Communications From the Other Side. Anthony Quinata
deck. I wondered why she was so upset. It wasn’t like I knew what I was doing.
The next day my mother received a phone call from one of her sisters telling her that my grandfather was in the hospital, but not to worry. The doctors said that he was doing fine and would be out soon. After my mother got off of the phone, she asked me, again, how I could possibly have known that my grandfather was in the hospital.
“As I said,” I told her, “it’s what the cards were telling me.” The truth is the cards weren’t telling any such thing. I just remember it was a feeling I got when I was looking at them.
My mother was so shaken by what happened that she told our next door neighbor about it. Our neighbor, while stunned because what I “predicted” turned out to be true, apparently found the whole thing funny as well.
“Wow! Are you a psychic, Anthony? Are you a fortune teller?” she asked me, laughing hysterically.
“I’m not a psychic,” I thought. “I don’t have a star in the palm of my hand.”
A week later my mother asked me to tell her fortune again. I got the cards and started laying them out the same way I had done before. This time I didn’t finish . . . I stopped when I got a “feeling” from one of the cards. Even today, I remember the card; it was the nine of clubs.
“You’re going to break your leg,” I said, hesitantly. I remember being afraid to even look up at her.
Her reaction was exactly the same as when I told her that her father was in the hospital. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re going to have an accident, and you’re going to break your leg,” I told her, still not wanting to look at her, so I just continued staring at the cards.
My mother didn’t want to hear any more of my nonsense. Once again, without saying a word, she got up and walked away.
A couple of days later my mother had taken my sister Nadine, who was just a few months old, for a checkup. When she came back home, she lifted Nadine out of the car and noticed toys in a neighbor’s yard that looked like toys we owned. She kept looking at them wondering if Meridith, or I, had left them in that yard. She kept walking, not paying attention to where she was going and not seeing the ice in front of her on the sidewalk. When she stepped on it and lost her footing, her first instinct was, of course, to make sure Nadine didn’t get hurt. She protected Nadine’s head and body with her arms, and when she fell, she broke her leg.
She never asked me for another “reading” after that nor did our next door neighbor. The idea that I might actually be a “psychic” never came up again. After all, we were still a good Guamanian family.
After Iceland, my father was stationed at a naval base in Indiana. It was there that my youngest brother Steve was born.
We lived in a small town, and I went to a small school several miles away. I developed a reputation for being a weirdo interested in psychics, ghosts, and witches. Virtually every day I went to school, I was harassed about it. So much so that one of my eighth grade teachers brought a “test” to class which was designed to determine if someone had ESP. Guess who was the only one assigned to take the test.
According to my teacher, if I answered seven of the ten questions correctly, then it was “possible” that I might actually have extra sensory perception. I don’t remember what the questions were, but I do remember surprising everyone, including myself, by answering the first six questions correctly.
I also knew the answer to the seventh question. I could see the answer clearly in my mind’s eye. Now I faced a dilemma. Do I answer the question or don’t I? I was already feared and hated by much of the school, and most of those people thought of me as a nut case. Like so many kids that age, I wanted more than anything else to just fit in.
I decided that answering the question would only make things worse for me than they already were, so I claimed ignorance. My teacher and classmates all laughed at me. She didn’t bother asking the remaining questions. I did get what I wanted though. The harassment I was subjected to started to ease up slowly.
After that, my classmates began welcoming me with open arms. My intense interest in things paranormal gradually began to be replaced by playing baseball and basketball and by joining the track team.
An incident happened later that did keep my interest in ghosts alive though. One day I heard on the news that a female student at Indiana University in Bloomington was murdered the night before. Later that day, Julie, one of my neighbors, asked me if I had heard about what had happened.
I told her I had and she said, “Did you know that she used to live where you live now? She grew up in that house.” I didn’t know that, and now that I did, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It just seemed creepy to me.
I told my parents about it and that somehow gave them the idea that going shopping in Bloomington later that day was a good idea! I didn’t want to go, so I was alone in the house, reading a book, when I suddenly thought about the girl who was killed the night before. I thought about how she had lived, played, eaten, and slept in the very house I was in. Suddenly, the glass of a small kerosene lamp that hung on the wall between my room and Meridith’s room exploded sending glass all over the hallway floor.
I sat there trying to decide whether I should clean up the glass or run screaming out the door. There was another kerosene lamp hanging on the wall between two other bedroom doors that didn’t explode, which made me wonder if she had slept in either Meridith’s bedroom or mine.
I came to the conclusion that since I was sitting there, it must have been mine. That made me want to pack my clothes and move out, and I probably would have done so if it weren’t for the big wet spot on the front of my pants.
When nothing else happened for about an hour afterwards, I decided it was safe to change my pants and sweep the glass up off the floor, saying a prayer for the young university student as I did so.
After living in Indiana for two years, my father was stationed back on Guam because his father was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS. Most people know this condition as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” It’s a horrible illness that paralyzes every muscle in the body, eventually causing the death of the person afflicted when the muscles that cause the lungs to expand and contract stop working.
It became an opportunity to become reacquainted with my culture. The Chamoru mindset is based on respect, which extends to those who have died. We also have a great deal of respect for our ancestors, whom we refer to as taotaomona (tao-toe-mo-na).
We moved into a home that belonged to my mother’s parents while we waited for military housing to become available. One of the stories that my mother told us was that my grandfather was out in a field behind the house when he saw a young boy staring at him. My grandfather asked the boy who he was and what he was doing there. The boy vanished. My grandfather believed, until the day he died, that he had seen a taotaomona.
Strange occurrences happened while we lived in that house. For example, it was so hot and humid during the day that I typically took a shower at night. I noticed that when I finished and stepped out of the tub, the air around me was freezing. I started opening the bathroom window after I took a shower; then I began opening it before I took a shower. The result was always the same. Instead of stepping out of the tub into humid, tropical air, I always felt as though I were stepping into a walk-in freezer. My teeth would literally chatter while I was drying myself off. I finally started wrapping my towel around my waist, and I would walk out of the bathroom and into my bedroom to dry off and put clothes on. Then I would walk back into the bathroom to hang my towel back up. When I did, I’d notice that the air was usually warm and humid again.
What I didn’t know at the time was