Another cancellation, another chance to be back on Becky’s massage table ahead of my mid-October appointment.

Becky got to work on my back, elbowed the knots, went to town around the right scapula. After she asked me to flip over, she said, “I think it will be okay to tell you this.”

That’s not what I want to hear while lying almost naked under a sheet, but I went with it. Closed my eyes. Even the dimmed light was more than I wanted.

“I didn’t tell you this last time,” Becky said as she worked the curve between my neck and left shoulder, “but the day you came in, that morning when I woke up, I said, ‘God, I want to write my story and I don’t know how. Please bring me someone—today—who can help me.’”

A few flutter chills passed up and down my arms. “Wow” was the best I could muster while partially freaked out.

“I know!” Becky said. She was leaving on a trip later that day and planned to read StoryJoules while she traveled. “I didn’t know how to tell my story, but now I will.”

I thought maybe that was too much to hope for from a 50-page ebook. “Just imagine you’re telling one person,” I said. “Don’t think of it as writing a book. Just tell your story to that one person you want to help.”

“Hmm.” She pulled on my arm. Then she said,

“Maybe we’re here to help each other.”

At her last word, the lights went out. Then they came back on all the way, blindingly bright. Then they went out again and we were in pure dark. Chills ran up and down my body from my head to my toes. Becky grabbed my upper arms, then let go and apologized.

She walked to the light switch and turned the lights on, dim.

When she came back to the table, Becky said, “Did you notice when the lights went out? What I had just said?”

I said yes, then privately wondered if Becky has a Trent who likes to talk to her via electricity. Before I could tell her about Trent, she told me a story.

Becky was having a twilight picnic with a friend, sitting on a blanket on the grass, when her truck lights came on. The person she was picnicking with was a mechanic who told her what happened wasn’t normal. “Trucks don’t just do that.”

Becky also said that the first time she saw me, that day she asked God for help, she wasn’t supposed to have an appointment. It was a special slot she had opened for a patient with cancer. When the patient couldn’t keep the appointment, the front desk wasn’t supposed to fill it.

I’m guessing this story isn’t over, but we’ll see. I have an appointment (the one originally scheduled) with Becky this Friday.

In the meantime, it’s nice knowing there’s one more person out there who has someone who talks to her electrically.

PS: I saw Becky this past Friday. Before we started the massage, we talked about what happened last time. She said the lamp had never done that before.

I don’t know what it means but I know it matters. For now, it’s a mystery.

PPS: Here’s the wierdo part, that I’m hesitant to share. I thought the lights went out in the room. Becky corrected me. The room lights were already out. The dim lighting came from a salt lamp—large salt rocks illuminated in a glass bowl. The part that stumps me is the sequence: the room went dark, then “blindingly bright”, then dark again. I don’t know how a countertop salt lamp can make a room go blindingly bright.

When I go back next time, in December (Becky’s booked until then), I’ll ask Becky to do an experiment before we start the massage. I want to see how bright the room is when the only light is from the salt lamp.

Chewing the Cud of Good

Thankful for life.