Category Archives: Curiosities

I have rarely gotten too agitated about birthdays, but there was definitely something going on with this one. For the last month I’ve just had this growing “itch” at the back of my brain whenever I thought about last week’s birthday coming up, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. Until last weekend, just before my birthday.

In short, last Tuesday I turned sixty-eight years old. Today it’s six days after that birthday. But last weekend, I realized that my father had died of a massive heart attack five days after his sixty-eighth birthday.

I’ve always thought that the human brain and consciousness is pretty amazing and there are depths there that we haven’t begun to plumb. But having my subconscious brain apparently be aware of that connection (which is what I firmly believe was going on) while my conscious brain was clueless is just bizarre. And how my subconscious finally got the message across to my conscious side is even more bizarre.

Let me state for the record that I’m not a believer at all in ghosts, the afterlife, spectral messengers, and the like. The Long-Suffering Wife is a believer and she has her own opinion on what happened. We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that. But still…

Two days before my birthday, I woke up in the middle of the night with an extremely vivid dream. In the dream I was doing my upcoming drive to Texas for the eclipse and I had stopped after dark in a remote, almost empty diner. The only other patron in the diner was a sad, lonely woman who wanted to talk to me while I ate, then wanted to come with me to see the eclipse. Her name was Connie Navarro.

Her name was important in the context of the dream, important enough so that I wrote it down when I woke up from the dream, then went and Googled it when I got up. I did not recognize the name at all, don’t know anyone by that name, and to the best of my knowledge I have never heard it before.

Surprise! “Connie Navarro” brings up a LOT of hits online, almost all about one woman. She and a friend, Susan Jory, were both murdered in 1983 in Bel Air by a jealous boyfriend when she broke up with him. He was convicted and given the death sentence, later commuted to life without possibility of parole. Connie’s notable also because of her son, Dave Navarro, who was a guitarist with Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

One of the websites I found near the top of the search results was highlighted. You know how the link is purple instead of blue when you’ve been to that site before? The website was for the FindAGrave.com and it had a memorial page for Connie Navarro. I went to it and then I was curious where I had ever gone to this site before. I didn’t remember that. But there was a “login” button and it found an account for my email address. When I connected, it took me to information about my father’s gravesite in Orange County. Which had his birthdate and date of death. And his age at death – 68.

Um… yeah.

That will leave you sitting there thinking for a few. On the one hand, it’s good to finally understand what’s been tickling your subconscious. And the sense of relief that swept over me left little doubt that I had indeed found the answer to the puzzle that I didn’t even know I was solving. On the other hand…

You can’t make this shit up. Okay, yeah, you can, but I didn’t.

So.

Today it’s the sixth day after my 68th birthday. I’ve officially lived longer than my father did. And I’ve had either an extremely fascinating experience or an extremely spooky one. Probably both.

One thing I remember my dad always mentioning, usually with a bit of humor mixed in, was to be cautious and pay attention whenever I feel “an impending sense of doom.” (You need to hear that phrase in the kidding-around-with-a-five-year-old-son “dad voice,” which I’m sure most of you did already.) I learned what he meant and I’ve often had experiences where something’s “off” that I can’t quite put my finger on. Usually that’s something relatively minor, like messing up a report or attaching the wrong file to an email. I’ve gotten good at hitting the brakes, listening to my subconscious, and doing a last double check to catch those kinds of errors. It has paid off.

This was bigger. More doom. Better quality doom. Nothing but the finest doom for my sixty-eighth birthday!

I’m listening. I just wish my subconscious would take a more simple, more direct route to tell me what’s up.

On the other hand, did I mention that for my birthday I found a truly excellent stick? I didn’t see that coming either.