This story reads like fiction but it is precisely true and freakishly inspired and very deeply rooted. If you can grasp this story, you’ll never forget it and I will do my best to write it but you know. I may fail.

I wrote this in 2002. My daughter was about 6 years old, my son was 2.5 and called, “Tumbler” at the time, a screen name given to him by my daughter.

You have to have the back story here to understand. What happened was I went to a garage sale one day and someone was selling all these sea shells. They were not junky shells, but nice ones (the pic is of some of the actual shells) and they were cheap. $3 for a basket as I recall and I bought them all without a thought.

Actually, I had a thought but my thought was subconscious and destined to stay that way for several months… maybe 6.

Time passed and I forgot about those shells. I had no reason to buy them but I did have reason to take my kids to the reservoir on a hot day. This is the best you can do for your kids in this land-locked state. We have these sterile sort of man-made bodies of water with no trees and playgrounds and the life, They have fake beaches so I took my kids there one day and the idea hit me.

I has all these shells and it occurred to me, I could come to this fake beach and scatter them around and then when the kids showed up, they would find shells. Pretty cool, huh?

I got my daughter involved. She has a 9th house Moon trine Jupiter so could readily get into an adventure. We decided to bring the shells to the beach and a few weeks later we followed through. I was blogging at the time and came home and wrote this:

Today we took the seashells to the reservoir to toss around. I didn’t know exactly what to expect.  When I had this idea last time we were there, it was early and the crowd was thin. I imagined the same situation when I came back with the shells, and thought if I were particularly lucky and it were meant to be, I might witness a child finding one of them.

“Look at that. Those kids found treasure.”
“Yep. This is a really good day.”
~~

Now here is the killer part and I mean, this just kills me. It was MONTHS later. I was on the beach in Mexico with my family when it hit me. I realized / remembered that my sister (we grew up in a land-locked state) wanted a sea shell really damned bad. I mean, she wanted a SEA SHELL when we were kids, I was 11 and she was 13.

I lie there on the beach, tears streaming down my face as the memory came back to me and I realized I had just re-enacted and re-lived my childhood except this time it was so much easier to get these kids a shell.

The first time I had to travel 1000 miles to get her a shell and endure an Indiana Jones type adventure where I had to fight off, gypsies, tramps, thieves, rapists and the well-heeled!

In whatever case I was stunned at the power of my own subconscious and immediately started writing the story from when I was a kid.

The words came through my fingers as channeled by from God, all artists know what I am talking about. I was so humbled. Who was this woman who sold me the shells for $3, hmm? Had they been $10, I’d not have bought them, see? I was not shell shopping!

So anyway, now it is 2009. If you read the boards here you may know that some man contacted me on facebook a few days ago. I went to California to get those shells and quite inexplicably wound up at a huge Catholic wedding of people I had never met before in my life.

At that wedding, I danced with a boy (12) from Texas and this is who contacted me if you can believe that. I told my sister and reminded her of the shells, though I think she has little idea the impact of this on me.

She told me she still likes shells and in fact had Henry’s shells on her shelf. ‘You gave them to me, remember?”

Well no, I didn’t remember. I have so much to remember it is not possible for me to manage any more than I can write everything I know or have to say but I can tell you this:

Any shells I get I will give away and shells = ….

Well you figure it out.

I am not going to proofread this. It’s takes too much out of me just to write…