Washer Woman
by Karen Williams | March 31, 2006 - Seminole Chronicle
My son Joel has finally reached the age when children start to realize their parents aren't actually stupid and crazy but more in the category of wise and brilliant.
Alas, that's not happening for me - and the "Magic Washer" is to blame.
When Joel grew up, we lived in Ashland, Oregon - a small town known for, in addition to its Shakespeare festival, its alternative health practitioners and New Age teachers.
Neale Donald Walsch of Conversations with God fame lives there, as well as Gary Zukav (The Seat of the Soul) and James Twyman (Indigo children phenomenon).
Let's put it this way: There are possibly more gurus per capita in Ashland than anywhere else on God's enchanted earth.
After only a short time in that quaint town, it seems normal to meet people who hobnob with extraterrestrials, make barefoot pilgrimages into the forest, and communicate telepathically with squirrels. In Ashland, if you're not weird, you're weird.
Thus it never occurred to me that some of the practices I adopted might strike my family as strange. One such practice involved the Magic Washer.
I attended a pendulum workshop where we learned to use an object on a chain to access our inner self, asking yes-or-no questions and getting answers depending on which way the object would move when dangled. It required a quiet, focused mind, but the pendulum did move back and forth for most of the folks at the workshop, including me.
Even more than a focused mind, I have a frugal mind, and I wasn't about to buy the $20 pendulums for sale at the class. So at home, I devised my own, using a piece of string and a household metal washer.
When my football playing, don't-hand-me-any-twilight-zone-stuff teenager entered the living room, I was happily asking the Magic Washer questions and allowing it to swing to and fro.
JOEL: "What on earth are you doing now?"
ME: "Oh, I'm accessing my inner being and asking if I should go on a date with Skyhawk. You know, that guy I met who has the llama farm and a tree house where he communes with the cosmos."
JOEL: "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!"
ME: "Which? The llamas or the cosmos?"
JOEL: "That washer that you're swinging back and forth!"
ME: "It's an age-old practice that helps us access our inner-knowingness."
JOEL: "Well, I prefer the Johnny-come-lately practice of using our intelligence and our logic."
After that, when I made any comment to Joel, such as "You have an 11-o'clock curfew," he would say, "And who told you that? The Magic Washer?"
I learned not to flaunt unconventional practices around Mr. Mental-Rigidity, but the damage was done. To this day, Joel, about to graduate from law school, mentions the Magic Washer when I so much as remind him to charge his cell phone.
In his book, I don't know diddly squat.
Ironically, while in Ashland, I explored far more bizarre things than the Magic Washer. There was the fungus disc that I grew in a bowl of sugar water in the cupboard and drank the vinegar it produced for health purposes.
There was the miraculous "zapper" - a small metal box that emitted a light electric charge. I tucked it in my sock and wore it night-and-day to kill off microscopic "parasites."
Well, I could cite many more examples, but the Magic Washer tells me it's time for us to go.
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Copyright 2006, Karen Williams
