DIY Divination

Before Friday night I didn’t realize I was capable of making a ouija board out of a manilla folder, a Sharpie, and a shotglass, but now that I’ve done it, I can’t imagine communicating with the dead any other way. 

I don’t recall when or how contacting the spirit world became part of the evening’s agenda, but given the original plan — to help a friend pack her belongings for an upcoming move — I’m not surprised my companions and I embraced an alternative. With no “legit” board available from our collective closets or nearby retailers, we resorted to what could probably be called with a certain degree of authenticity “the college try:” we pooled what limited resources we had and faked it.

Apart from some poor spacing in the numerals row, I think the resulting “board” turned out pretty well, and it proved successful when put to use (though an obstacle created by the crease in the folder’s center manifested in something akin to spectral stammering). I won’t go into the narrative of what transpired or what details surfaced, but the experience was rewarding in a way I’m not sure I can replicate on something stamped with the Parker Brothers logo.

I know that the superiority of homemade products has become something of a cliche in the Etsy age; jewelry, apparel, beer — whatever the market, “craft” is king. But whether moved by something spiritual or simply humdrum human pride, I’m fully convinced the paper conduit around which my friends and I huddled by candlelight was charmed — not necessarily because we made contact, but because we made something.

Alma Matters

As I slept last Sunday night, someone from my high school class died in his parents' driveway.

I didn't learn of it for a couple of days, and when I did it wasn't through Facebook or Twitter but rather secondhand whispers, the way news used to travel through the hallways. "Did you hear..."

I barely knew the guy, but when the details of his arrangements came through, I briefly considered putting in an appearance. I've skipped at least two class reunions and more than a dozen years of football games, charity auctions, and trivia nights, but given my disposition toward high school, a funeral seemed like a wholly appropriate venue for a homecoming.

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As I write this I am burning through House of Cards on Netflix. It's not the most relatable show (thankfully), but there's a scene in a midseason episode that felt especially potent. Morally questionable congressman Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) returns to his alma mater and reconnects with his college circle of friends for a night of campus revelry. Plied with plenty of Maker's Mark, Frank asks one of them: 

Do you think this place made us? When I walked on campus today I wondered, did it mean anything? Was it just a place we spent four years of our lives or was it more?

Prior to this point in the series we haven't seen much reflection in Frank, or much uncertainty. But sitting here in the dark, removed from his day-to-day world, he's confronted with his own need for reassurance that it all mattered. 

I sometimes find myself in a similar state — not often, and not for very long — fleeting thoughts in the dark that drift further back than Frank's, back to high school — and unlike Frank, I want to believe those four years didn’t mean anything.

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Despite distance and time, the thought of high school can still rouse frustrations unlike anything else I’ve experienced. Such feelings are absurd, but significant. I didn’t attend the funeral.

Sometimes I wish I could put those feelings in the ground right next to the kid they buried last week, but I can’t, and that's good. I don’t have to wonder if high school mattered. My unsettled thoughts about the experience assure me it did; more importantly, they remind me to do everything I can to ensure that whatever happens next matters even more.

Otherworldly Appreciation

On a weeknight in 1988 — a weeknight! — my parents brought me to a special program in the St. Louis Science Center’s James S. McDonnell Planetarium, where I promptly lost my mind. 

In the days and months that followed I would reason myself down from the madness of that night, funneling the information I’d just acquired into something resembling a respectable boyhood fascination with space. I would check out every available library book on rockets, constellations, and, of course, UFOs. I would abandon a burgeoning encyclopedic knowledge of baseball cards and the players depicted on them in favor of full mission rosters from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs committed to memory. I would transition from speculative interest in Space Camp, then a popular grand prize on Nickelodeon game shows, into a dire need to attend. I would continually feed a healthy sci-fi film habit while quietly nurturing aspirations of a career in the U.S. space program. 

Over subsequent years, while returning periodically to the Science Center and the Planetarium, I would grow slowly grounded to life on earth, pursuing other interests, looking outward more than upward. 

But on that weeknight in 1988, wedged into a not-entirely comfortable seat near the center of the auditorium, as Leonard Nimoy’s instantly recognizable yet still vaguely sinister voice narrated what I would soon learn were some of the most famous accounts of UFO sightings and alien encounters ever publically disseminated, a part of me was abducted right out of my seat and into the stars above the Planetarium dome — a part that remains there to this day.

Submitted as part of the Planetarium 50th Anniversary celebration