In fact, mom always did quite well at the races and at bingo and even at Las Vegas the few times she went. That's what tipped off our family, long before She went "professional.'
She'd wake up with some dream or another. "A man means two", she'd say, "A desk means four." She'd phone the bookie, bet two and four and the next night we'd be eating steak. Or she'd rush off to bingo and often enough, she'd come home with a new radio or toaster. She always stored away a couple of toasters for her friends' birthdays or anniversaries.
Her "gift" wasn't something we discussed outside the family. Mom had grown up in Kamsack, Sask. - in many ways an uprooted Eastern European village. Few of the townsfolk scoffed at psychic phenomena, many accepted it completely. As witchcraft.
So when my mother, at age 10, woke her parents to cry that the boarding house was burning, they took her at her word. They crossed town and knocked at the still and silent building. A moment later they heard shouts of "Smoke! Fire!" Sure enough, someone had fallen asleep with a smouldering cigarette. Mom's reward was a stern lecture. She had to promise never to think that way again.
She tried hard to block those thoughts, for there's no joy in knowing what even her good friend sometimes might be thinking about her or what the teacher or storekeeper may be fantasizing. Certainly, she felt terrible frustration when she begged a young man not to drive to the lake one hot summer day. It was the only time she'd revealed that she had "second sight." No matter. No one else heard her and the cocky young man never returned to talk about her prediction - a terrible car crash, and him laying dead upon the road.
It was better for her to keep such unmanageable thoughts at a manageable distance. Better, finally, to leave for Winnipeg and run a family clothing store on Main Street and stay too busy to listen to the whisperings of fate. Until she finally found someone who understood. Tamarra, a huge, boisterous, irrepressible woman, a matriarch who had learned the craft in Russia a half-century before. Tamarra had sent her children through school and into distinguished careers by publicly calling herself a psychic and taking on the world, one palm at a time.
So while we never had a family doctor, we always had Tamarra, our family fortune teller. More than that, she taught mom how to manage what she saw and upon Tamarra's death, to receive her blessing. Not the sort of a blessing that could be registered in words; rather it was registered more in voltage. Mom's apprenticeship was over.
Mom began to give readings. Soon enough, she got her license and zoning. Then came her name, Dot Dobie, and the ad in the weekend classified s.
Finally, clients - immigrants, judges, prostitutes, social workers, stock brokers, healers and dealers, cops and robbers - they've all sat side by side on her living room couch, all waiting to get to her kitchen table where their futures would be unfolded in her comforting hands.
Murderers, too. And potential murderers, wanting to know, "Can I get away with it?" "Yes , " she told one. " Until they do the autopsy."
Or the tearful wife. "My husband's terribly sick. How much longer has he got to live?" "He'll get better, Mom answered. "He'll last another 10 years. Maybe 12." The woman stood up with a scowl, threw down her money and stomped out. You can't please them all.
You can't convince them all either. Once she read a woman's palm and said, "You've had three children." The woman snorted. "I've got two kids. What a fake!" A fake would have lost all confidence at that. But mom looked into the woman's eyes and quietly said, "You've had three children. There was a child born before those two. Think back." Then the woman remembered.
I can't imagine what it must have been like for that woman to block out having a child, even a child out of wedlock; one born and quickly given away when the woman was almost a child herself. Then to hide what happened for so long that she believed the lie and forgot the truth. Till mom told her to remember And she did.
"I always keep a big box of Kleenex on the kitchen table," morn tells me. "Some customers go through a lot of Kleenex.". Others get into a lot of rnoney. Like the businessman who still sends her presents She'd told him to buy two large lots of land beside his house. When he sold all three properties, he got himself a place in Hawaii and plenty of time to shop for the nicest gifts.
Then there was the government agent who came incognito to secretly check out her business. "I didn't see it in his palm but when I read his teacup, there it was - he was from Revenue Canada. I caught him red handed."
Most people come to mom for love, not money, trying to get into a relationship or safely out of one. Or for health. She s given many a diagnosis that sent someone's doctor on a new path and even brought the doctor calling for an appointment for himself. Ironically, her own ailments go unresolved. She can't read herself or those she loves. "I'm too close," she says. "I can't see a thing."
Mom has finally had to slow down. When the Marlborough Hotel asked her to find their resident ghost she refused. "Too many stairs to climb," she said. She might have liked to train one of us to take over but psychic reading hasn't become a family business. Whatever I receive, all turn to images for my stories. My son, Adam, who has the strongest "gift" became a mathematician. Go figure.
Of all mom's experiences, our favourite is the reading she gave a young woman 13 years ago. Mom saw an S in her cup and accurately described the character of the man the woman was soon destined to meet. But mom couldn't see his face or any details of his life.
Four weeks later, the woman met the man whose name began with S. She didn't mention her reading. He didn't tell her about his mother, the psychic, Dot Dobie. It eventually came out, well before they, that woman and I, were married. It's what we call Our Psychic Connection .