The Madison Picker: The Picker Series: Book 1

My parents thought the worst; they thought perhaps that I was mad or going mad. So they took me to see the family doctor and he referred me to a pediatrician. Neither could explain the phenomenon. Everyone kept patting me on my head and telling my parents that I would outgrow it, whatever “it” was. In desperation Mom and Dad shuttled me from one specialist to another for months. A platoon of psychologists and psychiatrists repeated what the others had told them until one day there came a knock at the door and Professor Stevenson walked into my life. Dr. Stevenson had heard of my affliction through professional channels. We were living on Capitol Hill at the time by then. He drove up from the University of Virginia and stayed with us for a couple of weeks. I remember him trying to explain to my parents what “it” was all about, but I already knew the whole story because I had lived “it” before, and I told him so in my little boy voice but with an adult fluency that beguiled him.

He took copious notes, physically examined me, and directed one of his graduate staff researchers onto the trail of facts that I had been prattling on about for some time. Professor Stevenson confirmed my story by documenting the facts, which only exchanged the worries my parents had for a new one: “He is an Old Soul,” Stevenson said.

At such a young age I was too immature to understand reincarnation, or so they thought, but I knew what it meant even though I couldn’t pronounce the term. Dr. Stevenson started to explain the concept to me when we first sat down as a family but I stopped him. They later related how I’d held my palm forward and told him, “I already know that.” It was the same story that I had been telling everyone all along, only now they were listening for the first time – and believing me. My parents were aghast. Dad put his arm around Mom as she bit her lip and cried. I fidgeted and looked out the open window at the kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalk as a streetcar rattled by and then I heard the neighbor’s radio say that Hawaii had just become a state. It was 1959.

The staff researcher quickly verified the details of my story to be factual. The address, the names, the descriptions – everything was true, she said. A man named Randolph West did exist, she told Dr. Stevenson, but I already knew that. I knew where I had lived, even the street address, the color of the house (red), and the gothic shape of the stained glass in the door. I cried when I remembered my young wife Rebecca and my two small children, and I told them that I missed my little white and brown Jack Russell terrier, Felix. “Can we go see them?” I asked, hopefully.

“No,” they told me. “Sadly, they are all gone, Charlie.”

“But gone where?

“They’re with God, son,” my dad explained, and I climbed into his arms to be held closely and I wondered why.

When I was old enough, Dr. Stevenson explained everything. The home in which I had lived in my earlier incarnation was razed in a hail of Nazi bombs in 1942. We were casualties: Rebecca, the children, Felix, and me. I had died of a head injury. Professor Stevenson said the injury was “consistent with my birthmark,” but even when I was a toddler I already knew that.

My parents were relieved to be told that my Old Soul was not abnormal or even rare, and that it was actually common in certain parts of the world, India and Beirut, for instance, he said. There was no remedy for my “situation” and I may or might not eventually outgrow “it.” I never did. I still have love for Rebecca, Tom and Jane, and even little Felix. There’s always been a hollow place inside me, as if it were a purposeful space kept ready for them. Sometimes I wonder to myself how many incarnations I have had. One day I hope to find out. Professor Stevenson kept tabs on me for twenty-some years.

1 Jerry’s Game

I walked across the street from Bruno’s shop to the antiques mall to peruse for sleepers. The Strasburg Emporium is one of the largest antiques malls on the mid-Atlantic seaboard. Somehow the word had gotten across the street that I was in town with a load of Louis Vuitton, which can be a problem. More than once I have witnessed dealers rush around their booth changing prices up because I was headed down their isle. Any dealer who raises their prices for that reason is a novice or a fool or both. Said fools will display the same level of stupidity at auctions that I attend, too. They’ll run me up on a bid because they believe, incorrectly, that anything I bid on must be worth more than I am willing to pay, and so they bid higher. But no one really knows for sure what a bidder’s motivation is, except the bidder.