The other day, as I was preparing to leave Reston Virginia to travel to New York City, I slid my Macbook into my knapsack. A few seconds later, as I pulled it onto my back I had the strong sense that my Mac was going to die. Later, on the train, the Mac intermittently had a zizzley screen, and the next morning it was fried.

That presentiment was not the first time that I have ‘seen the future’. Indeed, it is such a frequent occurrence in my life that I have come to take my precognition as a given, not as a freak event.

——

A few months ago, returning to San Francisco from some travel in Europe, I decided to head to a neighborhood video rental place, South Beach Video, to get some movies. I had purchased a discount deal from the store — $75 for 50 rentals, I think — and I still had 20 something left to go.

As I stepped out the door to walk over to the store, I felt a wave of certainty flash over me: the store had shut down.

Now, I had been there only a few weeks earlier, renting movies and returning others, and there had been no indication of an impending shut down. I had chatted with the guy at the store about some movie they were playing on the display, and there were no signs or sales going on.

But I knew.

When I got to the store, four blocks away on the other side of the hill that runs along 2nd in Soma, the store was completely empty, not even a note in the window.

——

Over 30 years ago, I was preparing to spend the summer of my third year in college in a summer program at the University of Lisbon. In the week before departing I had two amazingly clear dreams about events that I felt, on waking, were going to happen in Lisbon.

The first involved a blue frisbee. In the dream I was playing frisbee in a green field with someone unknown, and I ran, ran, ran to catch a nearly impossible shot, and leaping as high as I could, I managed to snag it at the top of my highest jump ever.

I didn’t own a blue frisbee, but I bought one and packed it for the trip.

The second dream involved a piece of jewelry: a piece of natural red coral with a silver setting. It was so clear in my memory that I drew a picture in my journal.

When I got to Portugal, I scouted the jewelry shops looking for a necklace of the sort I had seen. But I couldn’t find anything, except the endless pieces that had been turned into the figo, the ‘fig’, a hand with the thumb between the first and second fingers, which is considered a good luck sign. One jeweler was more helpful than others, and told me that style of coral was not Portuguese, but from the Pacific.

‘Oh well,’ I thought.

A few days later I was playing frisbee in Marques Pombal park with my new roommate, John, and as I chased down a long errant throw, I ran under the deep shadows of some enormous trees. I jumped to catch the soaring frisbee, and at the top of the jump I thought, ‘this is it!’ And then my face smashed into a pole that had been painted a dark green, so dark that it was invisible in the shade. I fell onto my back, stunned, as John ran over to help me.

Blood poured from my broken nose, spurting onto my white tshirt and pants. I was dizzy, and nauseous. John found a nearby fountain, and I staggered over and dunked my bloody head in it.

It took a week or more for the black eyes to subsist. One side of my nose had a deep depression, which I solved in a very painful but expedient way on the second day: I pushed a pencil up that nostril, eraser end first, to clear a breathing space.

A few days after my little dance with green destiny, I met a wonderful woman from Paris: Laurence. She was tall, dark, sexy, and funny. We became friends, and then lovers.

One afternoon, just after the raccoon look had abated, I met Laurence in the Praça dos Restauradores for dinner. As we walked up, I put down the pencil in my journal, and I saw that she was wearing a necklace I had seen before, but not on her. A piece of raw coral, on a silver chain.

She explained that she had found it in a small shop in Tahiti. I showed her the drawing in my journal. She took off the necklace, and laying it on the picture, it exactly covered my unskillful scrawls, point for point.

She gave that necklace to me, and a few years later I lost it in a snowball fight in Amherst, in a way that I had foreseen, in part. But that is a different story

——

I am no longer young, and like other aspects of my self, I have come to rely on my fey sense of what is to come, almost without thinking about it. A sort of glimmer, a bit of awareness that flashes in my brainpan: I don’t think about the sense itself, I just wonder about the missing parts, like the pole that broke my nose, or Lawrence who owned the coral.

I seem to sense part of what is on the rise, but not the whole, like a mariner who feels the loom of the land over the near horizon, but without a true chronometer, is unsure of latitude.

How this all works is unclear to me, but it is so close to my being that its like balance, or hearing, or my sense of smell, all of which I trusted before I knew how they work. I could no more doubt my fey sense than I could my reason, or my heart, and I speak of it seldom, like the other elements of my deepest being.