I can't get everything I want at Alice's Restaurant

Monday, October 04, 2004
  Premonition and strange reactions....


911 My premonition
By Tova Gabrielle:

My flambouyantly gay host, Tony, was one of three who could tolerate my usage of “Judgement Day”, amongst my peers, the baby boomers. I’m convinced, that other than such few open minds it is the younger generation who are our only hope, as demonstrated by my twenty three year old housemate’s tears upon hearing my story. Others had turned defensively amnesic, new patriots like Arlo, who said who would have thought he’d ever find himself able to say he likes Bush. Even he didn’t appreciate my usage, although he denies it is so when I confront him. Arlo told the woman in the old church he’d bought and turned into a center (where, “Alice” had reputedly once lived) that I didn’t know what I was saying. In fact, he further consoled, what I was saying was akin to telling a rape victim that she’d been asking for it.
I felt like I was in a bad dream and weaseled off the former pulpit where Arlo and the dozen or so others sat on the floor, hoping to sneak undetected, past the candle-lit tables down where the pews had been, then out the door to disappear into night.
It had been only a week after the Eleventh. I’d traveled an hour and a half in hopes of finding some resolution regarding my “vision” amongst people who didn’t know me, in case it went wrong. Which it had done, certainly. But my need mixed with hope, and made me stay for the meditation Arlo led.
After that I was again ready to go, but a woman with white hair and otherwise young in appearance, sat down at my table and gave me a warm smile.
“I’m surprised you will even talk to me after my schpiel,” I said, “Don’t you think I’m a terrorist?” I missed it; I came in late. I just came over because I was drawn to you.
But it sounds interesting—I’d like to hear what happened. “Well, I tried, unsuccessfully, to share a premonition I’d had,” I began. “I even drove out here from Amherst, just to be amongst people who I don’t know but who I thought could appreciate what happened to me. I guess, though, that people are defensive everywhere right now.”
Oh stay, people are understanding, come out and tell me all about it over refreshments. I demurred, curious what would develop next if I stayed. We sat on an old couch and I said to her, you look so familiar. Well, I haven’t been around your parts in many years but you do too, she said. You remind me of a woman named Laura who was a psychic. That would have been me, I grinned, exposed of my other life in this one.
A woman burst into our bubble and sat on the arm of my couch just then. Hi sweetie, I loved your dream she said, of the first part of my speech to Arlo that had ended up almost catching fire. Oh thank you, I said. I’m glad someone did. I’m Tova. I’m Jackie, Arlo’s wife, she said warmly and I was in love. She felt so damn homey, just the thing to go with his old songs. But I liked her better. Then he walked in. I looked up and said, hey, Arlo so you think I was saying I support terrorism and I’m blaming the victims.” No he said, but I had to do something to stop where things could have gone. “Then you understood what I was saying?” Sure, but I had to protect you, too.
People weren’t ready to hear that.
So what else is new. Timing is not my strength.
A few weeks later either timing changed or I met someone more of like mind. I was invited to the Catskills to help my friend, Vicki, deal with the contents of an inherited family estate, Tack Tavern. This turned out to be the place where court was held after the burning of nearby Kingston, by the British, that she’d inherited the contents of and I was there to make sure in the end that some things stayed, and in so doing, made my contribution to history by aiding in the creation of it’s being a historical museum.
The man who was buying the place was our host, Tony. After awhile I told Vickie that Tony was more like me than I am: A raging mind, but one in which he resides without, apparently starting small fires everywhere he goes.
When do you come down? I asked him. He said oh he did, in a crumbling of insecurities now and then but somehow it didn’t sound to me as if it spilled into the rest of his life. Tony is the kind of person who grabs my hand and whisks me out to his yuppie van to go buy deserts when I suggest wanting apple crumb cake after dinner. Tony is the kind of guy who tells me I’m a Goddess when I say you’d better go straight and marry me and who also says hey, it wouldn’t take much, his partner is the evil butt head. And when I meet him, I discover that the evil butt head is as kind and considerate, as Tony is a card. Tony looks and does schtick that reminds me of Robin Williams. Tony is my angel in the world, I tell Tim, the butt head, apologetically, hoping he’ll believe this is a purely spiritual interest of mine and that I’ll be invited back for another weekend of pure joy and servitude from these two endlessly energetic and selfless men.
In the van ride to pick out desserts for the nine guests who’ve arrived to fight over furniture, but not if we can help it. In the end I have gone through the rooms and touched the pieces that seem charged and in the end no one wants to move them, especially after I mentioned of the small statuettes of George and Martha, that, anyone who take these are taking the spirits that seem to be attached to them. (The spirits, it seems, are not “haunting” the estate, i.e. not “hangers on” but are preserving history in those three hundred year old rooms.)
So, the renewal of my psychic life aside, back to the van ride with Tony. OK, so Tony tells me he lives in Manhattan during the week, in fact 8 blocks from the WTC. Was lying in his bed when a plane went by, thinking, “that plane is flying awfully low”. Then heard the first explosion, wondered about burst pipelines, I believe, (I don’t remember, was probably too interested in my own story to take note). But when he hears the second explosion, he pulls on his shorts, grabs his flip flops and runs out the door towards the fires, which he says without apology were astoundingly, eerily beautiful. Just in case that sounds approving of him, let me say that Tony was not sympathetic, but only observing the facts. Neither am I a terrorist sympathizer, although the night before the incident I found myself putting up a bumper sticker on my car that read, “Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society”. It came off promptly on the eleventh. Although I’m no sympathizer, my undiscerning subconscious has no taste, it seems.
Well, I tell Tony my story. Which follows: Three days before the attacks I’m flying back from my daughter’s graduation from her internship as a therapist, in Berkeley, and I’m feeling very somber. I get home Saturday night and on Sunday I can’t shake this foreboding feeling. For one thing my son has gone off his mind again from the travelling, and for another; it feels like Armageddon is here. I get this weird thought. Its not just a thought, it’s a sense of completeness, as in doom. As in doomsday, as in about to occur. Like a stack of dominoes is about to collapse and all I can think of is that stupid phrase, “The Judgement Day”. But there it is and it’s not stupid, it’s not manipulative, it’s just what is. All the data of all our sins against humanity is in and something inevitable is about to happen. So I turn to my sometimes significant other there in my living room, and say, hey Gersh—you know what yesterday was? What? It was the judgement day. Now had he been in his typical Hassidic mind set he would have corrected me, saying, no, that is next week, Yum Kippur. But he’s learned to listen to me. What do you mean? Well, I guess there really truly is a judgement day in the world and I’m getting a strong hit that it was yesterday. The shit’s going to fly. We both do the equivalent of shudder, which is to look at each other and wonder what the hell I’m talking about. But there it is.
Only, I can’t tell this to anyone after the event three days later. Except I do eventually seek out one person, and not a likely one, at that, but he seems to have been touched by the Gods. Gods as in energy bundles. Energy bundles as in angels.
My friend, Rabbi Chaim is truly intelligent: he knows how to listen and listen deeply. So I relay that I had this thought about the judgement day and he says, well God talks to you and you listen. Simplistic sounding, yes. But. Judgement Day? I query him. Yes, of course, things like that don’t happen without a judgement first. But it is up to humans to choose whether or not to carry out the judgements. I feel deeply validated and go home to let that incubate in my troublesome subconscious. He must be speaking of the energy bundles known to the students of Jewish Mysticism and the Hussids, as accusing angels, and certainly not the defending ones. He must mean that to all events we can choose to respond in accusatory manners which then justify our getting even in the world, or we can respond to our defending angels which keep us safe, and in fact, open to amazing blessings, ways around all kinds of evil. For instance. The Native American who walks through a battle and because no one notices him, he is in fact, invisible to them because he is on such a different plane than those who do battle, can not be harmed and is absolutely untouched in the line of fire. Like a dream I’d had in 1970 when the third wold war hit but a group of people walked through debris from bombs protected by an invisible to others, but golden to the deep seeing eye, aura, or energy field.
Yes, it’s that time in history we’ve all been waiting for and dreading folks.
My friend, Tony says to me that if there were an alien invasion the whole world would unite against a common enemy when I say that maybe this event is the beginning of world unity because deep down we all love the world, and no one wants to see it end.
I hope. More than hope, this is what the defending angels told me.