Feelings

All a skeptic is is someone who hasn’t had an experience yet.

~Jason Hawes

I was getting that uneasy feeling again, the one I always got when something was about to go wrong. At first, the strange sensation came on intermittently. Some days, I didn’t experience it at all. But as time went by, I noticed my anxiety was increasing, especially during my husband Bill’s daily commute.

Bill drives over sixty miles in heavy traffic to and from work each day. He’s got an excellent driving record and keeps his car in top shape. Still, sometimes I worry. Most days, I keep my thoughts to myself. Yet now I knew I had to tell him about my concern.

“Um, Bill,” I started as we sat eating dinner, “is everything all right with your car?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, have you noticed any funny noises under the hood or anything else odd while you’re driving?”

“Oh, I get it,” he scoffed. “You’re having one of your ‘feelings’ again.”

After twenty-five years of marriage, my husband was well aware of my quirky intuitions. It baffled me, though, that after seeing how many times my premonitions were correct, he still didn’t give them the credence I thought they deserved. I decided to drop the whole thing… for the time being. Yet, in the coming days, during his commute times and whenever I was a passenger in his car, I became more and more certain something was awry with his vehicle.

As I sat in his passenger seat one evening, I decided to broach the subject once again. “When did you have the car inspected?” I asked nonchalantly.

“Relax,” he smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with this car. It passed inspection with flying colors a few months ago. I had all the fluids changed, and I even had a new set of brakes installed. Enough with your ‘feelings.’ The car is fine.”

Still, I could not be convinced. My instincts were too strong.

Then one night I had a dream.

Bill and I were driving in his car with three friends sitting in the back seat. We were all having a pleasant conversation when Bill decided he was too tired to continue driving and asked me to take over the wheel. He pulled to the side of the road, where we switched seats.

“Be careful with the brakes!” Bill shouted at me as I pulled into traffic. “You have to tap them lightly. You can’t hit them hard.”

Normally a soft-spoken man, Bill’s loud directive took me by surprise, and I experienced a sense of unease. I did continue driving but with added vigilance. We were going along well when suddenly the car in front of me stopped short, and I slammed on the brakes. There was a loud crack, and the car seized right there in the middle of the road.

I wasted no time in waking Bill from his sleep and told him about the dream. He hesitated for a moment and then finally replied. “Okay. I’ll make an appointment with the mechanic for Saturday.”

Bill knew better than to ignore one of my dreams.

And it was a good thing, too. When the mechanic took a look at the brakes he had installed only a few months earlier, he discovered a defect in the mechanism that was causing them to wear unevenly. At this point, the problem was easy to remedy. Had this defect been discovered during the car’s next annual inspection — or later — it would have been a different story.

Does Bill still scoff at my premonitions? Not anymore. Now, after all these years, my husband is finally in touch with my “feelings.”

— Monica A. Andermann —