Foresight

When I was a little kid and it was hot in the summer, Tom, Maura and I used to sometimes sleep on the deck. It was like camping for a family that never camped. Maura invariable woke up with a mosquito bite on either her eyelid or her lip, both swelling to a disfiguring state, but that's a story for another time. My brother Chris, eight years older than me, would sometimes come up and lay down in the middle of the three-across formation and tell ghost stories to help us not sleep in the Bruce Lane dark. One of those stories stuck with me for years, and now it's something to sort of think about.

Chris told us one night that he had a friend in the army, and that the friend told him the army had recently shot down an alien space ship. They questioned the aliens inside, and they told their captors that they would come back in the year 2012 and destroy our planet. The story while told, I'm sure, was probably much more involved and colorful, but I don't remember all the details. I just remember trying to do the math in my head to figure out how old I was going to be when I died.

This was like in 1970 or so, so I think I was thinking I'd be about 42 (which is wrong. I have never been able to do math.). Anyway, I remember that throughout my life, even as I matured into the kind of person that doesn't believe a word Chris says (or said), this thing still stuck with me. Back in 1970 nobody was talking about the end of the Mayan calendar. 2012 wasn't this thing that sat in the near future, taunting believers and nonbelievers alike with the possibility of doom and destruction. It was just a year off in the future where we would be flying hovercrafts to work and dressing like the Jetsons. It was like talking about having a billion dollars - just some random number that was totally unattainable.

But seriously, it stuck in my mind. I can tell you that over the years as my math "improved" from five year old TtheD math to eight year old, twelve year old, fifteen year old TtheD math, I never really landed on the right age. I just knew I'd be in my forties and that was plenty old enough to have lived a long and fulfilling life before being blasted to bits by some pissed off aliens who were holding a grudge.

Now that I'm older, am way less naive, and have the benefit of a ten-key, I realize that this was probably all a bunch of hooey. But isn't it KIND of interesting that he would land on the year 2012 lo those many years ago? And the fact that not one, not two, but THREE psychics have all told me that I was Mayan in a past life? And that I held on to this particular story my whole life when all that has ever come out of Chris's mouth is a constant steady stream of bullshit? Maybe there IS something to this 2012 thing. I mean, you've been to Chichen Itza (or at least seen pictures). Explain the pyramids.. Mayans with really strong calf muscles?

Or aliens..?