Life Begins at 40: Just Ask the Psychic

These are the waning days of my fourth decade, a time when I always expected I would have a life, or at least a clue.

As such, this was an opportune time, my friends said, to pay a visit to Thomas Gray Sexton, the “internationally acclaimed” psychic.

For the same amount of money that bought Hugh Grant a whole passel of notoriety, Sexton will do a little time travel for me, to check out the second half of my so-called life.

“Everyone who’s into it has been to him,” advised one gal pal. “He’s deaf, you know. And he’s kinda weird. I swear to God, he guesses people’s birthdays.”

He did guess mine--accurately--and at least one other person’s that I know about. But sometimes he misses.

“He was off five days on mine, so I think the whole thing is screwed,” the friend scoffed. “The outlook is good for me; I just don’t happen to want to get married and move to Washington state.”

She is more accepting of another prediction, though: “He said I will win a major award within the next three years. I’m thinking Oscar.”

For the record, my psychic-seeing pals are not crackpots. They are quite successful at careers that require a certain amount of sanity. OK, maybe we are all searching secretly for meaning, but on the surface, at least, they claim to be seeing psychic Tom purely for laughs.

So off I went to Chatsworth one bright Saturday morning, skeptical yet curious, and looking for a rocking good time. Little did I know that I also would be embarking on a psychological journey that would carry me from skepticism, to suspension of disbelief, to wanting to believe.

At Sexton’s request, I tossed three coins into the air six times while Sexton chanted and hummed and drew squiggles on a yellow legal pad.

I had no idea what it meant, but the humming sounded something like, “Hum-yow-um-gay-ah-gum,” and was repeated several times. Followed by “Eye-yah-dee-doo.”

Sexton might hum a lot, but he definitely is not a zippity-doo-dah guy.

“He’s very Pooh-like. You know how Winnie the Pooh makes those little humming noises?” observed my friend, who prefers to remain nameless, lest judgmental types call her a Fruit Loop. She launched into the first chapter of one of my all-time favorites, “The House at Pooh Corner.”

“Pooh’s going to visit Piglet, right, and nobody’s home,” she said, setting the scene. She continued, this time reading: “A hum came suddenly into his head, which seemed to him to be a Good Hum, such as is Hummed Hopefully to Others. ‘The more it snows (Tiddely pom), the more it goes (Tiddely pom), the more it goes (Tiddely pom) on snowing.’

“So, Pooh finally hooks up with Piglet and, like, he tells him about the hum, and Piglet goes, ‘Tiddely what?’ And Pooh goes, ‘I just put that in to make it more hummy.’ ”

Beyond the hummy, there’s the tummy. Sexton has been known to ask people to poke his protuberant abdomen, which is as hard as a rock, I can tell you, having poked it myself.

“That is definitely a Winnie-the-Pooh kinda thing,” the resident Pooh expert reports.

After the coins were tossed, the hums hummed, the tummy poked and the great beyond consulted, Sexton sized up his squiggles:

“The chances of that being right are remote,” he stated, dismissing some squiggle’s improbable message. The papacy, maybe. Or the electric chair.

“On the other hand, that is my whole business. You know, I’m truly in a crazy business, except that a lot of the time it turns out right. Otherwise, people wouldn’t come to see me.”

He continued, “Let’s see, we have a profession, current. You are a writer. That is one of your gifts. You’re what they used to call a sob sister?”

“Well, I try not to be,” I protested.

“We have the name of the guy you’re going to marry. That’s easy. If these are right, the rest should be right.”

He asked my birthday, then showed me what he’d previously scribbled next to the squiggles. Bingo! Direct hit.

“I’m so glad, because for once we got that,” he said, smiling with self-satisfaction.

Then he told me there was good news and there was bad news.

The bad news was, he’s going to put me on a diet and exercise program--not that one needs to be psychic to divine that I, like Pooh, would do well to keep my nose out of the honey pot.

The good news was, if I followed this holistic psychic’s advice, I will be married with at least one child--a boy--and I will write novels, lots of novels, so many novels I won’t need to work as a sob sister anymore. I will meet my true love in conjunction with exercise.

I will not die a violent death. And I will never ever experience another disaster like the Northridge earthquake.

Best of all, I will prosper.

“I saw you becoming a success as a fiction writer,” he says. “You are returning back to life after something that has held you back. You will start a family within roughly 16 months, at most 22 months. You will not have a big family. Doo, doo, doo. I haven’t figured out the sex yet. Uhn gowah gum. It will come to me. . . . I think it’s a little boy.”

Future hubbo’s name is either Bradley or Bert, whom I meet after a fling with a Don that begins this winter.

For kicks, I check out the phone book. Hmmmmm, there’s a Bret Bradley listed. Wonder if he goes to my health club? I decide against calling him because I’m not supposed to meet him until the fall of 1996. And who am I to mess with destiny?

My wedding ring will have diamonds on it, Sexton said. How did he know I always pick out the diamond ones in the catalogues?

“Now the paths leading to renewed growth are revealing themselves,” Sexton continued. “You probably would have done some of this anyway.” (In fact, I did join a health club three months ago, but I went only six times.) “Now, are you doing it because I told you to, or did I tell you because I saw you doing this? You run into this whenever you do time travel.”

And there’s the catch. He dispatched me to the health food store, where I purchased bottles of vitamins and supplements and powdered proteins, for no small sum. I am taking them. I am working my way up to going back to the gym.

He told my cynical friend to buy a jump rope, and she did.

“Well, it’s a very nice jump rope,” she bristles. “That was a good idea. Let’s see how your diet goes,” she added over my protests that I have been on a bazillion diets, without one of them working.

“This one is different,” she points out. “This is a psychic diet. Hey, when was the last time you saw me skipping rope?”

So beneath all the caution and cynicism, hope lingers still at 40.

“You’ve got most of your life ahead of you, kiddo,” Sexton told me.

Man, I hope so. Wouldn’t it be a stitch if I found myself on my 50th birthday curled up in an overstuffed chair with my kid, reading him “The House at Pooh Corner” aloud, just like my mother did for me when she was 35?

If that ever actually happens, I will take time out to fondly remember Tom Sexton, the psychic who Hums Hopefully to Others.