I very emphatically did NOT believe in an afterlife...until yesterday.
As some of you readers know, my wife Sa and I lost our best friend about a year ago. I often argued with him about ghosts, afterlife, and the Beyond. He was a big believer; claimed he could see the dead, communicated with his dead aunt via a medium...all that. I really thought it was all hooey.
After he died, my wife, also a believer, started telling me she was finding mysterious coins everywhere. No big surprise, as I'm not good about removing spare change from my pockets. But I'd roll my eyes every time she said she thought they were from Kent.
Then, yesterday morning. Breakfast. Sa had been at the computer in our home office, commenting on Facebook about something Kent would have had strong opinions about; thinking about him. I set down my cereal and coffee on the dining room table. Sa went into the kitchen. I went to the living room to fetch my tablet to read the news.
As I walked back into the dining room, I heard something small clatter to the floor. Sa was in the still in the kitchen. I said "What was that?"
I had heard where it landed, on the other side of the table. I walked around the table. Precisely in the middle of the floor, directly in front of a beautiful piece of furniture that we had taken as a memento from Kent's house, was a dime. My sense of the sound was that it had fallen from between four and eight feet, and landed without rolling or bouncing on the hardwood floor, like the Ring in Lord of the Rings. I looked around. It simply couldn't fallen from anywhere physical. The nearest piece of clothing was several feet away. I had been re-entering the room from the far side. I was still in my sleepwear...no pockets. Sa hadn't left the kitchen. There had been no movement in the room. I said, "It's a dime. It looks like a dime just fell from the ceiling."
Curious, I thought, as I picked it up and put it on the table. Sa told me it was Kent, and I laughed it off, finished my breakfast, moved on. But after a couple of hours, I became unsettled. I went back to the dining room to have another look at that dime. It was still sitting on the dining room table.
Next to a second dime that I swear wasn't there before.
My view of the universe has been rocked a bit. Still processing.
Do you have a "dimes from heaven" story?
UPDATE Sun. Oct. 6
I've spent a day thinking about whether to post this, because it's...well, it's intense, and personal. But I started this thread, and you've been kind enough to contribute, so you should know.
*deep breath*
Bear with my story.
Two nights ago after Sa's show, we got home about midnight and Di came in for a nightcap. I told Di I needed to show her exactly what happened with the dropped dimes last week. In order to do the demonstration, I needed two dimes. I thought maybe the original two dimes were still on our dining room table, but I didn't see them there. The table also had some stuff on it (you know how dining room tables can get), and I wanted to clear it off to approximate its state on the morning of the dropped dimes.
So, while Sa and Di chatted outside, I cleared off the table, especially the half where I had placed the first dime and where the second dime had appeared. I looked at the table, approved it for the demo. My clearing hadn't turned up the two dimes, so I went to a little Sa bitty bowl in our office. where there were three dimes…two of them probably the ones from the day of the dime drop, that Sa had bussed. I took two of them for the demo.
I called Sa and Di in from outside. They stood around the table. Holding the two dimes in my hand, I described the dropping sound I had heard, placed a dime on the floor to show Di where I had found it, and put it on the table, just as I had that morning. Then, without moving, I explained that I had gone about my business and come back two hours later to find a second dime next to the first. I put down the second dime to show where it had appeared.
As I took my hand away from the table, I saw…I shit you not…two MORE dimes eight inches to the left of the two I had just placed. I immediately shouted "Okay, where the FUCK did those dimes come from?!?"
Di and Sa had both been staring at the table the whole time. I had searched the table for dimes TWICE in the previous five minutes and found none. We all agreed. Those dimes were simply NOT THERE ten seconds before. And then they were.
See the attached pics. Don't tell me that none of the three of us would have noticed those other two dimes, set in precisely parallel orientations of Roosevelt's profile, in a flower in the tablecloth design. In the bad cellphone photo, the two "new" dimes at the top of frame are dark spots in the flower design that look more like pennies, but I'm posting the closeup, too.
Yes, that happened. Again, I shit you not. You can ask Diane Laskin or Sa Winfield.
