Dancing in the Light by Shirley Maclaine Read Free Book Online Page A

much, what I’m really doing is a little bit of what happened to me back then.”
    This was a truly amazing statement. Mother’smouth dropped open, but whether or not she realized my father was saying he deliberately spiritual-traveled, I don’t know. What she said was, “Well, I still think you should get up earlier so I can clean your room. It’s a mess and the dust from it flies all over the house.”
    “Now, Monkey,” said Daddy, “I want to tell you something else. You know how long I studied philosophy at Johns Hopkins University?”
    “Yep.”
    “Well, every Sunday morning after we had finished a week of what they said we should learn, we would all sit around and discuss the things you’re talking about. Why, I remember everybody having a story or two about believing or experiencing these other dimensions. Why, only a fool would categorically claim they don’t exist. I remember the custodian of our dormitory telling us about the vision he had had of the death of his son. He was a nice lookin’ boy who served in World War II, and one night his father had a vision that his son appeared at the foot of his bed. Scared the bejesus out of him because the son was real. And he knew the son was in Europe. But the son said, no, he was here saying good-bye to his father because he had just died. The old man jumped up and came to me in the middle of the night to tell me about it. I suspected what had happened, but I couldn’t be sure. A week later the old man got the telegram saying that his son had died at precisely the same time that he had appeared at the foot of the bed.”
    “So what do you think of all this, Daddy?” I asked, never having anticipated that my parents would be people I could talk to about this stuff.
    “Well,” he said, loving the introduction of metaphysics into our relationship, “I think we should stay open-minded about everything there is to learn. You may be blazing a trail here, to make it more acceptable to discuss. I mean, read your Plato, or Socrates, or your Freud and Jung for that matter.How do we know unless we explore? Of course, we can’t explain it in presently acceptable terms, but who knows how those terms will change? Nobody believed there were microbes crawling around on the skin until someone came up with the microscope. We are each our own microscope.”
    I got up and stretched and went to look out the familiar sun-room window. Had I sensed this capacity for metaphysical truth in both my parents while growing up? Were they the reason I now found such speculations easy and thrilling to comprehend? Had Ira and Kathlyn Beaty been silently instrumental in the forming of this bent of mind I now had? I knew I had responded more to their feelings than to their words during the years we had lived together—emotional truth being more vivid and influential to me than intellectual truth. But never, not once, had I consciously speculated that they might be thinking about the same possibilities I was. I thought I was the only one.
    Mother watched me at the window.
    “You know, Shirl, remember your old Bible?”
    “Yes,” I said. “Why?”
    “Well,” she answered, “you were always reading it and underlining your favorite verses. I have it here, if you want to see it. You have been interested in this spiritual side of life since you were a little girl.”
    “Really?” I asked, not remembering.
    “Yes, you were never much on religion or church or any of that stuff. You wanted to know what was underneath what they were teaching. You really liked reading about Christ. I remember you used to call him a spiritual revolutionary.”
    “I did?” I asked.
    “Sure,” she answered proudly. “Your friends were going to church and you were reading books about religion. You know, both you and Warren could read before you ever went to school. Your daddy and I read to you every night until you beganto be able to do it yourselves. You were insatiably curious. Your minds were always