I Really Haven't Changed At All

People always ask me how I can believe in reincarnation when I haven’t made the round trip myself. I don't know; I just do.

This is me when I was 4. I look the same minus the pigtails and plus a nose job.

When I was 3, I started telling my parents that Cincy, Cindy and I were going out to play. That would have been fine by them only I didn’t have any friends named Cincy and Cindy. Cincy? What kind of a name was that? I'd never heard it and to this day have never known anyone named Cincy. My parents grilled me like a shishkabob over those two people. My answer was always “I don’t know; they are just MY FRIENDS you big stupid heads.”

Sidebar: If I really had said that I would be writing you from my grave right now.

Naturally I out grew Cincy and Cindy and as I aged my Dad talked to me about reincarnation. He believed in it and I think I believed in it because I guess he had a good explanation. Like, Believe in it or you’ll never get your own car.

Sidebar: I did believe in it and I never got my own car because my parents were big stupid heads and I'll write from my grave IF I WANT TO.

It wasn’t until years later that I read when children are under the age of four and start talking about people with names you don’t recognize that you should pay close attention, that these were probably people they had known in a previous life. I used to call my sister Dorothy when she was 2 and tell my parents we were moving to California. My Dad's 3rd wife was named Dorothy, her son lived in California and I ended up here THREE separate times in my life before settling here. And my sister Lindy moved here first.

When I was age range 36-43, (that’s how we give our ages in Hollywood) (That is, if you ever want to work again) I received a letter one of our distant uncles on my father's side sent my father and me. He had hired an assassin to work for him and the media was all over his place. I don't tell anyone who it is because this man assassinated a very famous person and homey don't play no witness protection games. In this letter was a diagram of our family tree. I gave it a cursory glance and filed it under Who Cares They're All Dead Now.

A few years later I was working on my first novel 'His Dead Wife" and I foraged the letter out from my files and in the many branches and offshoots of that tree I found the name ‘Cinzie,’ a woman who had died roughly twenty years before I was born. I stared into space thinking about how I had known her on the other side. Whoever she was to me then, she clearly had been very important so I dragged her into this lifetime.

I called my Dad. He totally flipped out. True, I haven't made the round trip but have MILLIONS more stories like this in my life. Research on reincarnation suggests that children under 4 remember names and places and then when they're fully verbal around 5 and "get stuff" it all disappears for them.

For me? Cinzie never disappeared because I found her in a family tree and never forgot the strange name. I still wonder if she's the one who said, "For God's sakes, child, never get married."

End of chat.