Past Lives

Once, when my daughter Sophie was about two years old, I dragged her to a big, noisy birthday party at Circus Pizza, where she had been on only one previous occasion. That, too, was for a big, noisy birthday party about a year and a half before. When we arrived at the second party, Sophie looked up at me intently as a far-distant look spread across her face. “I remember this place,” she said. “I ate cereal here.” And believe it or not, she was right. I had fed her baby rice cereal when she was five months old at that very same Circus Pizza a year and a half earlier.

The nature of time, memory, and experience intrigues me a lot. I’m right in the throes of a fascinating book—Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives. I bought it primarily because I loved the title and the cover, but it turns out to be a lively read, and it reminds me immediately of two things. First, the uncanny feeling I had about my daughter Lillie the minute she was born, when I squeezed her warm, wet arm, and I felt the physical presence of my beloved Aunt Lala (Alice) all around me. Since the first minute she could speak and name things, Lillie has repeatedly chosen the name Alice for everything in sight. Second, this book has sparked my recollection of a singular experience with the potential of my own previous incarnations.

It was back in the last days of December 1999 when I drove with my sister Laurie down a dark, quiet street in an ordinary St. Paul neighborhood. In my wallet was a wad of cash. I needed $60 for the hour-long psychic consultation my sister had talked me into scheduling.

Sitting down with a clairvoyant had been Laurie’s idea, but since she was an out-of-towner in from New York for the holidays, the business of tracking down referrals, sifting through them, and choosing the most promising seer had been left to me. Now here we were, ten minutes late, skeptical of course, but having a good time doing something novel and indulgent and sisterly.

My appointment was first, and it began, just as you’d imagine, with a greeting from the very assertive and overly affectionate house cat. The woman standing in the shadows behind the cat was large and rather stern. She led me into a stark room off the front hall where we sat across from each other on the only two chairs in sight, separated by a small table. The first thing she did was scold me for being late. “The spirit,” she told me, “arrives on time.”

It got better from there, for she quickly began to rattle off some interesting observations about my daughter Sophie. First of all, she spoke of Sophie’s unusual and profound affinity for animals. “She’s going to be devastated when she figures out where meat comes from,” the psychic told me. “She’s been a vegetarian since birth,” I replied, struck by the memory of a child who refused to walk down the meat aisle in the grocery store and wept inconsolably after learning, at age four, that the Chicken in a Biscuit cracker she’d eaten at a neighbor’s wasn’t purely plant based.

Eventually, the conversation turned toward the distant past. I learned, much to my unabashed delight, that prior to this lifetime I’d been a prominent Russian ballerina. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine anything I’d rather have been. It was like drawing the trump card on past lives.

The psychic said I was very talented and a raving beauty. Everyone loved me—when they weren’t fleeing from my dramatic temper. My one true flaw, I was told, was a tendency to be tyrannical (when I was not being lavishly generous and witty and adoring).

In this lifetime, I was born on the other side of the tracks, and was simply not the kind of kid who got to do things like take ballet lessons. In fact, I somehow developed an aversion to dancing, a dreadful self-consciousness around it, what you might even call a rhythm and music impairment. (I did study the violin, briefly, until my sister tore me from it permanently by stomping on my instrument. But we’re both over that.)

Now, pondering my supposed past life as a ballerina makes me want to go buy a pair of toe shoes and tear up the floor. I think it’s a tad too late for me to become the next Billy Elliot, though. But that’s okay. There are other avenues. Do I really have to be ashamed to consider, with relish, the idea of ballroom dancing lessons? I think not. After all, you only live once. Er, I mean, life is short. So we have to make the most of it.