Am I Psychic or Just Plumb Crazy?

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Just a little note: Tomorrow I’m going to be guest blogging at Novel Thoughts and giving away another signed copy of Gotcha! as well some other next items. So make sure you pop over and have a good laugh about some of my brushes with the law. Yup, I’ve had a few.
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It’s almost time . . . (May 26th to be exact) time for GOTCHA! to be released. And to celebrate this event I’m giving away a prize. Yup, all you have to do is post a comment to be entered in a drawing to win a copy of GOTCHA!, as well as a personalized Christie Craig pen and flip notebook. So don’t forget to post a comment. Now for the blog:

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I recently got this question from a reader: Do you ever think that the ability to create characters out of thin air is a little mystical? That it could somehow be tied to a sixth sense?

Hmm. Basically what they were asking was, did I think of myself as gifted in the psychic sense? It was an intriguing question and one that got me thinking and . . . reminiscing.

While I’m not sure my storytelling talent stems from any sixth sense, more than likely it stems from me just being plumb crazy. Hey, I create characters, throw a bunch of problems at them and then have fun watching them get themselves out of trouble.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that I do see myself as a bit . . . intuitive. And frankly, I could go one step further and tell you that this intuitiveness may even be inherited. Yup, to this day, I remember her.

She was old--always old in my childhood memories. I don’t know exactly how old she was, but I’m betting she was in her seventies or early eighties. That doesn’t seem so old now, but when you’re six, seventy seems ancient.

Like myself, she was small in statue, probably not even five feet tall. Then again, maybe she just looked short. As far back as I can remember, she walked hunched over, sort of how a child envisions a wicked witch would look. Complete with the coarse gray hair, pointed chin, and crooked fingers. This witchy-looking character was my great-grandma and she lived with my grandmother, Nana.

Oh, don’t misunderstand, I never saw Granny—that’s what we all called her—as wicked. But the witch part, well, I was young and had an overactive imagination. Ahh, but looking back, I still have to wonder. I wonder a lot. Because as wild as my imagination was, there was a lot of it based on facts.

I remember hiding right behind the dining room door, listening and occasionally getting brave enough to peek inside to watch her performing her . . . “magic.” She read people’s fortune. She would mix some weird ashes with tea, she’d have the person having their fortune read, sip from the cup, then she’d have the person turn the cup over on the saucer and twirl it around. While it twirled, my great-granny would repeat some strange words I didn’t recognize. Then she would turn that cup back over, look inside at the patterns made by the tea and ashes and she read the person’s fortune. Sometimes, I’d even see the people leave her money before they left.

She wasn’t a gypsy. There was no sign hanging in my Nana’s yard, advertizing Granny’s fortune telling or palm reading, but somehow the people knew and they came. When she wasn’t reading people’s fortunes, she sat in her chair in the living room, watching daytime soaps and spitting in her spittoon. Yup, she dipped snuff. You’d sometimes see a little brown juice at the side of her bottom lip.

When ever she was spitting, I stayed away, I didn’t like the sound of that black juice hitting the bottom of that tin spittoon. Sppss . . . ding. Sppss . . .ding.

But she wasn’t always spitting, and while I might have been half afraid of her, I was more in awe of her. I remember occasionally watching her aged, crooked fingers make doll beds that she sold to bring in extra money. (I guess fortune telling wasn’t that lucrative of a business.) She’d take cigar boxes and those old-fashioned clothes pens and with lace, material, and pillow stuffing, she’d make the cutest doll beds, complete the little dolls all snug under their tiny blankets, their heads resting on tiny homemade pillows that she’d sewn by hand and with her pedal sewing machine.

Yup, Granny was unique and to say the least, she was mysterious. I was told, and my daddy still stands by it, that when she was younger, she was often called to the hospital to talk the “burn” out of burn victims. A healer, they’d called her.

You know how some smells are associated with people you’ve known? Well, to this day the smell of cedar and peppermint instantly brings back her memory. Because sometimes she’d take me into her bedroom, lift open her old cedar chest, pull out her huge two-foot long stick of peppermint that people would give her for Christmas, then she’d pull out an old hammer, the kind that looked homemade out of cast iron, and she’d whack off a piece of that candy for me.

The funny thing was, I seldom could eat that candy. You see, Granny was a widow. She was a widow times five. Yup, she’d buried five husbands in her life. While I was told to never ask about them, and it makes perfect sense that she probably loved them all, and it hurt her to talk about their short lives, my overactive imagination couldn’t help but to make me wonder what else Granny had whacked with that hammer of hers. Of course, if Granny had been a witch, she wouldn’t have had to use a hammer, but just put a spell on them.

Nevertheless, every now and then when I find myself “knowing” something will happen, like knowing that the phone is about to ring, and then I’m proved right, I always think about Granny. I wonder if perhaps, I don’t have a few mysterious gifts. Not that I think my crazy, quirky stories are a result of any of those gifts. Nope, I think they are just a sign of my whacky sense of humor and a little disturbed mind.

What about you? Do you ever think you have a little bit of intuitiveness? Do you have some odd family relative that made your own childhood imagination go a little wild?

Don’t forget to post a comment for a chance to win a copy of Gotcha! and some neat other prizes.