Continuing the heritage vein, my mother's parents, he the Ulster Presbyterian Christian Scientist convert and St Lawrence Seaway steward, she the Isle of Man Anglican, were strictly lace curtain. He was the grandfather who died when I was a baby during the time my mother and I lived with her parents while my father was away fighting in the Korean War. I have a clear memory of their house with its dark floral patterned wallpaper and the Jack Russell I was terrified of. There was the stone birdbath in the front yard and Canadian geese that ravaged the back garden. We were in a car accident, maybe in the parking lot after visiting my grandfather at the hospital, nothing major, no serious injuries, just another car ramming into ours from behind. I saw it coming through the rear window as I leaned over my mother's shoulder while she held me in her lap in the front seat; I tried to warn them, but I was too young to speak. Here comes the bump; all shook up. Uncle Paul must have been driving because my grandmother was in the back. He wasn't actually blood related; he'd been my grandfather's best friend on the boats and spent all his winters at their house even after my grandfather died because he had helped them pay for it. I loved his tattoos; my favorite was a hula girl on his forearm who wiggled when he clenched his fist. When I got my own tattoo in 1980, I was thinking of Uncle Paul. The night he died, he woke me up by sitting on the side of my bed and saying goodbye. He blew one last kiss in the doorway as the ambulance pulled up outside because, in fact, he was already dead. My first psychic experience, my communing with the ghost of Uncle Paul, I talked about it over and over, this was before my father came back from Korea so I wasn't even two yet. I doubt it bothered my Isle of Man grandmother, but my mother would say later she was afraid I’d inherited the Manx talent for such strange things, and I had. Especially as an adolescent, there was the incident where I woke up one night and saw the child of our neighbor swinging in the old rubber tire her father had hung from a tree only to find out in the morning she’d died, again, at about the same time. A few years earlier, when my family was leaving the States to live on an army base in Germany, I remember being very upset saying goodbye to my paternal grandmother because I was convinced I’d never see her again. All the adults laughed at me, but in a few months she was dead as well. I saw things, it was simply information, and usually my mother was in some way involved, if only as a conduit since she said she didn't believe in ESP. Once I stood with her and watched two deliverymen bring a sofa up our stairs and I knew they were going to fall. So when they both slid back down the steps with the sofa between them, breaking one of their arms, I already knew it would happen and said so. One of them said something about me being a little witch. And perhaps I was, although this questionable skill would more or less stop when my mother passed while I was in college, but that’s another story.