My First Guitar
In the summer of 1968, I got a used guitar from my parent’s life insurance sales agent, Mr. Valero. He’s long gone, on the other side. But, whether alive or dead, I thank him very much for being a good friend and positively influencing my life. It was a blonde acoustic guitar. I remember it hurt while I developed callouses on my fingers. But once I started, I couldn’t stop, and my addiction to music was born. Of course, I already loved the 60s, for it was the most creative, artistic, and exciting time ever. But learning the guitar excelled my life to a new level.
Once a month, Mr. Valero would stop by our house to collect his insurance payment, and we struck up a friendship. He was from my grandfather’s generation, so my first real friend from the WWI generation.
Being an intelligent Aquarian, I quickly made friends. He started teaching me a few chords and a couple of simple songs. Then in the evening in summer, when the weather cooled down, I’d sling my guitar over my shoulder and walk the neighborhoods looking for guitar-loving, porch-dwellers like myself. After all, it was the 1960s, and music was in the air. We were in the middle of the most outstanding music revival ever, inspired by the Beatles and the incredible music of the British invasion years.
People would wave me over, and I’d go, just like that, no fear, no hesitation. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend doing that now, but these were different times and love-filled the air. By the time I met Mary, I had quite the repertoire. She was sitting on the steps of the pizza shop down by the loop on the right hand as you turned the corner to head up California Avenue with her guitar, and we instantly hit it off. She was pretty in her way, as I was pretty in mine. We were different but complemented each other. I had long sandy hair, and she had black hair, shiny and dark as night.
She had the most stunning voice. She told me she started singing quite early, and they featured her on local television shows in Ohio, her home state. We hit it off right away. She taught me songs, and I taught her, and like my childhood friend Cherilyn, she and I could harmonize. She said she had sung live on television for many years in Ohio on local kids’ shows. That impressed me, and being a year older, she knew more than I did.
Piecing together my timeline, this must be the summer of 1969, the year I started dating Landon. He wasn’t with me all the time at first. I had taken his virginity, opening up the genie’s bottle. But, like his father, who cheated on his mother, Landon was out getting sexual notches on his penis now that I taught him what he needed to know. I enjoyed being his Dakini (sacred sexual healer) because I was madly in love with him. But he fell in like, not love. So, with renewed confidence and a 1966 Mustang, he set out on the hunt for girls, and since he was very handsome, I’m sure he caught plenty.
I wasn’t into that cheating stuff, so I masked my pain with music. After all, we weren’t exclusive. I just liked him; he would come and tap this, then rotate, just like other boys I’ve known before (namely Laramie). Young men were in heat while young women, desperate to find “the one and only,” completed the dichotomy of love.
Mary fulfilled a part of me I didn’t know was missing. We weren’t in each other’s lives for long, but many things happened that propelled me along my life’s path.
Mary’s UFO Story
She and I were both ET contactees. When she was about 10, a UFO landed in the vacant lot at the corner of her street. Everyone went down there and looked at it, right in broad daylight. It parked there motionless and let the humans gather themselves for the feast. When enough people showed, the ETs hypnotized them, brought them on board, took off, did their thing, then returned them, blanking their minds. Only one thing went wrong. Mary did not forget, as she remembered everything.
The next day, she returned to the corner lot. The military had it blocked off and wouldn’t let anyone near it. When they finally left, there was no sign that anything odd had happened there. This event was one of the first times I heard about the American UFO/ET cover-up. By the time
I was 15; I already had more contact than most people get their entire lives. I loved getting confirmation, and Mary was one of the first people I’ve met who had such clarity. She wasn’t lying, as I am psychic enough to know the signs of someone who’s not telling the truth. And she had no reason to lie or try to impress me. And I’m not even sure why we got on the UFO topic, as it was super taboo back then. But there we were. The dam was open.
Married to a Vietnam Vet
Mary married a man getting drafted to keep him from going to Vietnam. So early in the Vietnam War, if you were married, the military would not send you to Nam. But that policy changed and was no longer in effect, and Mary and her friend didn’t know that, so they proceeded with their marriage of convenience. So, unfortunately, that ploy didn’t work, and before she knew it, she was married and living alone.
Mary’s Stepfather is a Pervert
She moved back in with her mother, who thought she married off her only daughter and thus found love and got married. That made things awkward as Mary suddenly had a super crazy and horny stepfather. He chased Mary all over the house, expecting her to have sex with him. The mother knew, so she told Mary to run and protect herself but not let him catch her.
From this perspective, writing this up in 2022, such behavior ends in arrest, and he would spend a lot of quality time in prison. But those were different times back then. Her mother didn’t want to be alone, so she was unwilling to divorce him. Mary loved her mother wanted her to have someone to love as she was getting old, so she kept running and tolerated the situation as best she could. Then I came along with a solution, and everyone relaxed and felt relieved.
These are not the kinds of problems that a 15-year-old child should have to face. But this is not the first time I’ve been to the rodeo. Kids were coming to me for years with their sexual abuse issues. I became a child therapist when I was a child myself. I wish I had training back then, for I could have been much more effective.
But I was born very empathetic and functioned on pure instinct, plus guidance from ETs, angels, and higher spiritual beings. So listening was an essential first step. I wish we had resources, but no one wanted their family members arrested and end up in prison, for they were the ones putting a roof over their heads and food on their tables. So we all lived in one giant Catch-22.
Sexual Predators of the 60s
In the 1950s and 1960s, sexual predators were quite common. My neighborhood was insane. You never wanted to be alone with an older male. And if there were younger female children in your family, you needed to watch them like a hawk. I’m not even sure how safe little boys were. It was as though men were in perpetual heat and women were supposed to satisfy them in endless, loveless sex. But if they did, society labeled them sluts and whores. Every woman was supposed to be a virgin when they got married. Yet all these men of all ages were supposed to have their sexual needs met on demand whenever they wanted.
It was a strange world indeed, and often the only way women could keep a job or even get one in the first place was by being available sexually to their bosses, who were married. Then, if they were to get pregnant, it was their fault, and society labeled them sluts or promiscuous. And abortions were illegal, so some died during these back-alley abortions. It was a vast, convoluted mess. Then Roe v. Wade passed, and the world became a little saner. But now they’re trying to reverse it, and it’s just insane.
Mary Moves In
So I told my parents what was happening and asked if Mary could come live with us. My sister and brother were out on their own. So we had two empty bedrooms. She wanted to finish high school as she dropped out to become a wife. But that didn’t work. Fall was coming, and I was going to school, so she wanted to go as well. She didn’t want to get a job, and she couldn’t just sit around my house all day. That was not the arrangement. My parents surprised me, did as I asked, figured out how to become her foster parents, and registered Mary for school. That shocked me. They were here to support me.
In addition, since Mary was legally married to a soldier, she received money every month. So she could support herself and buy her food and clothes, so they would not have to do much but provide her with a roof over her head. Not that they wouldn’t share, as they always did. No one would starve, although my parents experienced a lot of economic challenges most of their lives. So Mary and I went back to school in the fall. Since she was a year older, they put her in the 11th grade.
While we were technically teenagers, basically little girls, not entirely women, we were both sexually active and thought we knew it all. She was married, and I started dating an 18-year-old, a man, that summer when I was 15. So we just barely missed violating the age of consent issue.
But there are ramifications for being a sexually active female in a sexually repressive high school. Our world was sexually repressive, and simultaneously, the sexual revolution of free love and experimentation was on the rise. But in the end, who suffered the most but the women who got pregnant or labeled. The world’s always been full of hypocrisy.
High School Bullies
While sex was happening everywhere, we were supposed to remain virgins until we were adults and married. Hypocrisy rules the world, and high school was no different. So the boys started acting out and sticking me with straight pins. I wore miniskirts, and the boys would come up right under the hemline, stick me and run. That hurt; the shock of it almost made me fall or drop my books. We didn’t have book bags back then, so we often had our arms full.
While I had known them since kindergarten, I would not date any of them, but they felt sexual attraction towards me. I was cute and growing up nicely. My dad spoiled me and bought me a nice wardrobe, so I looked good.
But I could only tolerate that for so long and skipped school to avoid all that abuse. And I felt embarrassed, so I didn’t tell anyone. Besides, if you were a snitch in school, it would be 100 times worse. So they doomed me either way, so I quit and got my GED in 1970, two years before my class graduated. I was a nerd, so I had enough credits to graduate at the end of 10th grade. So I started working as soon as possible. But I get ahead of myself, for that didn’t happen for another year.
Mary’s Marriage
Mary agreed to marry her best male friend to help him evade the draft but never intended to be his life partner. She laughed nervously at her wedding, and some people said that wedding and commented on the girl who laughed through her wedding day. Bizarre.
The Move
I turned 16, passed my driver’s test, and my dad got me a car. My sister was having problems with her husband. I’m not sure when she divorced him, but he was an abusive jerk, and she would have to run from him, or he would have killed her. So I helped her move 17 times in those early days till she finally got him out of his life. So, as always, I come up with plans to help everyone. That’s always been my genius.
Louise, Mary, and I discovered these lovely new apartments almost finished at the edge of town overlooking the Ohio River. With my parent’s consent, we moved in and split the rent. I had a car to get Mary and me to and from school every weekday. Louise worked, and Mary got support from her military husband. We agreed to keep our new residence private and not let anyone know, especially Louise’s husband, John. It sounded like a good plan, so we negotiated the lease, signed it, and moved in.
I wanted to engage more fully with Landon. We were falling in love. I was crazy about him, as I’d been dreaming about him since I met him when I was twelve years old. He seemed to be everything I wanted. While I didn’t have birth control even though the pill existed, I had a book called “The Rhythm Method.” I followed the strategies outlined in that book for many years, and it seemed to work. Unfortunately, my mother left it on my bed when I turned 13. I immediately started a calendar to keep track of my periods.
Even though I wasn’t planning on having sex, I knew when I was potentially the most fertile and was super cautious about even thinking about sex during those periods. I avoided things like intimate parties and events with drinking, and I think my strategy worked. The key was to remain conscious and avoid compromising situations and date rape scenarios. As a result, I avoided pregnancy while at least three of my closest friends got pregnant and had babies when they were teenagers. Unfortunately, Roe v. Wade was not yet law and wouldn’t happen until January 2, 1973. And I did not want to get pregnant until I was well into my twenties.
Sneaking sex at my parent’s house was getting tricky and didn’t feel right. If I had my bedroom in a shared apartment, I could freely engage and explore this new relationship with the man I intended to marry. So this move was a plus for me.
Mary tries to kill herself to get her husband out of the Vietnam War.
So we get moved in. I have sex with my boyfriend, and I’m floating on cloud nine. I never felt so free and happy. I had arrived in salvation in total joy and bliss. But, my happiness did not last long. I get up to go to the bathroom, and Mary’s left her bedroom door open. I look into her room and see that she’s passed out on the floor. I check on her, and she’s not waking up. I go back into the bathroom and find empty pill bottles.
I launch into emergency mode, “Landon, I think Mary has overdosed on these pills.” He comes to investigate. I show him the empty bottles, and he reaches the same conclusion. Running to Mary, he grabs her with little effort, picks her up, and yells, “I’m taking her to the emergency room!” It impressed me he could think and respond so fast. So off he goes.
Meanwhile, my sister Louise called her husband in a panic, revealed where we lived, and he was on his way over to cause trouble (as usual). Landon returns after Mary’s stabilized as they pump her stomach just in time. At some point, Landon and John got into a huge fight. Landon and John were both street gang-type fighters. But John always fought dirty with knives, so I’m not sure how Landon escaped without injury.
I cannot remember what happened, as I was so traumatized by all that unfolded. But bottom line, we got evicted because of the fight and the extreme amount of noise we made in the middle of the night. Louise had to run again, and I’m not sure what she did and where she ended up living. Meanwhile, Mary and I moved back in with Mom and Dad. I felt devastated, defeated, and furious; I didn’t speak to Louise for a year because of her betrayal. There was no need to call her husband.
Mary gets molested in the hospital.
One would think a hospital would be a pretty safe place, full of doctors and nurses. But instead, the hospital put Mary into the psych ward after attempting suicide. While she was recovering from getting her stomach pumped, she awoke in the night because a man was fondling her breasts. She screamed, and he ran away, but no one believed her because she was in the psych ward.
At the beginning of visiting hours, I went there the next day and asked her why she tried to kill herself. She said she was honoring her promise to her husband. I said, “Well, you could’ve at least warned me. If I hadn’t discovered you, you would be dead.” She replied, “Well if I had told you, you would have tried to stop me. Besides, I knew you’d find me because you always figure things out.”
She referred to my magical, mystical, psychic abilities, and yes, she was right. I would have tried to stop her. But, since I also know things on such a deep level, I would have sensed something wrong (as I did) and found her just in time. So, I let it go. Meanwhile, Mary’s husband came home immediately from Vietnam. The plan worked.
Mary & Gary
I introduced Mary to all of my friends, and they all accepted her as that’s what we did back then. We were pure, not having formed judgments and prejudices yet, which develop later and often not at all for some.
Ed’s best friend was Gary, and he and Mary immediately hit it off. Between 1968 to 1970, most of my female friends got pregnant. I thought they were all crazy, and while I was having sex, I used my system to avoid fertile days. But I think all the other girls wanted to get pregnant, and there were no accidents. I knew I was not ready; I had decided long ago that I didn’t want children until I was in my twenties. But, unbeknown to me, Mary had a plan. Mary, being extremely strong-willed, always got what she wanted.
Mary gets pregnant
Mary knew what she wanted and got pregnant right away. Of course, getting married didn’t keep her first husband out of Nam, but maybe being married and pregnant would be the key.
Gary joins the Navy to avoid the draft.
That didn’t work, so Gary, like my brother Bill, joined the Navy to avoid Nam. Everyone wanted to avoid Vietnam, for classmates and neighbors kept coming home in body bags, blown up or suffering from PTSD. No one who went to Vietnam escaped some harm. Vets could rarely form lasting relationships as the war messed them up psychologically. With most of the best, strong and healthy men gone overseas, my sisters and others of my generation had to settle for the ones the military rejected.
Gary & Mary moved to San Diego, and she and I became Pen Pals.
Mary and Gary got married, and she stayed in Pittsburgh while he went into the Navy. Then, finally, she gave birth and moved back in with her mother. Her ex-husband lived directly across the street. They waved at each other from their porches with babies in arms. It was very surreal. But everyone was glad and with their proper mates.
Mary got pregnant with baby number two. By then, Gary got his assignment in San Diego, and she moved there to give birth to her second child and live with them. So we began writing, and that was our only form of keeping connected. We did not have internet back in those days, and long-distance was out of the question as it was super pricey.
They didn’t last long, but Mary never stayed single, even with kids in tow. I think she got married two or three more times and ended up producing about five or six kids.
She ended up living with someone in the Gulf. I think it was Louisiana, and I could never imagine her living so deep in the South. So this letter period led to a sequence of revelations that was seriously detrimental to her and gave me insights into things that bothered me all my life. I am forever grateful for her bravery to share her truth finally. It forever changed me and set me on my path when I read it.
For truth sets us free, even though it pisses people off and may hurt others who want to see reality in ways that suit their preconceived notions. But the truth is truth, and when you finally see it, you feel it in your bones, into the deepest parts of your soul. There’s no way she could have known these things if they hadn’t happened to her. There’s just no way she could understand, as I told no one. But there it was, in print, right in front of my face.
Our Letters
I’m not sure why Mary started this series of confession letters. She told me she could always project astrally and often saw the future, ghosts, ETs, and UFOs. She spoke freely about her past lives and how she knew we had known each other before in a previous life the first time we met. I looked forward to her letters, and as time went on, I explained more about my own paranormal life. Finally, I could talk freely. I felt happy that, at last, I had a friend who could understand the craziness I endured all my life.
Mary and the Ghoul in the stairwell at my house
A letter came that was exceptionally shocking. Mary explained she was always curious about the stairwell, made more seductive because my mother forbade us to open the door that led to the staircase in the kitchen blocked by the dryer pushed up against it. So she waited till my parents were at church one Sunday morning. And she kept me up talking super late the night before, so I slept in late.
She went downstairs, moved the dryer away from the door, and opened up the forbidden door. Never in my life was that door open. But suddenly, while I was deeply asleep, I bolted upright in my bed, jumped out, and ran downstairs. I didn’t even think about it consciously, as I was in full reactive, automatic mode. I rushed to the bathroom door on the wall opposite the stairwell door. Mary had locked it from the inside. I screamed through the door, “Mary, what’s wrong? Why are you screaming?” But I listened, and amazingly, she was not screaming, but I heard her crying out telepathically! That was the first time I experienced human telepathy.
Finally, she found her voice. “Look behind you!” I turned around and saw it, a horrid, snarling, gigantic ghoul coming ever closer to me from out of the stairwell door, which now stood wide open. I slid to the floor. Everything loose in the kitchen swirled around as if a tornado had it in its grip. Items smashed against the wall and broke into millions of pieces. I opened my mouth to scream, but the noise was deafening; I’m not sure if I made a sound or was so panicked that nothing came out.
Meanwhile, my parents were in church three blocks away. My father, a Deacon, sat in the back in the receiving room. He was to greet any latecomers who walked in the door. Mom jumped up out of her seat, rushed back to Bill, and said, “Get your car. We have to go home right now!” My father always obeyed my mother and immediately did as she spoke. So they drove home, and she had him pull up on the side by our house. She threw the door open flew up the front stairs into the house and to the kitchen in the back.
With the magical force of an ancient wizard, she grabbed the beast and its whirlwind and shoved it back into the stairs. She slammed the door closed and, in one move, pushed the dryer back in its place. By then, I was standing, and Mary had emerged from behind the closed door to stand beside me. Our mouths were gaping open, shocked looks on our faces; my mother walked right up to us so close she could spit on our faces. Then, with a look that could kill, she calmly says, “I told you never to open that door.”
She turned in a huff and, with the fury of the Gods, bolted out of the room and never discussed it again.
I had blocked it all. Decades had gone by, and I finally knew the truth. The moment I read Mary’s accounting, every detail came back to me as if it was happening now. I saw, heard, felt it, an event so traumatic my mind had to wipe it so I could remain sane and continue with my life. How did Does Mary know it was time that I had developed and grown enough to handle the knowledge that I had faced a demon from hell in broad daylight in the middle of 20th century “normal” America?
But now, I lived in a significant fundamental change, never going back to that old world I knew before I opened that letter. There was nothing ordinary about life anymore. We live in a state of ignorance, my reality shattered. This shit is accurate. You cannot make this up. And I didn’t make it up, and neither was she imagining it. So what was I going to do with that information? How can I go back to the “real world” and do life as I had before?
Gary calls Patty when her phone gets hooked up.
Pamela and Edgar spent the early part of their marriage making up and breaking up, then getting back together again. They had two children back to back, a boy and a girl. They did everything imaginable, cheated, fought, but something kept bringing them back again. They’re still together now and have been for over 50 years, as far as I know. They have grown kids, grandkids, and even great-grandkids. If they’re still alive, they’re the longest-lasting couple I know from my baby boomer generation.
So when Pamela left Edgar and set up her new house, she got a new phone. The technician hands her a slip. “What’s this?” she asked. “Your new phone number,” the technician replied and left. The door was barely closed, and the phone rang. It’s Mary’s Gary. “Hi Pamela,” he says. “How in the world did you get this number? I haven’t even had the time to memorize it myself.” “I’ve been keeping track of you. I work for the Navy, and we can do anything.” Click. He hung up.
Amazed, she hung up with me and immediately called me to tell me what had happened. The plot thickened. Our governments know. And somehow, we’re worth keeping track of with high, futuristic tech. What’s going on?
Mary loses custody of her children because of her writing to me.
Mary wrote periodically. But frankly, I kept moving, escaping dysfunctional family and relationships. I eventually ran across the planet from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, and wherever I went, there I was. Then, finally, I realized I was the common factor, and no matter how much I wanted to blame others, the buck stopped with me. I started talk therapy in the 90s, and I’m glad I did. It wasn’t always perfect, but treatment works, and without it, I wouldn’t be alive. I know that as a fact.
Poor Mary said one of her later husbands, who was the father of two or more of her children, sued for custody. When she was on the stand trying to keep her kids, he read my letters to her to the judge. The Southerners did not take kindly to our non-Christian beliefs and thought Mary was a witch. Because we wrote about such things, they took her children away. I’m not sure if she ever got them back. I felt devastated by such shocking news. We lost touch for a while as her newest husband forbade her to write to me.
Mary and I wed in my Lincoln Era incarnation.
Years later, I found her letters and re-read them. She told me she recalled being my wife from the Lincoln Era incarnation that I shared with her when we lived together. I had forgotten that we even discussed it. Years before, I told her I was a boy who witnessed Lincoln’s death. Later married, I had three children, two girls, a boy, and a beautiful wife. When I told her my past life story, she, too, had a flashback and understood everything I said was factual. We had three children and some wealth, for we dressed well and seemed content. But she hurt for the rest of that life because I died relatively young, leaving her alone to raise the children. This lifetime was a time for forgiveness and healing.
Mary felt uncomfortable telling me about it as we were best friends, female and both heterosexual and monogamous. When she told me she was living with me, I was dating Landon, and she was dating (not sure which boyfriend). I understood her hesitation, and now, years later, I have the sophistication and understanding to process that information.
Mary has a miracle child after getting her tubes tied.
I moved to Hawaii, and every year I went home for a month to visit my family. I worked temp jobs to stop working when I wanted to, plus I’ve always been good at saving money so I could afford to fly home and travel. Mary contacted my mother and found out when I would be home. She needed to see her mother, who was frail and slowly dying, so she returned home to Pennsylvania from the deep South. This time she was with a kind man and, at last, had the love and support she always lacked.
She had a young girl who was probably about five or six. She loved her immensely and explained that she was a miracle child. “What do you mean by that?” Mary told me how she got her tubes tied. Before that, she could get pregnant at the drop of a hat and had about six children.
Then, after her tubal ligation, Mary met her new man. They felt full as she had kids, and so did he, and together they committed to finish raising their two clans. Then, surprise, despite it all, she became pregnant. The doctors were amazed by this, and her miracle child was born. Although, since Mary had been having female troubles, her doctors advised her never to get pregnant again, for it was dangerous for her and the baby.
“She’s my angel, and she just wanted to be born. So she had to come through me, and she defied everyone so she could be here.” It delighted me to meet her little angel. I could see they shared a special love and that Mary and her last husband would endure till the end of this life.
I never saw Mary again. After all these decades, I cannot locate her, and I do not know her new last name. You see, women change their names, and thus it’s hard to find them, especially after many marriages. So we lose each other. But maybe we’ll reconnect on the other side. Who knows? She’s forever in my heart, and I’ll never forget her. Yet my life is so full of new things; I’m lovely with what is.
