Attending a Séance, London, Ontario, January 1969

Attending a Séance, London, Ontario, January 1969

When I was 16 years old in Grade 12 at Oakridge High School in London, Ontario, I first experienced puppy love, with all the attendant tail-wagging and barking. The year was 1969.  The object of my baying and howling was a Grade 11 student named Cathy Reed, who belonged to the school’s curling club, as did I. At our school, curling was what nerds and unathletic rejects did for sport, or actually to have any sort of social life at all.

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In 1969, a 16-year-old boy with a Beatles haircut felt the sting of puppy love like a vinyl record stuck on the world’s most mushy top ten tune.

Picture this: the bone-chilling depths of winter 1969, when the frost on the windows was thick enough to qualify as a second mortgage. That’s when my intrepid Cathy, ever the seeker of truth (and questionable adventure), spirited me away to a candle-lit séance in a location that, if not haunted, was at least allergic to central heating. There, hunched over a wobbly Ouija board, we were serenaded by a Medium whose gibbering was so enthusiastic it could have summoned a hockey team’s worth of ghosts. As the solemn ceremony commenced, Cathy searched for spiritual enlightenment while I, apostate extraordinaire, provided a running commentary so snide and cynical that the dearly departed probably considered reincarnation just to tell me off. Honestly, I was lucky not to be booted out by both the living and the dead.

Luckily this extremely bad behaviour didn’t immediately  put either of  us off our passion, although Cathy broke up with me only a couple of months later, when the Spirit may have suddenly come upon her.

Now, nearly 60 years later, faced with the imminent loss of my dear wife Anne, my partner for the last 47 years, stricken with an incurable cancer of the brain, I would attend any séance, consult any Medium, and take heart in the most cryptically hopeful Ouija board message if this would extend our loving time together.

Your friend,

Robert

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