13 years old. It sure was him. The ears, the hair, even the space between his front teeth he had his whole life. My dad had pulled off a trick that even Harry Houdini wasn't able to accomplish. He had sent a birthday greeting to my mom from across the great beyond.

And there was something else that made it all even a bit stranger. On this particular issue right next to my dad's picture was the name "Benj. Franklin". The magazine was originally founded by Ben Franklin, and they said so on every cover. I was born exactly on Benjamin Franklin's birthday several decades later.

Harry Houdini told his wife that when he died he would try to come back and leave a message. And that she could tell if it was really him through this coded message: "Rosabelle, believe". If the medium who was supposedly bringing his messages back omitted this phrase, his wife would know it was a fake.

Several years ago, a full year after my father died, it was my birthday this time. I got up about 10 AM, and the first thing, I turned on my telephone answering machine to see if anyone had called while I had slept in. There were no messages, but lately the messages didn't sound so good, and the tape sounded kind of worn. So, I decided it would be a good idea to flip the cassette over and start using the other side of the tape.

I turned the tape over and turned the machine on, and nearly dropped dead myself.

It was my father's voice, and he said

THIS Windows Media

or

THIS  Real Player

(play either link above)

I swear to god this is the absolute truth. Every year, the first thing I do when I get up on my birthday is play that greeting from my father from the mystery beyond.

You figure it out.

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