Psyched Out

Funny how you always remember your first time.

Hearing a certain word, that is.

Where I grew up, kids didn’t go to summer camp. Our mothers would shoo us out the back door after breakfast, with instructions to come back when the firehouse whistle blew at noon for lunch, and again when it blasted at six for dinner.

One summer, there must have been a secret meeting among the Moms where it was decided their offspring could be doing something more constructive than tearing up the neighborhood, so we were all herded into a different station wagon every morning and driven to a local park where we took part in arts and sports activities. To this day, I remember the park counselors, a group of college students who probably thought messing around with a bunch of kids in the great outdoors was a pretty sweet gig.

One of them especially stood out, not only for his blonde good looks (he made quite a stir among girls of all ages) and his black belt in the exotic discipline of Ju Jitsu, but also his predilection for the esoteric.

One day, he handed another counselor the astrological profile of a co-worker. She began reading it and exclaimed, “This is uncanny!”

At the time, I had no idea what uncanny meant but it sounded pretty cool so I put it in my back pocket until I could investigate further.

For those needing a primer, “uncanny” is something that’s eerie or mysterious or, more to the point, an instance that is familiar yet foreign at the same time. A great example is the theory of the “Uncanny Valley,” proposed by Japanese roboticist Mashiro Mori in 1978. Mori found that the more humanlike robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point. Fifty percent is fine, ninety percent even better, ninety-five percent the ultimate. But tip the scale to ninety-six percent or higher, and humans become repulsed, focusing on the parts of the robot that aren’t human. Think of an animated corpse like Frankenstein’s monster or the zombies in “Night of the Living Dead.”

This is where things get weird.

Recently, I was sipping a cocktail in a bar/restaurant, waiting for some friends to join me for dinner, when I saw an advertisement on the wall sporting the face of someone who looked vaguely familiar. Sliding off my stool for a closer look, I read the name that went with the face and realized this was the same great looking, martial arts master who mentored us at the park. The hair had gone gray and the lines had deepened but, no doubt, it was him. Here’s the kicker: The former counselor is now a psychic medium whose extraordinary “gift” allows him to “reconnect with the Other Side.” In other words, one could say he reanimates the dead.

I could call this collision of coincidence “eerie” or “mysterious” but “uncanny” will do it for me.